NFT sellers are dodging the elephant in the room: Buying an NFT is more like buying a print of an artwork than buying the artwork itself. Or more accurately, a link to a print of the artwork.
Yes, using crypto and blockchain you can prove that this was the first NFT print of the artwork, but that's it. It's an expensive way to proclaim that you have the keys controlling the NFT that links to the print of the artwork, and that it was associated with a crypto-denominated transaction of a certain value, but that's it.
These NFTs are also a goldmine for wash trading scams. NFT holders can "sell" the NFT to themselves over and over again at increasingly higher prices, creating an illusion of a very valuable and high-demand NFT.
Want to own an expensive NFT? Buy a cheap NFT, then use a second wallet to "buy" it from yourself. The last trade price gets recorded in the blockchain and you can now brag about having an NFT worth as much money as you were willing to scrounge up for the transaction.
And to me the interesting question here is, if we both buy cheap 10$ tokens, and agree to buy these from each other at 1000$ and "lose our keys" will we be able to collect insurance on the lost asset? Will we be able to deduct the loss in taxes? Or if we donate the "artworks" to each others charities will we be able to deduct them in taxes?
Folks aren't buying a verified unique token for obscene amounts just to brag about it. They might brag, but many have other reasons to hold an object of such "value" .
Anyone thinking that NFT is anything other than a vanity token for the wealthy and a money laundering mechanism for the same is fooling themselves.
Well, kinda. Art is a quirky way to use an NFT for sure. But being able to verify scarcity, ownership and interoperability of a 'digital asset' is pretty useful in many applications. Afterall, everyones been saying everything is going online but i don't believe we truly understand what that means yet.
Not sure about the first point, after all with digital art what matters is the NFT since anyone can copy the artifact 1:1 at virtually no cost and no risk. I agree with many that NFTs are best suited for digital worlds but that begs the question: what happens if the game is centralized? They can still prevent you from actually having or using that item, regardless of any proof of ownership.
Re: wash trading, that also happens in the art world with shell companies.
Use value is easy to assign to an NFT post-facto. That hasn't been really done in the current market(which is, of course, in the midst of a bubble), but:
* Tokens can become tickets to events
* Tokens can become options on commissioned work
* Tokens can become signs of membership
Because the token is guaranteed to be unique, and you can track ownership, there's a fluidity to this that lets you do away with contractual mechanisms. You can reuse the same tokens many times or announce that it will expire(for your use case).
Edit: And platforms can't really own it if it's on a public chain, too. You just copy the chain(see: BinancePunks copying CryptoPunks). So there's that.
NFT is a glorified receipt. Some people collect receipts: like ticket-stubs for world series games or concerts, but first you have to convince the MLB or Ticketmaster to sell tickets on Ethereum, which is a big ask.
It's amazing the absolute bullshit people will force themselves to believe when their might be some money in it for them.
All these articles gloss over the technical side (which is really not complicated, because there's very little THERE). And gloss over the demand side (sure, people want to "own" the art even when "own" means absoluely nothing in that context). I can only assume that on the demand side there's a mixture of stupid money ("I don't know what this is but it seems like it might be the next big thing so I'm buying") and people working one of various angles.
At least some artists are getting paid stupid amounts of money, if someone's got to get a windfall it might as well be them. But let's not pretend thing actually makes sense as an overall thing.
Proof of authenticity, whether being digital or not, doesn't mean anything until
1) the culture of the general people around you support it, or
2) there is an entity with political power (such as the state) that forcefully protects that authenticity through law/police/the military/etc (for example, intellectual property supported by law enforcement).
But firstly I think NFTs are totally antitheical to the current culture of the Internet era, where it is given without question that data can be freely copied and shared (regardless of the countless efforts by DRM technologies), and virality and mass transmission is regarded as an important communal cultural value. Who cares if someone "owns" the Nyan Cat meme, when you can freely Google it and view it on your smartphone, and can also save it to your hard drive if you want to preserve it? And I really don't think state power is really supportive of general crypto right now, so number two is off from the start. The problem I have with NFTs (and cryptocurrenties in general) isn't about the technology, it's more about the culture surrounding it.
(Also, think the blockchain is permanent, because it's supported by "math"? If the infrastructure surrounding Ethereum vanishes, your piece of NFT is essentially gone. And Ethereum's consuming a hell of a lot of energy and infrastructure to maintain, and you might start to think backing it up in a few hard drives is the easier and saner option...)
