I feel like I'm saying "the emperor has no clothes", but doesn't anyone else think this NFT art thing is bullshit? Everything about it screams "scam": they're asking you to spend your real, hard-earned money on some digital "asset", pumped by celebrity influencers and hype entrepreneurs. Everyone is drawn to the big multi-million dollar figures of these high profile artists, figures that you will never see for your "assets", and do nothing but serve as a siren's call to everyone around. These high profile sales are marketing, nothing more. They are serving their purpose to kick start the mainstream adoption of this scam, because everyone thinks they can make a quick buck buying some digital signature.
What's more is the pseudo-intellectual justifications for it all. As soon as you bring up value, proponents put on their philosophy hat and ponder "what is value? money is just paper, maaaaan, we just believe it has value." Or we hear that owning a digital "asset" is actually the same thing as a physical "asset" because they're both unique things that can't be copied. It's all smoke and mirrors, and you know that when you have to hide behind vague philosophical assertions about "well nothing really has any value", then you have no actual argument supporting the value of the thing you're defending. It's a new illusion, pumped by hype, and they're trying to justify its existence by pointing to other illusions.
It's bullshit (in the sense "absurd and meaningless") but I wouldn't call it a scam.
Something I wrote yesterday[0] that I think is relevant here:
> I'm not sure I understand the hate for NFTs. Don't get me wrong, the concept of NFT as currently used is completely absurd and definitely overhyped. But what is bad about it? People who spend their money on NFTs mostly do it because they got rich in the past few years gambling on BTC or ETH, and now use that money to basically tip the artists they like. Or they plan to resell the token at some point, which is pure speculation, but nobody other than themselves risk to get burn. Minting and selling NFTs is almost zero work and effort for artists, all the risks are on the buyers side, and only if they buy them as speculative assets.
> It still make no sense to me, but if rich people want to gamble their money and by doing so support some artists, that doesn't sound too bad IMHO.
> I would be more cautious if retail investors would start to gamble in this market, but that's not what I've seen so far.
If someone truly understands that the money is coming from crypto speculators, and that the way to make money is to essentially become an NFT influencer, then it's hard to fault them for extracting money from millionaires. But most artists in the space are convinced that the money is coming from real-life art collectors. I've seen multiple people quit their jobs to sell NFTs full-time. They say this is the future of making money as an artist -- that the true value of their art is finally being appreciated. It's hard not to dislike such a misinformation campaign.
> I've seen multiple people quit their jobs to sell NFTs full-time.
Regardless of your view on NFTs, haven't they been "a thing" for like a week now? Perhaps I'm just too risk averse but that feels like a very low amount of data to make such a large decision on
> They say this is the future of making money as an artist -- that the true value of their art is finally being appreciated.
Does that also work for physical art? My parents were full-time artists, but did not know how to sell anything, so now I have inherited hundreds of paintings. Should I create NFTs for them?
I'm not sure if "quitting their day jobs" has the same effect for an artist versus, say, a programmer. They deliberately work jobs like restaurants, not because they can't do anything else, but because they are easily quittable when an opportunity arises.
What are you basing this on? Most of the artists I've met either work in film, television, advertising or video games. I've worked as both an artist and a developer and your categorization doesn't strike me as common.
Also one of the artists I was talking about, who quit to work on NFTs, was design director at one of the world's biggest agencies, so not exactly waiting tables.
But yes, I was thinking about artists waiting tables. My spouse works in theatre, and it's normal even for modestly successful actors and artists to be working service jobs. I have asked why they worked those kinds of jobs when they were clearly smart enough to have better-paying white collar jobs, and they always say that quittability was one of their top concerns.
In the period where one could live in San Francisco for a non-insane amount of money, I knew lots of visual artists and sculptors who lived like that. (Anyway, all of them are now coding or have left.)
I don't mean to contradict your experience: the word "artist" covers a pretty wide swathe.
The fact it’s been in the news way more on top of the Bitcoin stuff has had the retail investors around me ask a lot about these NFTs and Bitcoin and if they should sink thousands of dollars into them.
This stuff is in the news to sell the crap to the people who don’t really know what they are doing.
Anecdotally, I’ve seen a large number of retail-ish early adopters jumping into NFTs on Twitter.
And I can’t help but wonder if it is a true scam - you could do some massive early transactions to pump of perceived values and create get-rich-quick hype (optimally, these should mostly be left-hand-to-right-hand transactions), then go ahead and make money as an NFT marketplace. Or by selling other works from the artists that you just pumped to the moon (which you had purchased before the pump operation).
Minting and selling can actually cost the price of a meal at a restaurant depending on ethereum fuel prices. The nft marketplaces are making a killing even if your art doesn’t sell. In that sense, there is potential harm to artists who get caught up in this.
You're right as of right now. ImmutableX is an upcoming Ethereum-based zkRollup that will allow 9,000 transactions to be processed per second, thus completely doing away with the problem of gas fees:
That’s right, though that’s quite limited. And you can use other blockchains than Ethereum, Tezos (a proof of stake blockchain with smart contracts) has NFTs platforms too and doesn’t have the high gas fee issue.
IMHO, it's just the same game as with the gallery art scheme, except on top of cryptocurrencies.
As a broke artist, if I can get some rich assholes to start convincing each other that my art has ludicrous amounts of money, then I will happily let them pay me for it, and let the gallery owner who was instrumental in convincing them of this value have a healthy cut. If the gallery owner wants to arrange a money-laundering kickback to the rich assholes that's their own business, personally I feel like I'd rather avoid it but who knows how I'll feel when I'm being offered a price with enough zeros at the end of its number?
Create a bunch of art, put the ownership into a decentralized autonomous organization with 51% held by the artist and the other 49% held by a bunch of random, anonymous "owners".
Start the hype train with a loud, crazy scandal that results in the "death" of the artist.
The artist's estate leaves their stake to the gallery owner who starts to sell off the stake at stupid prices following the death of the artist.
Secretly, you've faked your death and also were in control of the "anonymous" ownership stake. You can launder the increased value of that part of the stake and recombine it through a bunch of shells and mixers.
Who knows, maybe this was "Satoshi"'s plan all along. That "unclaimed" stake was just there to increase the mystery and the hype, meanwhile "he" actually had control of a bunch of other coin that "he" was able to launder at a later date.
Funny, but the actual plot of this timeline is to support living artists, and we've collectively leveraged that sentiment to create entirely new infrastructure to support that. This is the beginning of it.
Honestly I think Patreon does just as well to support living artists, without all the bullshit that comes from the "convince some absurdly rich asshole that your worth is worth absurd amounts of money" game, and also without the extra layers of bullshit that comes from involving cryptocurrency in it. I'd rather convince a few hundred people that my stuff's worth a buck or three per month. Feels a lot more sustainable, and less likely to end up with someone deciding to kill you to bump up the value of their investment in your originals.
I mean if you've got a bunch of money burning a hole in your pocket, I'll gladly take it off your hands. My Patreon's over at https://www.patreon.com/egypturnash.
It's the same game and sentiment, and there are plenty of people that don't like the trend of patreon, onlyfans, github sponors to make a buck.
The NFT space is building in royalties via transfer taxes. Which means you the artist would earn a lot more from volume than from the initial sale, and this is potentially even better than the subscription SaaS model, and for people that want to support you they may be even incentivized to keep you alive to make sure the royalty goes to you instead of possibly burned.
I don't really see using stablecoins such as USDC or DAI as "extra layers of bullshit that comes from involving cryptocurrency". In the US with the latest OCC regulations, these are the same as using settlement networks like FedWire or SWIFT. Your self-limiting philosophy requires conflating all aspects of cryptocurrency as the same, and the good news is that you will find a lot of camaraderie in doing that, for now.
1. There are some people who struck it megarich with crypto and now have so much "f-u money" that they are willing to spend it on conspicuous consumption. It is the same sort of thing that comes from "look at how much money I lit on fire" posts being given social credit in places like WSB.
2. There are other people who already had a gazillion dollars and are also interested in conspicuous consumption.
3. NFTs are trendy and trends in the crypto space attract people seeking to make money on a trend. A bunch of people are surely buying these things hoping to leave somebody else holding the bag.
4. It is crypto, so some degree of fraud and crime is involved.
5. TINA's revenge. Years of anemic interest rates have forced more and more money into the stock market, real estate, and crypto. This made some investors very wealthy, but also very aware they're sitting on a bubble.
How do you shield your gains when every traditional asset is either losing to inflation or looks like a bubble? You start reaching out for non-traditional assets.
NFTs have some marketable aspects for someone looking for an alternative investment vehicle. They're self-contained and require no real ongoing costs to just hold and flip later (compared with, say, opening a McDonald's franchise). They're also fresh and new with the promise of getting in on the ground floor of future exponential growth (as opposed to, say, buying an existing Van Gogh or a bag full of Krugerrands).
Now, in no way does this make them not bullshit (what ownership is actually conveyed? Do you now even own the copyright on the work, so you could monetize it later?) but that might be why it looks briefly compelling.
> 4. It is crypto, so some degree of fraud and crime is involved.
some degree of fraud and crime exists in regards to anything of value. Money laundering existed before cryptos. Most banks caught laundering money, did it at a massive scale in comparison to the value of the Bitcoin network.
Fraud and crime are directly connected with value
Yeah, but the crypto world is dominated by fraud. Things like Tether where they print billions of 100% unbacked tokens claiming they're backed and then use the money to wash-trade between exchanges all day.
Not to mention that centralized exchanges are an exit scam waiting to happen.
Most people could not participate in blockchain without dealing with a criminal onramp. (Bitfinex, for example.)
And sadly, to your point Rule35, this is why I feel cryptocurrency will never transcend into a truly legitimate investment vehicle beyond gross speculation. There are too many charlatans tied to this industry and they are wide-eyed seeing all the possibilities to hoodwink people out of hard earned dollars whenever they can.
Sure. Fraud and crime have been part of art sales for centuries. I'm not saying that crypto is unique here. Only that it is a force that cannot be discounted when analyzing an ecosystem.
2008 was barely a decade ago but if that comment made you feel smart good for you.
Plus this argument is ignoring that the way the banking system is protected from such failures is with taxpayer money, so you still end up losing some of it.
Sure but one bank went under in 2008 versus how many crypto exchanges that stole or “lost” deposits since then? The scale of issues is not even the same order of magnitude, likely at least 100 to 1 given how many banks there are and how many crypto scams there have been
1) It could be a scam of sorts, but one that the parties are in on. For example tax fraud or an attempt evade capital controls.
2) Leave aside digital anything, art has gotten really weird lately. The self destructing Banksy thing, the banana duct tape thing—-I could see being knowingly, publicly scammed as some kind of bizarre performance art. I guess the super rich are really bored.
3) The most reasonable spin on it I could think of is what if there was a limited edition print where the print itself wasn’t limited edition. There were as many prints as anyone wanted to buy for the cost of production, but the artist sold a small number of certificates of authenticity. It still seems kind of pointless and scammy to me but it’s at least closer to understandable.
I'm surprised blockchains are still being hyped even though they have practically no useful applications for business. Of all buzzwords, blockchain must surely have the worst hype-to-usefulness ratio of all-time. Having said that, even though paying for a digital signature on a blockchain is absolutely ridiculous in my opinion, if people know what they're buying then I don't really care what they choose to waste their money on.
Buying art with an NFT is just a way to give artists and/or art auctioneers money for their art. That's it.
Oh and it can be used for other things like event ticketing, software license keys, etc.
An NFT is just a way to record (in an immutable distributed ledger) that a specific, uniquely-identifiable token was transferred from A to B.
People have always paid stupid amounts of money for art, and in the last 100 years increasingly art that doesn't require years of training/practice and advanced craftsmanship. Why is this any different?
It sounds like you just don't want to be involved in the art market, which nobody in their right mind wants to be involved in anyway.
Complaining about NFTs is like complaining about "blockchain" or "the internet" or whatever.
Here is one thing I have a hard time wrapping my head around, and how I think it is fundamentally different from something like a painting:
The thing that is "non-fungible" is the token, not the actual art. The underlying digital asset is actually fungible with copies of it. With a painting, there are prints and reproductions of the Mona Lisa, but they are all fundamentally different in some way - the exact brush stroke texture, etc.
NFTs have this feeling of valuing the receipt, not the art. As if I walked into a gift shop at The Louvre and bought a Mona Lisa slick poster print, but then valued the gift store receipt more than the more-or-less completely replaceable poster.
It's like buying a piece of land. You don't physically take the land home, you just acquire new and specific rights depending on your legal jurisdiction. Are you buying the property, or just the deed to the property?
No it's more like the opposite of buying land. Land is non-fungible, "digital art" is exceedingly fungible. A land deed is perhaps not fungible, but it is reproducible, unlike an NFT.
I heard the bozos on the A16Z podcast (I think it was) compare NFTs to land deeds, but they very seldom know what they're talking about.
The point is not that land is somehow fungible, but that we have plenty of precedent for "owning" a thing without taking physical transfer of that thing.
When you buy land you gain a right to physically use (or charge others to physically use) the land you didn't previously have. Exceptions include the Brooklyn Bridge scam, where you actually gain no control over the use of the land whatsoever, no matter how verifiably unique the vendor promises the token they're giving you as proof is, and the people selling certificates with parts of the moon and your name on it. A token which grants you legal control of distribution of a piece of digital art so you can charge others to look at or listen to it might be like a real land deed, but a token giving you a nominal association with something already in the public domain is much more like the latter examples.
The problem is that supposedly knowledgeable people hype the concept as something new and clever, they claim it solves a real problem.
I don’t feel sorry at all for the clown that paid 69 mill for the url to a jpg, I just think the hype is stupid. Not that we can be sure the buyer was real and distinct from the seller.
Yes, and the point is that this is not what art NFTs do at all.
PS It would have been quicker to google A16Z than type out those words, but I’ll save you some time by telling you that it’s (the podcast of) a top three silicon valley VC.
If you have the deed to a piece of land that’s (usually, in stable-ish jurisdictions) backed by the police and ultimately, military, of the government. You can stand on it, build on it, possible mine it, and the cops will stop anyone from interfering.
Acquiring the land makes you the legal owner of it, backed by the law of the country and its military. Owning the nft has no legal consequence at the moment. Who will enforce any right on your behalf?
Which rights? Legal rights that the artist wants to sell alongside the token can be legally enforced. Beyond that, the ownership of the token is enforced by the blockchain, and that ownership token is the thing people value.
From what I gather a blockchain doesn't enforce anything. It simply states who owns what. Anybody can create a blockchain and own the world's entire supply of gold according to that blockchain. But can they enforce that ownership? No, they can't.
It doesn’t even do that. You can easily have one unique NFT claiming it represents ownership of the Mona Lisa, and another, unique and distinct NFT, also claiming ownership of the Mona Lisa. Besides ownership being unenforced, uniqueness is also unenforced.
But that's not how NFTs are being used now. For one, who would issue the Mona Lisa NFT, the Louvre, or Leonardo's family, or the family of his patron at the time? An NFT can't clear up a murky issue anymore than me writing you a paper receipt would.
But, a paper receipt is all that differentiates print #1 from #1005, and #1 is usually more prestigious. And even if those prints came off the machine in the other order, the actual artist is still attaching significance to one of them over the others.
NFTs are a way of saying that my identical print (file) is really the special one. Or that I'm special for having it. Or whatever.
It’s just like you having a paper receipt with #1 on it, and me also having a receipt with #1 on it. Both can be on the same blockchain at the same time, issued by different NFT ‘creators’. Or maybe on different blockchain... Which one is the ‘real’ one? No-one can say.
Do you not crypto? It's clear which address mints an NFT, and that address can be provably linked to the party with the keys. And they can put that proof on their website. You do know your favorite artists website, right?
So yeah, by looking at both NFTs we can clearly determine which is authentic.
If they're supposed to be unique, as opposed to 'we both sponsored the same art', then there are easy ways to ensure that.
For this reason, blockchains are not used that way - it does not track ownership of physical objects, it tracks ownerships of digital ones. If the blockchain says you own the only digital edition that Beeple created for his artwork, then this is so, because the blockchain states this.
If Beeple creates another NFT referring to the same work, then he is simply creating a second edition, in the same way that an artist can create a run of prints limited to 10, and later decide to create 10 further prints.
If someone else creates an NFT claiming to represent Beeples work, then this is like me selling my own unauthorized Robert Rauschenberg print, which I might find difficult to find a buyer for, though with enough talent, maybe not impossible.
In any case, the NFT is merely a digital equivalent of a print.
A digital equivalent of a print is an image file. The NFT has no real-world equivalent. Purportedly it "represents" the artwork, somehow, but in reality it's just a digital token with no connection whatsoever with the artwork.
But what rights would you need to go to court for? The point of an NFT is that the provided rights are exercisable without further permission.
Also, if the author wanted to control the NFT they'd just code it that way, for instance to prevent sales, or prevent more than one sale per decade, etc.
Sure they are, the original contract was that the blockchain asset was authoritative. If you buy that asset then you obviously share that view. If the asset has limited transferability, well you agreed to that. It was in the code for you to test for, if not read.
No, but purchasing it effectively will. If I create a software-license rental NFT which you have to refill periodically, you won't be able to force me to provide full coverage to that software. Even if you purchased it from someone else without being told the rules - the NFT encodes them and you'd be expected to read it and know the limitations on your claim.
If I minted an NFT that said for every period you paid you could collect royalties from my art then you would have a valid contractual claim after purchasing it, even if I didn't make the deal with you initially.
If you buy a second-hand concert-ticket NFT the requirements of attendance will still need to be met before you can use it.
> If I minted an NFT that said for every period you paid you could collect royalties from my art then you would have a valid contractual claim after purchasing it, even if I didn't make the deal with you initially.
I don't think it's plausibly true now because of the complexity of that contract and the difficulty in expressing it, jurisdictional issues, etc.
But if all that was handled and it was considered binging between you and the first guy then I don't think the transferability would phase a court at all. The NFT by nature, being meant to be transferred, and with tools to prevent that where desired, would indicate intent.
Perhaps a better example would be me (the hypothetical creator of cryptokitties) selling a cryptokitty, with the obvious implication that I would not modify my game to invalidate said kitty. The final owner of the kitty, like yourself, could sue me for misrepresentation for selling a product I intended to disable. Perhaps for tortious interference.
Right and you can also buy a cheap print of an expensive, famous piece and hang it on your wall. In fact, people do it all the time! Doesn’t diminish the value of the original.
Perfectly as in the exact paint compounds, the effect of that order of brush strokes and timing, and then aging. Such that no art expert or chemical/forensic analysis can tell them apart other than the label saying which is which?
That doesn’t not sound at all feasible. But if it were, then sure the prices would have to be close for the original and new one. It sounds impossible to do, and extremely easy expensive to make a copy like that of a real painting. It’s stupidly easy and simple to do with a digital work.
Any number of artworks are being sold which allow for reproducibility, say photographs. Expensive limited edition prints are a thing. In most of those cases the particular physical manifestation you acquire is entirely a construct. Even for an original painting, the fact that you desire that particular manifestation (over say an improved one which the original artist may now be able to do) is a construct. If a painting needs restoration, you may find that some elements are no longer original; this will not diminish its value. If over the years we replace all the parts of the Mona Lisa, it will still be the Mona Lisa (see also: the Ship of Theseus).
Even the photos that sell are scarcer than digital photos - the only people who could reproduce it are the original artist, or an owner of the photo who made a perfect scan, and the owners of the photo likely aren’t going to distribute scans of their own art.
But that is entirely artificial scarcity. The fact is that they could be produced perfectly; the physical prints need physical security, because if copies were allowed to be made, it would be difficult to know who owns the original.
If the provenance of the real item could be guaranteed, the fact that you have a really good copy wouldn't matter; people would still pay to own the original.
That's exactly what an NFT is; digital security for a digital print. People who buy NFTs don't care that someone else has a copy, they value the artificial scarcity provided by the NFT.
Look, the fact is that if you like a Picasso, you can have a perfect copy made, and you won't be able to tell the difference between the two. In fact, in a blind test, you may end up liking the copy more. The fact that you value the original more because Picasso touched it is totally, absolutely in your head. Empirically, there is no reason why this should make a difference to you.
And then you have a digital token that Picasso personally signed with his private key.
There are a lot of examples at the intersection of this. If you buy a Damien Hirst, the artist may well never have touched the piece - these are being produced by staff. Sol LeWitt's Wall Paintings exist as instructions that different artists re-execute over an over again.
In all these cases, enjoyment of the art is available to everyone; you can have a really good copy. It is totally disconnected with what people value when they pay large sums of money, which is entirely artificial.
It's not analogous, still. First of all, copies of photos are worth less than paintings for a reason. So already we see the price scales down based on how reproducible things are. NFT's therefore should never be close to your average gallery selling a photo reproduction, as they are infinitely copyable for free.
A high quality photo print and frame costs quite a bit of money. That's maybe a couple thousand dollars. And then the artist hangs them in a nice gallery, with sales people. That costs more too. And the final price isn't something like 100x the cost, it's maybe 10x if lucky, often 2-3x.
And again, you can't really reproduce it easily. If I found some really high quality scanning store, I could do a decent job. But it would cost me a lot of money, and the signature on the print wouldn't look or feel real.
So again, big difference, and already we have to admit paintings > prints > digital images.
You absolutely cannot have a perfect copy of a Picasso. Sorry, that's a meme that's not real. You can carbon date the paint. There are ridiculous complexity in his layering techniques. Even the specific paints he used were from his era, and hard to find. It's physically provable to show a Picasso is a real one that came from his hands. Not possible with an NFT as there literally is no original. You can prove the coin is the coin he made, but that's simply not analogous.
> You absolutely cannot have a perfect copy of a Picasso. Sorry, that's a meme that's not real.
Yes, the point I am making though is that if you cannot see the differences with the naked eye, or if in fact you prefer the copy if given a test, then why do you value all that stuff? Enjoy the much cheaper copy.
It is true there are unique properties that a physical original features - it is just that the value assigned to them is arbitrary, and there does not seem to be an obviously good reason to pay a lot of money for it. People do it because of what is essentially a collective hallucination centered around the idea of scarcity.
Now if there were a way to copy a Picasso perfectly, I posit that people would still assign an arbitrarily high value to the original. I mean, you can see that being the case with diamonds.
Obviously, there is something about a physical object that a digital image will never be able to reproduce. That's why people still enjoy real books, right? So I wouldn't be surprised if a real painting would carry a certain premium over an NFT. But the idea that people pay for an NFT, signed by Damien Hirst's own private wallet? I see no fundamental difference between valuing that and valuing the entirely imaginary benefit of Damien Hirst having once stood in the presence of that physical object you bought.
Because in one case I have an original Picasso, in the other all I have is a hash in a blockchain somewhere. I don't get how people don't see the difference.
An original Picasso... vs a hash number.
Would I rather have the basketball that Lebron dunked in a game or some random basketball that Lebron issued an NFT for? They are for all intents and purposes identical. Why do people care?
It's likely because authenticity matters, hard work begetting achievement matters, real world deeds, real world objects matter. Matter matters. It's just how humans work, maybe because we are matter..
Diamonds are a great example. They are in fact scarce, which drives value, and the reason artificial diamonds don't retain value is because they are less scarce. Now work backwards.
I agreed that physical objects have unique properties that digital objects cannot match. But presumably we can appreciate digital artworks nonetheless?
It is also true that the nature of the digital object means that ownership of the NFT is somewhat disconnected from whether a .jpg is physically in your computers memory at any given time.
But the choice is not between an original Picasso and a random hash number, but rather:
- An original Picasso painting vs an equally enjoyable copy.