Who cares who owns the Mona Lisa, when I can see it online better than I can in real life (infrared imagery, x-ray scan)
As soon as "real" art collectors start buying them (already hapenening) then they will mutually invest in protecting their investment, no need for government when civil courts can preside.
First of all, civil courts are supported by the civil law, and that law is supported by the government. One example of a civil law is copyright enforcement, which is often enforced by the Supreme Court.
And also, when actual powerful entities (whether that be governments/corporations/etc) start to involve in protecting NFT investments using the law, is there any benefit of "crypto" being used to protect the value of the asset anymore? Isn't it just private property with extra steps?
I really don't think the Mona Lisa comparison doesn't fit with the current conversation with NFTs, since NFTs deal with digital assets, and trying to convert an analog artwork like Mona Lisa to fit into NFTs would already demolish its authentic value as an amalgamation of detailed, non-reproducible paint strokes (which I think is the authentic value you're emphasizing about).
> Who cares who owns the Mona Lisa, when I can see it online better than I can in real life (infrared imagery, x-ray scan)
Exactly. The only things canonical-physical artworks are good for are conspicuous consumption/bragging rights and money laundering(/other money-laundering-adjactent activities).
The fatal problem is literally: "who cares". Real "authenticity" doesn't comes from math and comes instead from culture. Using the "if a tree falls in a forest" philosophy meme: if the blockchain claims that you have the Nyan Cat image but nobody cares about it, then do you really "own" the image?
More about the history of authenticity: Religion supplied this culture of "authenticity" for some time, but after the Industrial revolution the widespread duplicate production of commodities, along with the invention of photos and videos, has been eroding away the value of the authentic "the one and only" irrelevant for some time. Walter Benjamin has a nice essay about this change of culture in his famous essay - "
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". And the Internet seems to further accelerate the notion of communal art, where memes only have value if they are shared freely and not when someone hangs it in a museum. My gripe with NFTs has nothing to do with the technicalities of crypto and everything to do with everything else (primarily, politics and culture in relation to technology).
The DRM comparison is one I was dying to see. This NFT stuff feels like the returning nemesis of open culture from previous web sub-eras. I hardly want to own a work. Take it, build on it, sing it somewhere with someone else who likes it.
You can't restrict ownership of physical goods or art really, it's just that there's "authentic" goods and "fake" goods.
So you're right you can't restrict possession of digital goods but you can restrict the right to sell a digital good because any potential buyers will want to know what they're buying is "authentic".
CSGO skins go for thousands with the rarest going for tens of thousands, you can download them and possess them right now but valve says you don't "own" them and can't sell them.
CSGO skins are a slightly different case because of their use in-game. You can't play in an actual competitive game of CSGO with a knife/skin that you don't own.
Yes, there are servers that will let you try out custom skins and knives but you can't play an official game with them. The knives also offer different animations which look cooler than the default one. It's slightly different to me in that there's no inherent usefulness of the NFT's (at least currently - maybe in some metaverse future they have a use).
It doesn't seem like people really want to "own" the NFTs, they are viewing them only as investments which means eventually someone will be left holding the bag. In contrast, people DO want to own the CSGO skins and knives.
Well, no; the best case is they're trying to sell bragging rights in the style of "I'm so rich I can buy original Picasso paintings for no reason beyond showing off how rich I am!". Which is stupid and says depressing thing about human civilization, but isn't really any worse than trying to sell any other kind of artwork in physical form.
> So, if you were to buy an NFT from me, in a sense, you are buying STOCK in me because you believe that I (or my art piece) will continue to create more work and add more “value” to that stock over time.
So essentially, this has nothing to do with art, it's a way for artists to get in on the stupid money speculation train everyone else seems to be addicted to. You "own" the token in order to buy low and sell high, rather than it really mattering in itself.
Oh yeah. At least at some point in the Tulip Mania, someone was actually trying to sell someone else a tulip bulb - even if by contract for a tulip at a later time.
I don't even know what this is. The most prominent NFT seems to be NBA Top Shots, and even then it seems like the speculation is on something like... an ownership claim on a limited number of pointers to play-specific metadata referring to content licensed to Dapper from the NBA, that lets decide how you want to showcase them on the platform.
No one is even promising you a goddamn tulip bulb.
I’m extremely skeptical of all cryptocurrencies and most usages of blockchain. However this seems like the first interesting and potentially practical application I’ve heard.