- An NFT of Picasso's digital illustration vs an equally enjoyable copy.
Are you able to experience that same intangible connection with history by looking at a blockchain entry, as you might be standing in front of an old painting? Maybe not. But you may experience a version of it, in the same as you might by looking at the first websites.
> Would I rather have the basketball that Lebron dunked in a game or some random basketball that Lebron issued an NFT for?
Sure. What about a unique NFT of a sword that was used to win in a watershed eSports event? Note that this would be a digital object that does not merely represent the sword, but it is the sword, i.e. I can now use it in the game. I think people would value that through largely the same mental mechanism as the basketball.
NFT's that aren't just images could be valuable. I had a friend doing TikTok but with a NFT animated assets store. That makes sense! I could see it become popular some day, and then we'd see if Apple, Disney, Blizzard / everyone decide to jump in.
> Diamonds are a great example. They are in fact scarce, which drives value, and the reason artificial diamonds don't retain value is because they are less scarce. Now work backwards.
Even if that were possible, it wouldn't BE the original. Digital bits, unlike physical matter, has no identity, so the concept of "original" makes no sense.
If anyone could instantly make perfect clones of the Mona Lisa anywhere, at any time, then yes in fact the original would lose its value. By definition, it would be impossible to tell which is the original, and anyone could replace it the moment nobody is looking. You'll have to assume it's already happened countless times.
In real life you cannot make perfect molecule-for-molecule clones of physical objects, so what's your point?
No but getting an obvious replication is just a little weird. There is plenty of art of identical and higher quality than the famous pieces within affordable prices.
You seriously think so? Or is that for the uncanny valley where it's obviously just a replica, but not just a poster?
A lot of art, for many, is that others see the same thing through different eyes. Looking at the Mona Lisa or a Rembrandt, means that I'm experiencing what millions have but uniquely. Shared experiences create bonds, even across time and space. It's also perhaps a bit humbling in a way another similarly good painting from now wouldn't be because of the temporal distance it comes from.
>Buying art with an NFT is just a way to give artists and/or art auctioneers money for their art. That's it.
But we could already do that. It's a solution to a problem no one had. A NFT would only be useful for proving ownership if it will hold up in court, which I doubt it would without accompanying proof of purchase.
Hypothetical situation. You purchase some digital art for $1M from a marketplace and get issued a NFT for the purchase. I slip on my black hoodie and balaclava, hack the Gibson and acquire your private key for the NFT then try to sell the digital art. You then sue me in court. Both you and the marketplace can produce documents of the financial transaction verifying that you were the legitimate purchaser and all I have is just the stolen NFT. Who is the court going to rule in favor of? Well you and if that's the case what proof does the NFT provide that a standard purchase agreement and the accompanying financial documentation of the purchase doesn't which is how we already purchase something like art?
That would be an actual crime. If you guessed my key, perhaps by knowing I generated it insecurely or watched me type it (when not under an NDA or some duty to me), you could do this legally though.
But yes, once you've stolen the thing from me I have less control over it...
Also, this would never happen as written. If you tried to claim my asset without having changed the key, then I would. We'd never be in court with shared custody, and thus they'd never get a chance to rule on this. The only time a court would come in would be criminally if you actually hacked my system.
Otherwise, owning the key is the entirely of ownership. Blockchain is intentionally a knowledge-based version of a bearer bond. (It could be based on hash-preimages which would count as a password and probably be legally protected, but intentionally it's based on math because factors in an equation aren't protected.)
Also, you aren't really purchasing art because it's untenable. You're purchasing something like the right to show that the artist considers you to have purchased art. To actually purchase art would be to actually codify a contract (from what jurisdictions?) in an NFT, and that's not what anyone is doing. It's all just digital signatures of a phrase like "Thanks for being the first sponsor of my work 'Autumn Leaves', with shasum XYZ".
Isn't this literally the only thing an NFT guarantees anyway? It is precisely a "non-fungible token" and nothing more.
Anything you can do with a non-fungible piece of paper, you can do with a non-fungible token. Anything you can't do with a non-fungible piece of paper, you can't do with a non-fungible token.
I'm blown away by how many people are upset that other people are doing stupid things at the confluence of new technology and excessive spending money.
> Isn't this literally the only thing an NFT guarantees anyway? Anything you can't do with a non-fungible piece of paper, you can't do with a non-fungible token.
Pretty much. It's a bit harder to show your paper autograph (and prove its veracity for full status points or before selling it) than to demonstrate this with an NFT. If that's what the paper is about for you, the NFT is better.
With concert tickets though there are a ton of benefits from proving authenticity, not needing to meet to transfer paper, not needing ID to prove you didn't steal it when checking in, etc.
> I'm blown away by how many people are upset that other people are doing stupid things at the confluence of new technology and excessive spending money.
Well when artists are pretending to sell art for $69 million to their business partners to create hype for NFTs and lure in clueless people who will lose their money on a pump and dump virtual asset then people start to feel like it’s a scam not just “excessive spending”
I mean this artist is now the third highest paid artist alive and it seems like he just pretended to sell the art to his business partner and the money transfer may not have even happened. That’s not excessive spending if true, that’s lies and fraud
The token (according to the ERC-721 standard) contains a URL to a hosted JSON which contains a URL to the hosted image. So to access the actual image you need to go through two different servers.
What happens if you drop your print in a puddle and it's destroyed, but you still have the proof of authenticity in your pocket? While the artist is alive, they'll probably replace it at cost. But after the artist is gone the certificate does nothing. (It still proves your status, like the NFT, but otherwise is worthless.)
This doesn’t solve the problem at all. Many of the NFT sites are hosting their own IPFS and many of the images have already gone missing from the IPFS because no one is hosting that file still.
couldn't anyone else start hosting that content on IPFS, and the URL would resole to it? Since it's content-based addressing? (I don't have a great understanding of IPFS, I could be totally wrong)
From the original sale almost all of it goes to the person who minted it, minus a small fee (around 5%) for the platform. That should be the artist, but of course there are people minting art that isn't theirs. There's efforts to catch and remove that, but a lot slips through.
From secondary market sales, the artist can get a royalty if they choose and the secondary transaction is on the same platform. Typically around 10%. The same platform requirement is an issue and hopefully a future NFT standard smart contract will build in a royalty option/.
How do you remove tokens minted by people other than the artist? Who removes it, and what stops that person or those people from removing legitimate tokens?
Either you don't, and can't, or you build a special script with a revocation list run by trusted 'Oracles' who would essentially notarize a legal claim by the artist into a blocklist of image hashes, or a whitelist of who can mint NFTs for those hashes.
Those Oracles would ideally be known parties who could be sued under the laws of their jurisdiction for lying.
Yes, but there is a big problem of people other than the artist creating NFTs for other peoples art. There is nothing in the NFT process that guarantees the money is going to the "right" person.
I talked to a guy a few weeks ago. He needed help with his art related NFT project. Basically he was looking for a CTO because he had no idea whether his developers were doing a good job (and, I'd also add, what he built wasn't necessarily what he needed to build).
I have a pretty good understanding of block chain technologies but didn't hear about NFTs before, so like you, I started to challenge his ideas. Partly to understand what he was building. Because at first I tried to find real and practical applications for the platform that somehow connect to physical things, works of art.
But what he said was pretty interesting. The guy had a background in art management and, I think, trade. He said that art collection has always been about being able to say that you have the original piece. And that it's not rational anyway, not even for physical works of art, like paintings. It's not that you like the actual picture on the actual canvas so much that you want to buy it for say $1M and if you just had a copy you'd notice the difference and that wouldn't give you as much pleasure. It's simply about having the original. And also collecting related originals.
Now it's easy to trace it back to real, actual scarcity, where indeed there weren't many e.g. paintings (or books, etc.) and there was a big difference between the paintings of different artists (both in style and quality) and you had no way of looking at these other than having the originals probably.
I guess the big question here is whether this phenomenon is strong enough on its own to transfer to purely digital assets or whether this is really rooted and tied to that original scarcity that we kept changing the story around. (I.e. while it's not about being able to enjoy and look at the piece anymore, now it's tied to the knowledge that that specific piece of canvas was painted on by that specific very talented guy X hundred years ago, and he was standing in front, etc.)
One hint might be those 'limited edition' sport cards that some people seem to collect, as well as 'limited edition' e.g. CD or vinyl albums from the past millenium. (I never understood those, but I had a friend who did get a very obvious joy out of being able to buy those. For me, these were always just delivery mediums and I only cared about the music.)
Honestly, I have no idea, but that call was definitely interesting.
There's an interesting series of videos from the BBC called "ways of seeing", narrated by John Berger. The series is based on Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", which also seems relevant to the phenomena you're describing.
Interesting, uncopyrightable art. As a product of slavishly following directions it by definition isn't creative. The directions are, but the directions can be rewritten and still produce the same product.
I don’t part take. But I think you’re a bit too quick to dismiss the “social” part of economics, remember it’s a social science after all. Once you include that, your rational valuation frameworks start to erode as it becomes subjective (even worse, collectively subjective). Then the rest of the conversation is shouting over each other. Both sides are right, it is insane, but it’s insane because it wants to be insane. History will look at it positively if it crosses some threshold/tipping point of social acceptance. And negatively if it doesn’t. That’s all there is to it really.
The lines between economies and schemes are blurry and hero’s and villains are only declared once the dust settles. We’re not there yet.
I'm going to disagree with you. Pseudo-intellectual gives the "justifications" far too much credit.
What I also find hilarious, folks who love this NFT "can't be copied" are great are the same people who hate DRM. While I'm not a fan of intrusive DRM, I'm going to side with paying what folks deserve for putting time into coding/art/planning for a game/movie/whatever. I get something from their effort, they deserve something in return.
That and I'd rather buy a $20 poster of art from my real life wall than over glorified digital wallpaper.
Henry Ford got this. He was once pitched by some art dealers, who gave him a big book of prints of artworks they had for sale. He then asked, now that I have this book, why would I want the original?
DRM keeps people from viewing/using something, and can (often does) keep a legitimate owner from using it. And NFT does not, it only lets you prove (to anyone who cares) that you have a granted right to the product. You should appreciate this, it lets you support the creator with zero risk of locking out a legitimate viewer.
Also, you realize that you could print the digital artwork and have a poster, right? Personally I've got more than enough posters, too many to put up in ten houses, and would actually rather have high quality scans of them so I can still enjoy them.
You misunderstand. NFTs grant you absolutely no rights to anything. You simply were fooled into buying a token which points to a resource. That's it. It bestows no additional rights to the content itself. For instance, Jack Dorsey could delete that one tweet he sold an NFT against and... you're essentially left with a useless and worthless token to show off to very few people who probably barely care.
You have no recourse or a leg to stand on. Good luck getting a refund.
As far as supporting artists goes, doesn't Patreon kind of already do this? Or what about cutting a check directly to the author? NFTs seem like "supporting" artists with extra steps.
Plus, the middle-men always win on this with all the silly gas fees. I'd argue NFTs are extremely inefficient when those fees are taken into consideration.
> You misunderstand. NFTs grant you absolutely no rights to anything.
NFTs provide the right to whatever they control. If you buy a software license via NFT, it will unlock the software. You can prove this before buying.
NFTs to show you own art? Yeah, that's pretty basic, it's the equivalent of a paper receipt. If you'd pay more for print #1 then an equivalent NFT is no more wasteful.
> For instance, Jack Dorsey could delete that one tweet he sold an NFT against
Yeah, Jack is an idiot and so is his NFT. Not a surprise.
> As far as supporting artists goes, doesn't Patreon kind of already do this?
Yeah, but it takes a bigger cut.
> Plus, the middle-men always win on this with all the silly gas fees. I'd argue NFTs are extremely inefficient when those fees are taken into consideration.
Don't buy an NFT on an expensive blockchain then. Some have almost no transaction fees. Besides, you could just buy an off-chain cryptographically signed token of donation if you don't want the blockchain but want to be able to prove that your receipt is real.
I appreciate you taking the time to break down your response. I still don't see the utility in NFTs personally (disastrous environmental impact notwithstanding), but you didn't handwave away my criticisms, which is a plus in my book.
EDIT: My other real concern, which I don't believe NFTs really address is the fact that, unlike a physical artform, like a certified Picasso painting, digital art can be infinitely copied, and having an NFT token isn't the same to me as actually owning the physical painting outright, something that cannot be properly 1:1 copied. Also... NFTs don't prevent a bad actor from tokenizing someone else's work and passing it off as their own.
Paper receipts don't prevent gallery owners from printing off extra copies, sometimes of art they aren't even supposed to have. But if your favorite artist has a webpage you can go there and see their crypto payment address (if they're into NFTs they'll know to do this, if they don't maybe the NFT is from someone else...) and you can verify that the funds go to the right person.
And yes, the art itself is unrelated. Anyone can download it. NFTs (for art) are a prestige way to sponsor the artist via that specific work. You can 100% prove that you sent that author the funds. That's it. (I think it's a bit like buying an original and giving it to a museum.)
IMHO, The future use of NFTs is actual non-fungible goods, like a concert seat. It's not "real property" so there aren't many legal restrictions on trading usage rights and a court is likely to respect the decision of the two parties to keep their ledger wherever they want. This NFT-art boom seems like people just playing with the tech before we manage to sign a venue to use crypto-tickets - a proof of concept and a way to familiarize enough people with the tech that there's an audience for it when a real service using NFTs is launched.
Yea, but copyrights do. Lots of pro-photographers have lawyers as best friends for this exact reason. The drawback to buying long dead artist art is their copyright ran out. Oh well. We all celebrate public domain day for books even though they're subjugated to the same rules. The NFT, inherently at least, doesn't give you the right to distribute or anything of the sense. It really obfuscates the concept of ownership into some weird hippie mentality that boils down to, "How can you own anything man?" It literally neuters the idea of ownership because what in the hell do you actually own? A string of numbers saying you bought what amounts to a wallpaper background? But at the same time, everyone has access to it anyways without buying it? What bothers me about this "ownership" discussion is just that, what are you even talking about? The idiom possession is nine-tenths of the law refers to this. Not just the law "enforces" possessing something, it refers to defining what that even means and limitations. Copyright and IP lawyers are their own special sector because it's a far more complicated aspect of the law because so many people want to have such a wishy-washy idea of "ownership". Are you allowed to produce, distribute, end of sale, consume and just how much consumption? Within your own home, to a group of people? For how long? Etc. That's just the easy stuff by the way.
Sponsoring the artist is also an extremely weak argument. What's the difference between this and buying a $20 printed tshirt of their art? Or a poster? Or a pdf of their comic? Or their mp3? Except for the fact I get something. This whole thing of, "Yea, but patreon/apple/amazon/paypal/merchantServices/platformX gets a cut out of it."
And?
Because places to purchase/convert crypto and NFT don't exist nor take a cut themselves? When was the last time you mailed a check or cash to someone? Are you going to do that for an artist to buy their stuff? Or is a stamp too much of a "cut"? That and the envelope. Those pesky manufacturers of envelopes. Why do they oppress us by not providing them for free? Just like paypal and patreon not dealing with the debit/credit card companies for free since their data centers and employees are all volunteer anyways! I mean come the fuck on. This is ridiculous. Do you work for free? What do you do? I guarantee the same argument can be applied to your job and you would foam at the mouth about how you deserve to be paid. No one goes into these services stupid. They don't go, "Oh, this is a 100% free services and I make all ze monies." Specialization is such a worshipped concept around here, this is part of it. Someone deals with ease of purchasing and a marketplace so an artist can "art" instead of figuring out how to connect with a merchant services API and the cart to fulfill transactions, let alone all the security required. Yes, they deserve to get paid.
This whole NFT thing feels like some twisted Twilight Zone red herring. It's an immensely complicated way of solving nothing. Concert tickets? What does it do differently? "Verifies ownership". How does it do it differently than the 2 to 3 sets of ID numbers on the ticket and/or putting someone's name on it and verifying by picture ID? A piss poor MySQL db and terrible PHP accomplishes what NFT can do, minus the computational power. That and it's not "the courts" that don't let you scalp tickets. It's the venue. The agreement to buying a ticket either lets you or restricts you from scalping, which was created by the venue or whoever is performing, but normally it's the venue's rules. That's then upheld in court as the agreement is considered a binding contract. Again, the whole "ownership" and legality wannabe work around doesn't work. The restriction was placed by the venue. You think they won't do the same? Or even better, not give a shit about an obscure 3rd party system that grants no value to them or the customer?
Why NFT has ruffled my feathers so much is honestly weird. It has this Twilight Zone feel to it. The question is, wtf is the punchline at the end? I know it's not going to be pretty. Crypto in general led us to this weird new religion of tech. Or maybe it's the worship of "disruption" regardless of purpose or benefit? Disruption for the sake of disruption and regardless of consequences. Could even lead to the same type of pandora's box that the nuke gave us. The biggest difference, crypto tech is energy consuming. Nuclear tech was rapid energy producing. Curious what the fallout from this insanity is going to be.
This was a beautiful response that articulated my concerns on NFTs better than I ever could.
Semi-relatedly, to your point about religion, Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, whatever else falls under this umbrella, really does have a bizarre cultish component that I believe helps sustain its so-called "value". This is why we keep seeing shit about this on HN. Every. Damn. Day.
As I mentioned in another comment, retirement accounts, like the 401k I have, has some modicum of exposure to the zany world of cryptocurrency (see TSLA's BTC buy and that company is part of the S&P500). It's like I don't get a choice in the matter of whether or not I want to be tethered to this albatross. Sad but true.
> The NFT, inherently at least, doesn't give you the right to distribute or anything of the sense. It really obfuscates the concept of ownership into some weird hippie mentality that boils down to, "How can you own anything man?"
I don't think you know what's going on here. An NFT for art sponsorship is usually just bragging rights. You're provably the first sponsor of a thing. Yay you.
But if you see something that says 'own' or 'purchase' and you don't think the court could enforce it - like the Brooklyn bridge, or the moon, then don't buy it. Insisting that every NFT be worthwhile and honest would be like insisting that all contracts be perfect and all parties must fully agree - unworkably unrealistic.
But for a comparison to software, I'd rather buy an NFT license that obviously couldn't convey ownership than I would a cardboard box that appeared to contain a product but only had the installation media on it and had a hidden EULA before purchase.
> [discussion of legal quandaries in the copyright space.]
Yeah, totes. Nobody said otherwise. So don't buy an NFT purporting to give you royalties to the work - it can't be enforced on-chain and is therefore a stupid crypto investment.
> Sponsoring the artist is also an extremely weak argument. What's the difference between this and buying a $20 printed tshirt of their art? Or a poster? Or a pdf of their comic? Or their mp3? Except for the fact I get something.
How about a webcomic where you get the output anyways, and can print it if you want? Why sponsor the artist at all if you don't get anything. But once you get past that...
Anyways, producing a book is expensive and the artist may not have the time, or I may not want the book, and they only get "normal profits" from it. If I gift them money they get it all, without any work or prep. So donation and patronage are very valuable.
> This whole thing of, "Yea, but patreon/apple/amazon/paypal/merchantServices/platformX gets a cut out of it."
Without adding any value for me and by requiring the artist to go to the trouble of running a campaign. I have nothing against Patreon as a concept, for when an artist wants to recruit a following around a new book or something. But I don't buy collectibles anymore so this doesn't meet my needs.
> Because places to purchase/convert crypto and NFT don't exist nor take a cut themselves?
The artist can do it themselves for free. And they can generally spend their crypto easily online. Buy supplies with it, etc, without specifically offramping into currency first.
> Are you going to do that for an artist to buy their stuff?
If my artist didn't know how to mint NFTs and wanted to, yes I'd do that for them.
> Or is a stamp too much of a "cut"?
If I want to send mail, then no - it doesn't even cover the costs. But if I don't want to send mail and had to buy an unwanted stamp for some reason it would be.
> Just like paypal and patreon not dealing with the debit/credit card companies for free since their data centers and employees are all volunteer anyways!
The big value those companies play is in reducing and protecting against risk. But it's my crypto already, and I know the artist's address, so there's 0% counterparty or technological risk. So what do I need them for? They're an unwanted stamp in this context.
> Do you work for free? What do you do? I guarantee the same argument can be applied to your job and you would foam at the mouth about how you deserve to be paid.
Nope. Many people do not use products I work on, or DCs I manage, or anything. Why would I care? They don't cost me anything. Similarly, me not using Paypal doesn't cost them anything.
> I mean come the fuck on. This is ridiculous.
Why are you so mad about it though?
> Concert tickets? What does it do differently? "Verifies ownership". How does it do it differently than the 2 to 3 sets of ID numbers on the ticket and/or putting someone's name on it and verifying by picture ID?
Apparently you've never heard of counterfeiting. And why do I want to go through the trouble of giving them my name just so they can make my ticket harder to use?
> A piss poor MySQL db and terrible PHP accomplishes what NFT can do, minus the computational power.
No. Use a non-PoW chain and the cost to everyone, transaction fees, computation, etc, is less than $.05. And the piss-poor MySQL DB can't prove to me that my ticket is unique so it doesn't solve the counterfeiting problem.
> That and it's not "the courts" that don't let you scalp tickets. It's the venue. The agreement to buying a ticket either lets you or restricts you from scalping, which was created by the venue or whoever is performing, but normally it's the venue's rules.
Why would I care who, or how, they decided to create user-hostile rules? They don't serve me so I won't miss them.
But, if you as a venue wanted a transfer fee you could enforce it more easily then by suing resellers. It'd happen automatically and risk free. So once they get their fee they won't need to care how I transfer it, giving me the ability to easily buy a bunch of tickets for friends without having to know who exactly is coming, or whatever.
Even if they encumber the NFTs they'll be no worse than paper tickets in any way.
> not give a shit about an obscure 3rd party system that grants no value to them or the customer?
Except that it provides value to them and the customer.
No tickets to print, no defrauded customers with fake tickets complaining, no worries about scalpers eating your lunch... If they do place a bunch of restrictions I'm no worse off, and likely they wouldn't because with a more transparent market they could just arrange a Dutch auction and capture the money themselves in one simple step.
> Why NFT has ruffled my feathers so much is honestly weird. It has this Twilight Zone feel to it. The question is, wtf is the punchline at the end? I know it's not going to be pretty. Crypto in general led us to this weird new religion of tech.
There are people who dream of replacing fiat currencies. Most everyone else just wants to send money to friends, play games, etc. Don't let the ideologues freak you out.
> Or maybe it's the worship of "disruption" regardless of purpose or benefit? Disruption for the sake of disruption and regardless of consequences.
Disrupting companies is pretty safe. If everyone switched from Paypal they'd go bankrupt but nobody would be hurt - employees would get new jobs and life would go on. Disrupting the entire currency system is dangerous but is potentially required to avoid corruption.
> The biggest difference, crypto tech is energy consuming. Nuclear tech was rapid energy producing.
And interestingly, both have a large crowd of detractors who don't understand the tech or the risk/reward tradeoff but want them gone.
I appreciate your response, but dude, you're just performing mental gymnastics that avoids saying, "NFTs solve nothing". In Kanban and Lean systems management, NFTs and crypto provide zero value to the producer or the consumer. Nothing is gained through the extra hoops.
Want to "sponsor" an artist, how is an NFT any better than mailing them a five dollar bill or sending them $5 through paypal? The "someone takes a cut" argument is null because someone is always going to get a cut no matter the system and that includes NFT. What does the NFT do special? Does it magically make the $5 dollars spent a $10 dollar bill without the need for market speculation? Because then it's smarter to just gift the artist a treasury bond or gamestop stock at that point. But again, most people don't like "gifting". They prefer buying prints or do-dads from the artist. Something they can get to mess with or decorate. An NFT is just... eh? It's as unique as naming a blank text file a random 32bit hash. Sure, it's got a unique name that's probably never existed in all of time like a 7-times shuffled deck of cards... but so what? There's a ledger that says you "have" that unique string which gives you the ability to... say you have it?