It deals with art - something that’s value is inherently subjective. Plus it gives makers of digital art a better/additional way to fund themselves. Further, transactions would likely be limited reducing environmental impact. Finally, it could provide some competition to company’s like Sotheby’s.
Obviously there a lot of open questions (couldn’t someone else just duplicate a work and make their own coin, why not just pay an artist directly, money laundering, etc). But I think this at least warrants further discussion. It’s an interesting way to make digital art collectible/tradable
Oh man, it's even structured like a penny auction where the majority tile holder 'owns' the "final creation".
I'm willing to grant that it's slightly slightly interesting to consider what some works would look like if they were chopped to pieces and reconstituted from only the pieces people would individually bid on. There's an artistic statement in there somewhere.
But the pomp and slime that this is presented with completely obscure that.
In my project, we use robust near-duplicate image detection based on image fingerprints that are generated from deep learning models. So if an image has already been registered on our system, no one else can register it.
Do you have a system in place for an artist to say “hey some asshole registered my art before I even heard of your project, no seriously, here is a screen grab of it in the editor/a closeup of the canvas/some other snippet of the Original File”?
Except that there's a huge market for 'official' numbered prints. Often the sales of print editions by an artist can rival or exceed the value of an original painted piece. These prints are more more authentic than any other print of the same piece. Their value derived from scarcity, provenance and association with the original creator. All of these are present in an NFT.
Can you provide an example of a print being valued more than the original painted piece?
That defies all logic unless the print isn't just a print -- e.g. it's in a million dollar gold frame or was previously owned by the Pope or something.
At that point if you have a single authoritative site, you can just use postgres to store the who-owns-what and skip the added complexity and risk of a blockchain.
Readit News
Yes, using crypto and blockchain you can prove that this was the first NFT print of the artwork, but that's it. It's an expensive way to proclaim that you have the keys controlling the NFT that links to the print of the artwork, and that it was associated with a crypto-denominated transaction of a certain value, but that's it.
These NFTs are also a goldmine for wash trading scams. NFT holders can "sell" the NFT to themselves over and over again at increasingly higher prices, creating an illusion of a very valuable and high-demand NFT.
Want to own an expensive NFT? Buy a cheap NFT, then use a second wallet to "buy" it from yourself. The last trade price gets recorded in the blockchain and you can now brag about having an NFT worth as much money as you were willing to scrounge up for the transaction.
Folks aren't buying a verified unique token for obscene amounts just to brag about it. They might brag, but many have other reasons to hold an object of such "value" .
Anyone thinking that NFT is anything other than a vanity token for the wealthy and a money laundering mechanism for the same is fooling themselves.
Re: wash trading, that also happens in the art world with shell companies.
* Tokens can become tickets to events
* Tokens can become options on commissioned work
* Tokens can become signs of membership
Because the token is guaranteed to be unique, and you can track ownership, there's a fluidity to this that lets you do away with contractual mechanisms. You can reuse the same tokens many times or announce that it will expire(for your use case).
Edit: And platforms can't really own it if it's on a public chain, too. You just copy the chain(see: BinancePunks copying CryptoPunks). So there's that.
All these articles gloss over the technical side (which is really not complicated, because there's very little THERE). And gloss over the demand side (sure, people want to "own" the art even when "own" means absoluely nothing in that context). I can only assume that on the demand side there's a mixture of stupid money ("I don't know what this is but it seems like it might be the next big thing so I'm buying") and people working one of various angles.
At least some artists are getting paid stupid amounts of money, if someone's got to get a windfall it might as well be them. But let's not pretend thing actually makes sense as an overall thing.
1) the culture of the general people around you support it, or
2) there is an entity with political power (such as the state) that forcefully protects that authenticity through law/police/the military/etc (for example, intellectual property supported by law enforcement).
But firstly I think NFTs are totally antitheical to the current culture of the Internet era, where it is given without question that data can be freely copied and shared (regardless of the countless efforts by DRM technologies), and virality and mass transmission is regarded as an important communal cultural value. Who cares if someone "owns" the Nyan Cat meme, when you can freely Google it and view it on your smartphone, and can also save it to your hard drive if you want to preserve it? And I really don't think state power is really supportive of general crypto right now, so number two is off from the start. The problem I have with NFTs (and cryptocurrenties in general) isn't about the technology, it's more about the culture surrounding it.
(Also, think the blockchain is permanent, because it's supported by "math"? If the infrastructure surrounding Ethereum vanishes, your piece of NFT is essentially gone. And Ethereum's consuming a hell of a lot of energy and infrastructure to maintain, and you might start to think backing it up in a few hard drives is the easier and saner option...)