Yea, venues and artists make rules for the nature of their performances. Why can't they? "You buy a ticket, you can't resell it." I wonder why they would do that... OH RIGHT! Because assholes with a fuckton of money would just buy out all the tickets to a popular concert (like the '05 The Killers concert in Tampa... fucking bastards, I'm still angry over that shit) and resell them at triple the price so poor fans/teens can't attend! You think maybe those pesky venues are not just protecting their own wallets but making sure the average schmuck isn't screwed out of participating in events? This is why I absolutely hate crypto folks. You have zero clue how or why the rules are in place in our current systems. After smoking a bowl, you skim a few manifestos and, "I know it all maaaaan." Ten minute youtube cartoons can't teach you about, "The truth to money". You keep saying it provides value to people. Where? Do you know what that means? Adding value means it's solving some sort of problem in a way that can't be done in other, simpler means. It's another one of those $400 over engineered juicers that squeezed a pre-juiced pouch into a glass. Pouches that could be hand squeezed faster than the machine could. That's not value. That's mental masturbation.
An Ethereum NFT transaction, one transaction, single, is 60 kWh: https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption That's no 5 pennies. That's 2 days worth of average household energy usage. PoW and PoS are energy hogs, get out of your cult.
The cult of crypto is a, "I don't like the old players had a headstart to the game. I'm changing the rules for me." Yea, it sucks. Millennial here. Fresh in the job market and the economy raw dogged us all. Grow up. For one, the wannabe new system is flawed and unsustainable already. This push is so damn disingenuous of, "there are no problems, everything is perfect, this is the way" it's far more sinister that the archaic system. A generation will go by and they're going to want to ruin the new system because they weren't apart of the last "wealth redistribution". No great revolution really helped the poor in history. They just transferred power from one set of assholes to another. The honeymoon period is when the most poor people suffer.
Why am I mad? I got real angry too when those bastards with a dehumidifier in Hawaii won an XPrize purse on "solving" water supply issues in arid African countries. Now, it only works in a select few, high humidity locales that are better served cheaper and faster with a well and water purifier. Perhaps I'm sick of good tech and ideas being passed up for venture capital because con artists gallivant around with their bullshit "I'm going to change the world for a better place. All you have to do is give me lots of money and not question me." We all want to scream and cry about how no one is putting money in research that "matters". Yea, well, $70m for an alphanumeric string that amounts to fake... it's not even ownership or anything. You can't call it ownership. It's literally nothing. You get nothing. This is the most outrageous con, I swear. Maybe I'm just pissed I didn't make up this con myself or this is going to sideline the greats like Victor Lustig.
Crypto was also claimed to help the poor obtain wealth. Yea, well $70m goes a long way on buying bags of rice and wheat to feed the poor. Would have been better spent that way.
it's the same kind of financial intermediation to extract wealth without providing value that underlies ponzi schemes and the derivatives that got us the 2008 crisis. it's a lot of wealth accumulation for its own sake detached from its real basis as a claim on (someone else's) productivity.
in short, it's bullshit, but for the tech crowd rather than wall streeters.
> I feel like I'm saying "the emperor has no clothes", but doesn't anyone else think this NFT art thing is bullshit?
I don't think the implementation is interesting. I don't think the technology is interesting. I think the concept is extremely interesting, though not in the context of the NFT linking a user to a digital artwork.
If people believe a product has value, then the product has value. If consumers are willing to pay money for it, then the product has value.
People are willing to exert considerable effort to submitting the first comment on a popular youtuber's latest video. People are willing to spend considerable money in order to "own" unique items on roblox. None of these items have any marginal cost to the creator, the hard work has been done, but they are an interesting auxiliary product to the creator's product.
I think an interesting intersection lies between the thinking that lead to NFT, the idea of community and the implementation of smart contracts. Being part of a community, with bragging rights and smart contracts and agreements and sanctions and a culture and so on, becomes much more interesting if people are willing to take the leap to believe that the investment is worth the value they get in return. I think NFT is the proof of this, and the implications of this worry me deeply.
People are using NFTs as stores of value. Despite spending, the owners are not illiquid and are much more liquid than fine art collectors, as borrowing at decently high Loan to Value ratios against the NFT can happen in the subsequent block.
Given your existing predilection, knowing that probably also just moves the goal post for why you think there is something wrong with it "omg, now there's leverage!?". But its just an efficiency on the existing art world which has all the same stuff just much slower due to poor data and information, and nothing to do with the pseudo-intellection abstraction of value.
In a single protocol (standardized class with a set of standardized functions), art provenance has been disrupted, art appraisal has been disrupted, art insurance has been disrupted, art lending has been disrupted, and art royalties have been disrupted.
You will just be seeing more participants in the collectors market because of it, and a market that moves faster and can attract more capital globally, instantly, during a period of massive currency creation.
Its not anybody's problem that new galleries/marketplaces have fees for the artists. Its not anybody's problem that there will still be a ton of starving artists that will never get bids on these platforms. Its not anybody's problem that a buyer ends up with an asset that might not be valued the same or higher or ever get a bid again. Its not anybody's problem that a lender winds up with an illiquid asset. Buy art you like and from creators you like to support, maybe some times you won't get outbid.
I think the first NFT asset might have had a value, much like Maurizio Cattelan's banana[0], where the actual bit of art is the certificate of owning the work, and not the perishable banana.
It is a sort of performance art.
Beyond that, I literally see no reason to buy these things, but they don't seem that different from physical collectibles, and most art pieces in general, where the concept of "original" is just as "irrelevant" in a world where we can duplicate things relatively easily.
> we hear that owning a digital "asset" is actually the same thing as a physical "asset" because
What's the difference between paying 100x for a purse, etc, and a digital status symbol? It's not bought as a good, it's bought as a symbol. Yeah, it does seem wasteful, and I generally think "spending Dad's money" when I see it, but it doesn't offend me.
> but doesn't anyone else think this NFT art thing is bullshit?
Yeah. Because it's not clear that it's just a prestige way to sponsor someone. Non-techies may not understand that the NFT offers no control over the art, the way that owning an original allows you to lock it in a vault or burn it.
Yeah, digital-only NFTs will likely be a fad. I'll be interested again when the trend moves toward deeds. A title for a physical work could have staying power. Even potentially an iou from an artist for a one of a kind (physical) piece.
Personally I'm buying only stuff that resonates with me. I do not plan to flip it for a quick profit. In fact, my.taste is sometimes so eccentric that I doubt anyone else will want to buy them from me. However, I must say that owning a NFT to an artwork, gives you a stronger connection to it, even if it is digital. The artist also appreciate that you support their work.
That's the way you should go about this too. If you see anything promoted by celebrities, run, run away. Also avoid corporations caching in on it like the NBA. Only buy from Artists directly, and if you must, then trade only peer-to-peer.
Oh, you're wrong. It does! That's because if the price appreciates on the 2nd market, then it gives the artist an ability to sell new works for a higher price, as there is more demand for them. Sales drive more sales.
Btw. I meant, only buy NFTs that were produced directly by the artists themselves, and the artists have rights to their work. Basically, avoid middlemen. That's what crypto is for.
There is nothing in ERC-721 to permit such a requirement.
Centralized marketplaces for the resale of 721s (NFTs) can enforce this for sales they arrange, but there's nothing inherent to the blockchain or NFT to require it, which means that sales bypassing such centralized marketplaces would not be subject to those conventions.
Imagine if instead of a piece of art, it were your orange juice pint that came with a token. You could check it to see where that batch of oranges came from, if there are any FDA recalls on it, or whether your religious certification was reversed due to a hilarious but tragic cheese danish accident.
Other people can also see this information, but it isn't as useful to them.
We truly are in the era of more money than sense. I get that people want put their money into something other than virtually-worthless low-interest savings accounts, but where will we all be once the musical chairs stops?
It's pretty obvious any why I look at it. The resemblances with MLM are staggering and the late-stage capitalism arguments for NFTs are baffling. It makes me see bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies as not so fun anymore and just a big capitalist scam.
Most people on HN are (rightly so) calling bullshit on the technology. I think it's worth noting though that there does seem to be a legit market for it, so it's probably worth considering what it would take to make the technology not bullshit.
Of all the hilariously stupid things coming out of the scammy world of crypto, NFTs take the biscuit. I've been hearing A16Z and other VC podcast breathlessly talk about the brave new world they enable. Now you can have digital assets in games, people can buy them with real money! Finally, because that's of course not possible without The Blockchain (tm).
And people can use them to prove ownership of physical things, TRUSTLESSLY. Because it's so much safer to have decentralised system of digital bearer shares, than a central registry run by the government or a bank, right?
Oh but it's for third world countries where the state is not to be trusted. Of course that also means you can't trust them to enforce your digital bearer shares either, but that shouldn't be a big problem. We'll just get all the farmers and villagers to agree on using one particular blockchain bases system to keep track of who owns what land. What could be simpler.
And if you thought that was stupid, enter NFTs for digital art. Yes let's use advanced technology to create digital tokens that can't be copied, and use them to track the ownership of digital art that can be copied indefinitely. Brilliant.
> What’s interesting is that Beeple, the creator of the artwork, is actually a business partner of MetaKovan’s. He owns 2% of all the B20 tokens. I’m sure there is no conflict of interest here.
And they're basically selling it off to 'investors.' So it was really just an elaborate marketing ploy for some shady crypto currency? I'm surprised an institution like Christie's was willing to lend their reputation to such an endeavor. Or were they conned too? Or did they actually net that $9m 'fee' which is enough to buy Christie's reputation?
BTC is at like $60k right now, and there are something like 18.4 billion BTC in circulation, which translates to over a trillion dollars in "value".
Yet if any of these bitcoin (or ETH or whatever) billionaires tried to cash out their massive reserves, the bubble would burst. So stunts like this NFT thing, where a "humble artist" becomes a millionaire overnight, serves to just further inflate the bubble, and help those bitcoin billionaires become real billionaires without crashing the market.
I wonder how many of these bitcoin billionaires are doing this (possibly colluding), or are actually so deluded that they believe $60k is the real intrinsic value of their BTC. Or maybe it's neither, and this bubble is still nowhere near the bursting point yet.
I don't understand why this bothers you so much. If you think this is dumb don't invest, it's really as simple as. Sometimes it truly feels like people here are sour because they "missed the boat", and are now hoping for BTC to crash again so they can go "see? I said it was dumb". I don't want to accuse you of this, I just don't understand the problem otherwise.
Also, it's 18 million BTC, not billion. You're right though that it's close to a trillion dollars market cap, so I assume that was just a typo.
If you see someone getting scammed on the street, like at a tourist trap, wouldn't you say something? Because this is the same situation, and why it bothers me.
It's literally a scam. People are throwing their real dollars into the BTC market because they were sold on vague concepts and bullshit viral articles like in the OP.
Maybe it's the investor's fault for being dumb and not doing their homework? Sure, so long as they weren't mislead, otherwise they're victims of a scam.
> ...people are throwing their real dollars into the BTC market
Real dollars? This seems to suggest that USD currency is "real" while BTC is "not real". Exactly how does this rationale work in your mind? Why is a USD more "real" to you than a bitcoin? The latter involved real work (energy) to create, while the former was just invented by a politician (by QE) or a bank (by fractional reserve).
> ...otherwise they're victims of a scam.
What if I told you that maybe by using fiat currency you have been scammed all along for your whole life? Mind you, I still agree with you that NFTs are a scam, but not bitcoin.
Well... you're kinda wrong, because now many retirement accounts and such have indirect exposure to cryptocurrencies (MSTR and TSLA's silly Bitcoin buys come to mind, and I know TSLA is part of the S&P500), whether we like it or not. So we do have a dog in this fight, and we'd prefer not to be a part of any of these shenanigans.
What two consenting adults do in the bedroom has zero affect on me. What a cabal of opportunists do with cryptocurrencies and then a possible epic black swan event could cause a domino effect that could even be considered catastrophic across the entire economy. Then a select few run off with their bags of real money while the rest of us take the hit.
I realize the Cantillon Effect is more associated with fiat currencies, but I don't think that's what I was aiming for. Bitcoin itself is extremely volatile, and having that indirectly tied to the S&P index could cause problems when another massive crash occurs.
After seeing the after math in 2013 and 2017, I'm really spooked about how Bitcoin is being somewhat interwoven into index funds, and this trend could potentially continue as more institutional money gets on the gravy train.
This is because you're still measuring bitcoin's value in terms of fiat unit of account. If goods & services were already priced in bitcoin (something that might happen at some point), then what you would think is volatile is fiat currency. Not to mention that there have been studies already that forecast bitcoin's volatility to be going down over time and it will reach parity with normal currencies soon (e.g. https://medium.com/@silvestrimichela.s/is-btc-volatility-goi... )
Pricing goods directly in BTC, to me, is a very big "if" scenario. I think most governments would find a way to put the kibosh to this entire operation before Bitcoin became some kind of default currency in the global sense for everyone (not just for its supporters).
Banning cryptocurrency itself would be very foolhardy (because how do you ban source code?), but what governments could do is prohibit exchanges from operating in their home countries, thus deterring any growth in mind-share amongst the peanut gallery, and even leading to a drop in the price per BTC. All they need to do is hamstring it for the vast majority of people. Diehards may continue to use BTC, but the allure would diminish greatly thereafter.
And, say if you decide to go around traditional exchanges and use more underground methods to attain your home currency of choice, I'm sure the tax agency will get very suspicious about the massive windfall you got that you can't properly explain away.
Climate change being what it is, I would be shocked if governments don't start cracking down on this sooner.
> I think most governments would find a way to put the kibosh to this entire operation before Bitcoin became some kind of default currency in the global sense for everyone (not just for its supporters).
Not sure if you're living under a rock, but Coinbase IPO is about to happen. You think they would kibosh anything after so many financial interests depend on BTC? I remind you that even Tesla already went in.
> what governments could do is prohibit exchanges from operating in their home countries
This is the typical FUD argument of government regulation, which everybody is scared about it but: 1) it never happens or 2) if it happens, it happens slowly in some odd countries here and there (which doesn't affect BTC at all unless all governments together decided to ban it, because right now if X country bans it, the other ones are seen as more tech-innovative, e.g. see Japan which is positioning itself as the hub of the future of DeFi).
> I'm sure the tax agency will get very suspicious about the massive windfall you got that you can't properly explain away.
Most people are using P2P & DEX exchanges more, so the surveillance possibilities are getting reduced. Note, I'm not advocating for tax evasion, everyone should pay their taxes, but actually having to pay capital gains deter people from selling, which makes actually the price to not go down (and after your BTC appreciates you can benefit from that without selling, e.g. borrowing against it, or buying small things with bitcoin here and there).
> Climate change being what it is, I would be shocked if governments don't start cracking down on this sooner.
BTC is not environmentally-unfriendly, this point has been long-debunked: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25320652 (and even if it wasn't debunked, there are cryptocurrencies which don't have PoW: PoS or PoST don't use so much electricity).
> What’s interesting is that Beeple, the creator of the artwork, is actually a business partner of MetaKovan’s. He owns 2% of all the B20 tokens. I’m sure there is no conflict of interest here
B20 tokens launched on January 23rd. Beeple has been on Clubhouse and other NFT spaces for months. It is common in the crypto space (and everywhere) to give an influencer an "advisor" share of the project.
Their pie-chart says 11% of the tokens are to collaborators. So really its 13% but Beeple is the influencer that is worth having his own separate piece of the pie, for advertising.
"You know its legit because Beeple is involved", and its working because now I know to bet on winners!
This token is up 2,000% in a month and a half, and I didn't know about it before and have been searching for the right way to get exposure to the NFT space, and these are the winners! They got Christie's involved and the whole world!
I'm absolutely going to try to partner with them as I have more clout in the crypto space.
The real discussion is on whether there could be a more community oriented token distribution schedule, or a similar project without the massive team/advisor share. So there is a market to compete in this regard.
It's a bit much to say someone who owns some B20 tokens is a "business partner" of MetaKovan's. Are all the token holders "business partners"? Obviously not.
It's enough to point out that MetaKovan has a financial interest in increasing the value of Beeple's art. That alone lessens the impact of this auction, and I'm a NFT booster.
Using auctions to increase the value of your holdings is one of the questionable things that happen in the high end art world. Check out the Mugrabi family Warhol collection sometime.
Every art buyer has a financial interest in increasing the value of the art they've bought.
One reason that Christies can charge substantial fees is that it serves as a guarantee that the transaction is somewhat real. If an artwork changed hands privately between friends for $1M, there'd be no reason to believe that price. But when they're paying a 15%+ fee to an auction house, there must be something valuable.
I can't believe people are getting excited over collectable barcodes.
Of course this is a scam.
I can create NFTs for Beeple's art too.
I can create NFTs for Jack Dorsey's first tweet. I'll sell you a hundred of them if you want.
This is exactly like buying a spot on million dollar homepage, except anyone can make a million dollar homepage and nobody will honor your purchase because they don't have incentive to care.
Imagine some game company creates an online basketball game and owning a LeBron NFT grants you the right to play with a unique LeBron skin. If you aren’t using the official NFT, the game won’t recognize your skin and no one will see you playing as that version of LeBron.
That same token might grant you access to use that skin as a statue in Decentraland and everyone will be able to see who issued it (based on digital signature). Other people can make their own LeBron statues, but just like having a knock off of a statue in real life, having the real thing is more impressive.
These NFTs can also encode more information such as how many of this same item exist, which other items are in the set, etc... and these virtual worlds can understand that info and you can prove that you own the entire LeBron set and only 10 sets exist.
With NFTs being so new, people haven’t seen the eventual way they’re supposed to be used across ecosystems and their only experience with them so far is that they are useless.
Genuine question - why do you need an NFT/the blockchain for the "in game" stuff? Why not just manage that "in game"?
And then I guess - outside of "in game" what incentive would companies ever have to work with/create compatibility with any NFT stuff as opposed to just creating something similar themselves and owning it whole? Like if I was Apple, would I make it compatible with Facebook and Google, or just wall in another marketplace?
Yes, but only if I think I can capture most of the market. You see this behavior with Apple App store and Facebooks Quest store. Because they own the hardware, they have substantial power to be the central authority and extract the 30% rent.
But for smaller game studios, you may not be able to do it, due to lack of resources, or lack of a moat, or you're not #1 in the space. Then you'd rather go into a collective marketplace. NFTs allow you to have marketplaces with items that are usable in any game that recognizes it.
This has already happened once. For example, in Gods Unchained (a CCG), you can import a Cryptokitty that you
own, to decorate your playing board.
It's kinda like cross promotion between games, in the same way mobile games did cross-promotional ads.
You also see this kind of behavior with Openstreetmaps. Google is #1, so they don't care. All the #2 and #3 players are working together on openstreetmaps to collect their market power to beat #1.
What lots of people on HN don't see is that NFTs are public interfaces for interchangable immutable items with a history that any application can choose to honor for interoperabililty. I think you can use it for more than just art.
Gods Unchanied and CryptoKitties decided to mutually acknowledge each other's NFTs so that they can each sell more NFTs, since they are both NFT sellers first and game developers second. There's no incentives for any game publisher to unilaterally accept NFTs created by other game publishers. And this collaboration only works on a 1:1 basis - there's no good way to generically support all NFTs that come from a collective marketplace in a useful way and no incentives to do so without having your own NFTs acknowledged by others.
Well, you can do that already. It's the existing business model.
This is an alternative, for consumers that maybe weren't interested in buying a gun that they can only use in GTA:O, but maybe would be interested in buying a gun from [Game A] knowing that [Game B] and [Game C] (which they already play) allows them to use that same gun in their game. And that nobody else can have that particular gun in those games.
The technology (NFTs) is not really the end-all-be-all, it is lubricant which is intended to make the above use case more likely by enticing buy-in that would otherwise be less appealing.
> Other people can make their own LeBron statues, but just like having a knock off of a statue in real life, having the real thing is more impressive.
This is the thing though. How do you authenticate the creator of the NFT to ensure that the "legit" token is actually legit.
To give you a concrete example, right now an organisation calling themselves "GlobalArtMuseum" is selling NFT's of artworks held in museums. This is not being done in collaboration with any museum, the artwork is counterfeit.
How do you set the "authentic" NFT in the first place without rigorous compliance controls?
Who makes money from the original NFT? Why would the game company not want to capture the revenue with their own NFTs? And why would Decentraland then honor the NFT some other game company issued, instead of issuing their own? Any entity who's providing utility associated with the NFT is going to want to sell their own NFTs - why would they do all the work only to have some third party capture the value?
>With NFTs being so new, people haven’t seen the eventual way they’re supposed to be used across ecosystems and their only experience with them so far is that they are useless.
Why do you suppose it is that the first use case that has gained near-mainstream appeal is a use-case that portrays them as "useless"?
Seems you answered your own question. Yeah, anyone can create Mickey Mouse NFT but unless Disney officially releases it themselves, people will not be (as) interested in buying.
Takes like 5 seconds to check Disneys Twitter feed or blog. If they haven't said anything, they haven't released anything.
How do you verify that Apple has released a new phone? You don't, you hear from Apple that they released a new phone. Why would it be different with NFTs?
I'm pretty sure someone like Disney will have their wallet public on their website. They'd also likely own an ENS domain and sit all their addresses behind that, for example waltdisneyco.eth or something along those lines.
Isn't it as easy as an official Disney representative announcing ownership of the wallet and signing a message cryptographically using their private key?
The mechanism that the "right people" communicate which minting wallets are the "legit" ones. I.e. even in the less-crazy levels (i.e. not thousands of dollars), you'll see artists announce their wallet key on Twitter/Instagram/their website, and it's on the buyer to check that what they buy has the right source. (If people think that your bootleg mickey mouse NFT has value and pay for it, well that's their decision, they just might not find anyone who agrees later)
I guess an NFT will be signed with owner's digital signature, it can be verified with owner's public key. It is the same way as people can verify an encrypted email is from you with your public key.
It feels strange reading all these on the news now. Either future is coming fast at us, or people are crazy. I wish I had bought bitcoin though
People don't buy the art, they buy the story that comes with it. Take two chairs, one was used by Abraham Lincoln, the other is an exact copy down to the atom, the first one would sell for hundreds of million, the second wouldn't sell at all
Incorrect. I buy art, the story is nice - but I mostly just like the way something looks & the fact it was handmade by someone with a deep level of care. I’m not sure I’d call appreciating craftsmanship a “story”.
I'm talking about people spending insane amount of money on arguably ugly pieces, like that one guy who literally shits paint on a canvas. Of course there are reasonably priced hand made pieces but I don't think we're talking about the same "art"
MetaKovan/Sundaresan email me, my email is listed in my profile, I have other NFT projects for you and your fund, and also some recommendations for the B20 token.
Also weird that at around 1:55 in this video the user seems to be trying to place a bid for 70 million and can't for some reason. Is this a bug in their auction UI costing someone 10 million dollars?
For people placing $70M bids those money are probably less important than $70 for somebody who buys a used phone.
Wrt. the people trying to question what value NFT has - well what value a piece of a paper with a black square has? I'd guess close to $0 or less - a ruined piece of paper. Until of course it is said to be done by Kandinsky. The value of the most of the art is in that information, not in the material artifact. NFT is just a distillation of that idea.