As soon as "real" art collectors start buying them (already hapenening) then they will mutually invest in protecting their investment, no need for government when civil courts can preside.
And also, when actual powerful entities (whether that be governments/corporations/etc) start to involve in protecting NFT investments using the law, is there any benefit of "crypto" being used to protect the value of the asset anymore? Isn't it just private property with extra steps?
I really don't think the Mona Lisa comparison doesn't fit with the current conversation with NFTs, since NFTs deal with digital assets, and trying to convert an analog artwork like Mona Lisa to fit into NFTs would already demolish its authentic value as an amalgamation of detailed, non-reproducible paint strokes (which I think is the authentic value you're emphasizing about).
Exactly. The only things canonical-physical artworks are good for are conspicuous consumption/bragging rights and money laundering(/other money-laundering-adjactent activities).
You can't restrict ownership of digital goods. Decades of DRM have shown us that.
More about the history of authenticity: Religion supplied this culture of "authenticity" for some time, but after the Industrial revolution the widespread duplicate production of commodities, along with the invention of photos and videos, has been eroding away the value of the authentic "the one and only" irrelevant for some time. Walter Benjamin has a nice essay about this change of culture in his famous essay - " The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". And the Internet seems to further accelerate the notion of communal art, where memes only have value if they are shared freely and not when someone hangs it in a museum. My gripe with NFTs has nothing to do with the technicalities of crypto and everything to do with everything else (primarily, politics and culture in relation to technology).
Like this? https://lunarland.com/
So you're right you can't restrict possession of digital goods but you can restrict the right to sell a digital good because any potential buyers will want to know what they're buying is "authentic".
CSGO skins go for thousands with the rarest going for tens of thousands, you can download them and possess them right now but valve says you don't "own" them and can't sell them.
Yes, there are servers that will let you try out custom skins and knives but you can't play an official game with them. The knives also offer different animations which look cooler than the default one. It's slightly different to me in that there's no inherent usefulness of the NFT's (at least currently - maybe in some metaverse future they have a use).
It doesn't seem like people really want to "own" the NFTs, they are viewing them only as investments which means eventually someone will be left holding the bag. In contrast, people DO want to own the CSGO skins and knives.
Either way I don’t think there is value in ‘DRM but on a blockchain’.
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> So, if you were to buy an NFT from me, in a sense, you are buying STOCK in me because you believe that I (or my art piece) will continue to create more work and add more “value” to that stock over time.
So essentially, this has nothing to do with art, it's a way for artists to get in on the stupid money speculation train everyone else seems to be addicted to. You "own" the token in order to buy low and sell high, rather than it really mattering in itself.
We really are doomed, aren't we?
I don't even know what this is. The most prominent NFT seems to be NBA Top Shots, and even then it seems like the speculation is on something like... an ownership claim on a limited number of pointers to play-specific metadata referring to content licensed to Dapper from the NBA, that lets decide how you want to showcase them on the platform.
No one is even promising you a goddamn tulip bulb.
It deals with art - something that’s value is inherently subjective. Plus it gives makers of digital art a better/additional way to fund themselves. Further, transactions would likely be limited reducing environmental impact. Finally, it could provide some competition to company’s like Sotheby’s.
Obviously there a lot of open questions (couldn’t someone else just duplicate a work and make their own coin, why not just pay an artist directly, money laundering, etc). But I think this at least warrants further discussion. It’s an interesting way to make digital art collectible/tradable
A: Absolutely nothing ... I think?
https://mobile.twitter.com/muratpak/status/13585748601721569...
I'm willing to grant that it's slightly slightly interesting to consider what some works would look like if they were chopped to pieces and reconstituted from only the pieces people would individually bid on. There's an artistic statement in there somewhere.
But the pomp and slime that this is presented with completely obscure that.
https://www.christies.com/lot/lot-andy-warhol-colored-mona-l...
Deleted Comment
This is not true of a JPEG. I can perfectly duplicate it.
Now where it might make sense is if everyone views the asset through an authoritative “viewer”.
For example cryptokitties website.
In that case it somewhat makes sense.
As an analogy if I create a private World of Warcraft server and give my character a billion gold, no one cares.
But if they see my character on the official server (the official “viewer”) has a billion gold then its impressive.
That defies all logic unless the print isn't just a print -- e.g. it's in a million dollar gold frame or was previously owned by the Pope or something.