Reminds a recent Russian meme - a photo of Kandinsky with a bubble "Everybody can paint the same. Not everybody can sell the same way."
I have seen pyramid schemes that are sounder than NFTs. It is sad that a lot of people are spending their hard earned money on NFTs thinking they are going to be professional artists. They don't recognize that they are only becoming crypto-coin investors.
I have spent hours sifting through the crypto-art space and amazed at the "so called" artworks people have been spending money. As a person who has been a professional artist and somewhat knowledgeable about the art scene, I feel that it is a duty to warn people.
I don't mind people spending their money on newbie photoshop tricks if they know what they are doing, but I don't like people to feel like they are artists because they can apply photoshop filters to an image and mint them as NFTs. I am keeping the publicity stunts out of this conversation. The article does a great job talking about those.
Another important thing to note is that an artwork's value derives from its cultural effect. So far NFTs' cultural effect is feeding people's belief in get-rich-quick schemes. Our society has stopped valuing hard work and started valuing wealth. We don't care how you attained your wealth anymore. When an item creates wealth without providing value, it is almost always a confidence trick.
If you are going to invest in crypto currencies, at least go on the relatively safest route and invest in Bitcoin and hope that its volatility works for your favor. But know that you are gambling and don't put your life savings on the line.
I've got some dumb questions about this whole NFT thing...
Is the artwork actually stored in the token or does it contain a URL that isn't guaranteed to always exist? I'm guessing there is no mechanism to change the link if the host should go down or stop hosting the content.
Are NFT's used to recognise a transfer of ownership of the intelectual property?
* An NFT is just a pointer - could contain a URL, or just a number used by its smart contract.
* The artwork is just pointed to, it's not on the blockchain.
* The URL may or may not exist for any given length of time either. (Even some NFTs that tried to point to IPFS, actually pointed to an IPFS redirector.)
* No other rights - copyright, moral rights, reuse rights, etc - are conveyed without an explicit contractual transfer. Even the Christie's deal says, once you dig through the 33-page sales agreement, that you are just buying the token itself, and not the image pointed to.
Also, you have zero guarantee that the artist had anything to do with that particular NFT - and there's a lot of NFT grifters "minting" other people's art.
The metadata in the NFT can (and in my opinion _should_) point to an ipfs:// style URL. The websites displaying the NFT would have to use some redirector, but the actual token would have a URL that anyone could host (known as "pinning") on the IPFS network.
and now we're seeing the problem that even with that - or if you go look at the redirector URL and go directly to the IPFS link yourself - the artwork is frequently not present anyway.
Remember that IPFS is functionally just BitTorrent with magnet: links. So if nobody's seeding the file ... it's not there any more. And it looks like a pile of literally the sites selling NFTs don't bother seeding the files they've sold, mere weeks later. Thread: https://twitter.com/jonty/status/1372169695277760519
IP is generally not transferred with an NFT. There's some NFT markets that offer that as an option, but I'm not sure how it would hold up legally. It should be noted that IP is not generally transferred with any physical art purchase.
Very few current NFTs exist on-chain. A handful do, and there's the interesting case of generative art where the code that makes the art lives on-chain.
There's a push to get things on Arweave, a solution that purports to be a perpetual storage solution. In the long run, I think all art NFTs will have to go in that direction to remain credible.
Are you saying the underlying asset isn't stored in the blockchain? Or that the "title" isn't stored in the blockchain?
How is the title associated with the asset? Presumably the title is something like a sha256 hash associated with a wallet. How do you know that hash means "beeple artwork"?
> Are you saying the underlying asset isn't stored in the blockchain? Or that the "title" isn't stored in the blockchain?
What even is the "asset" in a lot of cases?
People are buying Tweets, which are generated in real time by querying a database and generating some HTML and CSS. Or some UI code on native platforms. Or some JSON via an API. What is the asset? The Twitter code that generates the Tweet? A JPEG of the Tweet itself? The text of the Tweet?
If it's an image of the Tweet, does take into account whether or not my user agent is in light or dark mode?
The rabbit hole is never-ending with such questions.
As far as I can tell, most of the NFTs that have broken into popular consciousness are entirely non-public and nobody can verify or inspect them at all. I spent like an hour yesterday trying to figure out which blockchain, specifically, the $69M Beeple NFT is on; nobody seems to know, and nobody really seems to be asking.
Whereas the IPFS version of the image is merely 1200x1200. In this case, it really matters because the image is a mosaic that is virtually indecipherable at the 1200x1200 size.
So, it begs the question what is the person actually buying? I get that it's the concept of "ownership" that's being sold, but ownership of what exactly?
When the new owner then goes to sell "it", what do they reference? An illegible JPG?
The NFT doesn't give you jack shit. As the Conditions of Sale [0] says:
> You acknowledge that ownership of an NFT carries no rights, express or implied, other than property rights for the lot (specifically, digital artwork tokenized by the NFT).
tho, the important piece is the network. the network doesn't know or care if random people have a locally downloaded copy of the art. all sites, services, validations, virtual worlds, whatever on the network will hit the ethereum contract which gives up an address which you've proved you own by key signature.
the network can't see nor does it care about your local files.
which means, basically, any other appearance of the art in any other place is just an ad for the current owner of the nft.
It is currently safe to assume Ethereum with the file stored on IPFS.
Christie's interface didn't just lead with the transaction hashes, but your conclusion is pretty far off, for now.
Try emailing them next time.
I'm understanding of the frustration, it took me a year of asking similar questions about Venezuala's Petro coin, which was even subject to pre-emptive US sanctions, before it became official that the Petro didn't exist and was never issued. Nobody could tell me the contract address and people acted like I grew two-heads for even asking, when it should have taken two seconds.
The technology allows for really basic things to be transparent, and when you don't lead with that stuff and nobody asks about that stuff, it does become pretty obvious that they aren't even using the technology.
I think a hash of the file itself is stored on chain. So you could prove that your title matches the "artwork", but still need to store the artwork yourself or rely on the seller/platform to keep hosting it
It's one URL in the token pointing to a JSON file with the metadata. In the JSON file there's another URL to the image itself. So you need to go through two different centralized servers to access the image. The only permanent thing is the first URL to the JSON file but nothing prevents the hosts from changing the content.
With that said, I went through some random NFTs the other day and I saw a lot of tokenURIs pointing to a plain metadata.json on a regular server that I could access in my browser.
Yikes. I've been meaning to do a survey & look at NFT rot, including number of pins on IPFS. Just because something is on IPFS doesn't mean it'll stick around
In this way it's like the stock market to the Nth power.
As money accumulates in larger and larger sums, and is abstracted farther and farther from tangible real-world power and resources, you get this. Things get increasingly weird.
There's got to be some kind of equilibrium point between this stuff, and your basic anti-fiat-currency gold bug, but I'm not sure what it is, particularly since modern macroeconomics acknowledges the capacity to just print money and make it up pretty quickly in the increased economic activity that makes possible: austerity isn't really a functional solution. This crypto stuff really works by the same principle: if you get enough people into it, they CAN'T crash because the important people are too deeply enmeshed in the system and will cheat to any degree to preserve the value of their properties.
I think it depends what is done with it. With macroeconomics, you can have entire countries spurred to activity and producing goods and services because they can transact with resources. With this crypto stuff, I very much wonder if it ends up being a small number of very privileged people demanding rights to increasingly silly abstractions that are said to be the value of entire cities, or countries.
I'm not sure that's sustainable, politically. I'd ask, how convenient is it for the first crypto trillionaires to buy real-world mercenaries? Things could get very dark, albeit in a peculiarly cyberpunk sort of way that might appeal to some.
It's not at all like the stock market. Shareholders are own the underlying business. NFT holders don't own the underlying piece of art. They only own the NFT. It's like buying a "share" that is just a blank piece of paper, and paying millions for it!
I interpreted the comment to mean something more like the derivatives market. In the derivatives market, you start getting "weird" stuff like futures contracts, collateralized debt obligations, or credit default swaps. Last two examples are, admittedly, a biased reference to 2008 since those are sort of the poster-boys of that market crash. Futures contracts aren't really that weird, but certainly more weird than just owning stock in a company.
So people might be trading (as in 2008) to "own" some N-th power representation of private debt that ends up going to zero because the underlying private debt itself was not sustainable. It's different from NFT, but for each degree of distance the financial instrument moves away from the real world, it looks increasingly weird, e.g. I own a share of insurance on a fraction of a bucket of debt people took out to buy their homes. (And I still think this is better than NFT unless the NFT has some underlying real-world thing tied to it.)
Derivatives markets always have some claim to an underlying financial good. If you buy futures, you can redeem it later for the good the futures guarantees. NFTs have zero relation to the underlying asset they are being connected to. All you're buying is a pointer to a piece of art.
My limited understanding is the blockchain data are distributed enough to get past the "that URL" issue. You'd need to destroy "that unknown collection of URLs" to eradicate the NFT.
The problem as I see it is that NFTs lack any potential energy. Their value is purely kinetic, and expressed in the transaction. If no one wants my NFT, it's so much binary noise.
Wrong. Most NFTs contain a content-address (hash) that is pointing to data on IPFS. The buyer can pin and make sure the data stays alive for everyone. Kind of like torrents but for web.
> Maybe marginally better than URL but not very much IMO.
Vastly better than a URL. Content-addresses points to content that can be served from anywhere. URLs point to actual locations. Anyone can seed the content behind the IPFS hash, including the owner of the NFT.
While with a URL, you cannot change it. If the owner wants to make it work after it disappeared, they would have to buy the domain name, make the hosting work again and then setup a server there, add the file so it can be served.
While with a IPFS hash, the owner could just turn on their IPFS node and everything works as before.
A URL has another huge disadvantage: a URL is the address of a thing, not the thing it is pointing to in itself. The thing it is pointing to can change. If you paid $70 million for a URL pointing to a Beeple artwork, you might be upset if the owner of the URL changed the content to a Rick Astley video.
But it does matter and has to do with the NFT. If you put a URL, whose content can change over time, the NFT that effectively be changed. At least what it's pointing to.
If you're using a content-address hash, you can be sure that you can always get back the same result from that hash as when you got the NFT N years ago.
If the buyer takes down their pin, and nobody else has it pinned, then that's their prerogative. The NFT is still there on the ledger, unless the whole blockchain goes down too.
I find it hard to believe that all this hype and these huge dollar figures of these NFTs and art being at the center that none of this is being fueled my money laundering. Jack’s first tweet? What value is there in that? The Beeple “art”, same question. All of this seems like a scam.
NFTs are HIGHLY inflated right now - paying $2mil for a tweet is NOT real demand. It's marketing by people with a stake in the industry. Justin Sun who bid $2mil for Jack Dorsey's tweet runs a blockchain network called Tron. I think NFTs will stabilize at some point but it isn't going to go away that's for sure.
So from the outside looking in this looks very silly, not highly inflated. In fact on the surface it looks clearly like a scam with a lot of hand waving and philosophical nonsense tacked on to confuse people.
Anyone can mint an NFT that points to whatever, and the benefits you get are purely imaginary or at best speculative that a greater fool may exist and buy it from you for a higher price.
The art world while also somewhat suspect at least has physical possession/ownership.
There likely is some foul play involved in some cases yes that's for sure. For example this Beeple thing looks like it's a scam to pump a token which Beeple has a stake in so that they can then offload the token at high prices to new unsuspecting buyers.
However just on your point "Anyone can mint an NFT that points to whatever" - sure they can but those NFTs will be and should be worthless. You are able to prove an NFT came from the actual author since it would have been signed with their private key.
When all the fake demand settles we will see if there is any real demand here or not. I myself have no interest in buying any NFTs, at least not yet :).
It's pretty baffling. You don't even own Jack's first tweet. You can't delete it or control it in any fashion. You have no IP rights to it. You own a unique link to it... it's like paying for a bit.ly link.
it's a gimmick run by a bunch of crypto insiders swapping tokens amongst themselves (acquired for fractions of pennies) at highly inflated valuations which they themselves bid up under cover of pseudo-anonymous shell identities.
the point, which is entirely rational from their perspective, is to attract media attention and thus new sources of unsophisticated money to crypto.
It's the standard ICO scam model, but tweaked to suit an even juicier demographic.
It boils down to the same question why somebody would pay millions for a picture with a couple of squares on it (see e.g. piet mondrian)? I guess one aspect is, that rich people can show off for their rich friends what shit they can afford...
I don't get NFTs, but then I've never really gotten Bitcoin either. If I'd bought a Bitcoin every time I told someone Bitcoin was overvalued I would have made quite a lot of money.
But I'm much more skeptical of NFTs than I am of cryptocurrencies in general. The most persuasive argument to me has been that it's no different than other collectible items. Art is one example, but I think stamps, coins, and baseball cards are better examples.
I think it's kind of objectively stupid to ascribe a lot of value to some random stamp or coin that is rare because of a printing or manufacturing error. But if that's your thing I'm not going to stop you. And if I were very wealthy and you came to me and made an incredibly compelling case that you'd figured out how to predict the future market values of rare stamps and/or coins well enough to build a profitable trading strategy I would consider investing.
The main gimmick of NFTs seems to be that they make it possible for a digital object to be rare. So I suppose some sort of NFT market could just be another type of collectibles, no better or worse than stamps or coins.
That's the most generous argument I've been able to make to myself. Personally I still can't get over the feeling that they're really stupid.
There does seem to be a lot of sketchy grifters floating around the space. I think that's compatible with thinking of them as collectibles. From movies and books, it seems like a lot of cons revolve around absurdly expensive collectibles (art, coins, jewelry, etc.)
NFTs is the unwritten chapter of Infinite Jest that eventually led to DFW committing suicide. Start with something decentralized, layer a bunch of centralized entities on top of it and, Voila, you have, you have no idea what you have.
We had Duchamp with his pissoir in 1920. I remember someone exhibiting a goldfish in a blender. And now this ...
They would say that art is what happens between the artwork and the observer. But of course it is much broader than that. There is also the artist, the story, the room, the broader society and ... the market.
But notice how virtually zero of this discussion is about the content of the work. Just its sale mechanism. Even the banana on the wall had people discussing its nature as art.
There have been discussions about it and its value, here on HN. Mostly people that were mad that they exchanging a fixed amount of time in a small range of price per hour for money instead of creating an unlimited number of assets and exchanging them at an unlimited range of prices.
Yeah, NFTs are utter BS, but not much more than people who collect actual original art pieces when you could simply hang a replica of the original for a millionth of the price.
So NFTs are valuable because they’re unique- but this guy has created a fractional ownership screen so an unlimited number of people can own 1 NFT. Oh and he’s lying about his identity and business relationships.
Just a small correction: they are "valuable" because they are unique AND because people want them. Otherwise they have no value. Scarcity in itself isn't enough to have value, you still have to create hype around the token somehow.
("valuable" in quotes, because it's really not that clear there is any actual value in an NFT that isn't legally binding...)
This sounds like a great way to facilitate money laundering . I put up a smileyface NFT for $10 million and then someone, that person being myself, 'buys' it for $10 millions, funds change wallets, with receipt of payment on blockchain.
You can, but if you look at the Christie’s auction requirements, it forces bidders to use specific KYC’d financial institutions. That auction house’s lawyers were only made
comfortable with that, but it is not a resolved legal requirement. You can totally sell an NFT to yourself in crypto.
I don't understand how Metakovan has $69mm, like the accounting doesnt match up.
Metakovan buys to lets the B20 digital fund own art assets. The B20 fund only collected like $3mm dollars and the rest is just a floated marketcap of B20 tokens.
So is Metakovan just going to pay for the art piece personally and just arbitrarily transfer the piece to the B20 address? Like basically B20 itself cannot pay for it, and the auction house isn't accepting B20 tokens.
Its cool Metakovan has so much money. There have been plenty of opportunity over the last few months to turn $3mm into $100mm, let alone over the last decade in crypto. So it isnt outside the realm of possibility that he has that much.
But if he doesnt pay, does Justin Sun get to complete the purchase and get it?
I don't know much about Metakovan's allegations of wrongdoing; but even without looking at these, it's fair to say that there are several individuals who, by just being early in crypto, have amassed the equivalent of tens, or hundreds of millions of US dollars.
It wouldn't surprise me too much if Metakovan has a net worth of hundreds of millions of dollars, and therefore can afford to spend $70M in buying this NFT.
There are many more people who made hundreds of millions without being early in crypto.
Just over the last three months there have been hundreds of 50x gains. That’s $1,000,000 being a liquid $50,000,000.
Going through the known history of Metakovan’s businesses in the crypto space are a complete red herring to that article. Everyone that has any experience and clout in crypto would have been involved in some service that didn't do well for everyone.
MetaKovan/Sundaresan I think transfers of the B20 token should somehow also result in royalties to all the artists in the B20 porfolio.
Without some form of transfer tax, this breaks the royalties advantage of NFTs because the NFTs aren't being transferred yet.
I think you will accrue a lot of value and attractiveness if artists and token holders are aiming to be appealing to you and the other competing funds that pop up, if you had a way to make the residual go to the assets in your fund.
You can easily add a transfer tax to the transfer() and transferFrom() methods of the erc20 token, which gets pooled and distributed prorata to all the NFT's royalty addresses. You can even keep that as an array in the erc20 token.
That's not really possible to enforce. The smart contract is loaded into the Ethereum network. Anyone on the network (who is rich enough in network terms) can place a bid, and the winning bid will be automatically selected by the contract code.
KYC is expected of banks or exchanges, centralized places with lots of transactions. And a person can punished just for running a bank without registering their identity (along with a bunch of other paperwork) beforehand. It makes no sense for the Treasury to spend time hunting down thousands of individuals for transactions that are mostly in the tens of dollars.
Anyway: If you’ve worked with the crypto space much, you know there’s a strong undercurrent of some libertarian-esq thinking. Crypto currencies represent decentralized trust, of some kind. I mean, Bitcoin was created in large part because Satoshi didn’t trust the central authorities in charge of the money supply. In some areas you’ll hear the phrase “governance without government” (I.e. fiat). What gives this place any spirit is the drive to overcome problems of distributed trust. Take that away by forcing KYC and now you’ve lost any ideological motivation to push the space forward. It just becomes a digitization of existing societal structures. Let it grow naturally and yeah, you’ll see plenty of scams, but you leave the door open for real innovations (like zero knowledge proofs) that could be worth massively more than any mistakes along the way.
So we just let some people do a whole bunch of shady, exploitative stuff, just in case someone manages to come up with an innovative idea despite a notable lack of actual research or though past ‘no gubernment’ whilst they’re in the process of scamming someone?
> despite a notable lack of actual research or though[t] past ‘no gubernment’
Can you not dismiss an entire space just from your surface-level view? Please? People are doing "actual research" in this space. If you were to comment in a respectful tone indicating that you're actually interested in hashing things out and learning, I'd happily point you to interesting research and experiments around distributed governance and funding of public goods (something which America has a real problem with!), etc.
But when you comment in a dismissive, derisive manner like this, all you accomplish is shutting down the conversation. That's not what we're here for.
> How is that distinguishable from "What gives this place any spirit is sheisters.. Take that away by forcing <standard practices>"...
If there was any standard practice that could force sheisters to move elsewhere without negatively affecting the rest of us, I would stand by that policy 100%. Even within our standard systems, we tolerate a certain baseline level of fraud. Banks quite regularly work with fraudsters or worse and knowingly violate regulations (see: HSBC, Wells Fargo for high-profile cases). The regulated and the regulators appear to be somewhat cozy at times. But we accept this, perhaps because the value provided by these systems seems to outweigh their flaws.
As for cryptocurrencies: do they provide value to anyone besides the sheisters? Yes. Not everyone is convinced, but at least I can claim to have performed legal transactions with Bitcoin and Ethereum that I don't regret years later and that I wouldn't have done without those currencies, and that's enough to convince myself.
Would these things exist if KYC was strictly enforced on 03/Jan/2009? No. No, there would be no Bitcoin; it would be impossible to reach the audience which embraced it in 2009-2011. The ideas would likely not have spread beyond the cypherpunks, ideas which I personally think have enriched my life.
Should we put up a fight against scammers? Absolutely. Is KYC one way to do that? Yes, but please don't underestimate the cost (previous paragraph) nor overestimate its effectiveness (take a look at the list of coins on Coinbase and Robinhood -- both of which adhere to KYC -- and tell me that these are all things that a responsible company should be promoting to its average user).
I'm surprised nobody has brought up the absurd energy requirements of NFT. Yeah, it's been beaten to death here, but a single transaction can be equivalent to one person's household energy consumption for several months. And yes, I'm aware Ethereum is working away from that, but it's taking a long time and it's not there yet. In the meantime, I find it highly immoral.
Just mind-boggling wastefulness. It doesn't make me feel hopeful about the future of the planet.
Having spent around 18 months of my life working on a top 5 blockchain, it's pretty disheartening to see so many comments on HN suggesting I'm some sort of MLM Ponzi Scammer when I'm actually just a guy who's interested in various CS subjects and few industries involve them all the same way blockchains do...
Hey — don’t listen to these clowns. They are upset because all they do is make enterprise widgets for a megacorp and memorize leetcode. Most software engineers in megacorps are incredible risk adverse (similar to doctors and others who follow a path) and are pretty salty they missed the boat.
IMO the most interesting problems in computer science are happening in crypto. Especially if you are interested in cryptography or distributed systems. Way more interesting than making some web app ‘scale’ with the same formula everyone uses
What was some of the interesting technical CS challenges you had to face in doing so?
I have no interest in blockchain or adjacent tech because I don't see any technical challenges worth solving, so I'd be interested in learning if I was mistaken to come to that conclusion.
Depends on what you're interested in. One thing I found really cool were zero-knowledge proofs where I have to get you to trust I know something without giving away any information about that specific thing (because it's all public). This would let you have secrets, such as private transactions, on a decentralized ledger.
- That outside of cryptocurrencies, people only work on enterprise software and widgets
- That blockchain has the only difficult distributed systems problems
- That cryptography is being advanced significantly by blockchain (I would like to see more on this if it's true. From a brief search only "zero-knowledge proofs" are brought up, and considering it's a deeply technical math area, just throwing more money at the problem won't necessitate any advancement)
But most of all, you just threw out buzzwords without giving any examples, which is a non-argument.
Quite surprised at this comment. The reason I got into blockchain was _because_ of the incredibly difficult technical challenges it poses. Among the few I get to work on:
- How to implement robust p2p networking algorithms for sharding in a distributed system such as Ethereum (a very deep rabbit hole), as Ethereum is migrating to a "sharded" architecture
- How to solve the problem of "transaction frontrunning", in which miners have an asymmetric advantage in ordering transactions they put in blocks for their benefit, which can adversely affect users creating those transactions. This is a problem known as MEV (Miner Extractable Value) https://research.paradigm.xyz/MEV and there is some incredibly sophisticated work going into this problem. It is a deep engineering problem as well
I could go on and probably give you 20 other incredibly technical, challenging problems that are on the bleeding-edge of this technology. If you're interested, would be happy to chat more!
.jpg?mode=max){kind=link}
What's more is the pseudo-intellectual justifications for it all. As soon as you bring up value, proponents put on their philosophy hat and ponder "what is value? money is just paper, maaaaan, we just believe it has value." Or we hear that owning a digital "asset" is actually the same thing as a physical "asset" because they're both unique things that can't be copied. It's all smoke and mirrors, and you know that when you have to hide behind vague philosophical assertions about "well nothing really has any value", then you have no actual argument supporting the value of the thing you're defending. It's a new illusion, pumped by hype, and they're trying to justify its existence by pointing to other illusions.
Thanks but count me out.