I just think it’s a way for people to show off their wealth. An NFT is pretty much a joke, “here’s the original” doesn’t really mean shit when I can quite literally have an exact and indistinguishable copy of the work. It honestly feels like insanity to me. Like, I can right now go set my avatar to the exact same Ape picture Curry purchased. It’s not even a replica, or recreation, it is literally the same exact image.
The only real world analogy we kind of have is if we could freely “duplicate” physical goods with the press of a button. Would the Mona Lisa be valuable if DaVinci could have made 1000s of EXACT copies? I’m gonna say no, but that’s exactly where we are. It’s cute someone says they own something like an NFT, or that it’s the original, but it’s nothing more than an illusion of uniqueness.
Selling nearly exact copy of same art multiple times already happens, think of prints and etchings and so on. Though I don't think they will ever reach value of single art pieces, but there just being multiple copies does not make them not valuable.
Overall this might even be preferable to unique art works. Lowers the barrier of access for one.
If you need multiple art experts to decide which of two painting is real and which is the forgery, is there really a difference in the value other than the bragging rights of owning the original?
Would the Mona Lisa be valuable if DaVinci made one but we could make exact molecular replicas now? I would still say it would be valuable. You can make nearly indistinguishable copies off the Mona Lisa now, but they aren’t worth anything. The pictorial content of the Mona Lisa is only a small part of its value.
What’s also usually difficult to keep in mind today is that before photography you had to physically go to visit a painting itself to see it. The Mona Lisa became famous partially also because once the painting was stolen, most people couldn’t actually find out what it looked like.
This is something that we always miss with art - even on a digital screen you’re always only looking at a reproduction.
But it makes sense that, like with paintings, NFT’s could gain or lose value with the story of who it belongs to and when and how it was purchased. It makes perfect sense for celebrities to be purchasing these things.
You’re sort of missing my point. An artist creating a similar work is not equivalent.
If they were atomically identical copies, they would be literally the same. Any idea of “difference” would be completely false. That’s the difference here, these (NFTs) are by all means atomic copies. They aren’t close to the same, they ARE the same.
If we could make atomic copies of the Mona Lisa it would surely drop in value… scarcity is what causes works like the Mona Lisa to be valuable. With an NFT there is no scarcity because unlimited duplicates, each as real as the original, can be produced for nearly free.
The works are identical if bits don't have color (re linked essay above). We know they don't, but in the eyes of the law they definitely do, so an exact copy is still a copy in the eyes of the law.
> Would the Mona Lisa be valuable if DaVinci could have made 1000s of EXACT copies? I’m gonna say no, but that’s exactly where we are. It’s cute someone says they own something like an NFT, or that it’s the original, but it’s nothing more than an illusion of uniqueness.
Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans were produced by a screen printing process and he made 32 canvases.
There is nothing that physically could have stopped Warhol from printing thousands of Campbell's Soup Cans instead of the 32.
And in the same way, a digital artist can choose to mint any number of NFTs for a work of art or variations of a work of art. If a digital artist chooses to mint a limited number of NFTs on the blockchain and this run of NFTs gains traction then it's a similar situation to the Campbell's Soup Cans in my opinion. In both cases, the artist could choose to print more physical Campbell's Soup Cans after the fact or mint more NFTs after the fact, but the initial run will forever be the "original" run, and they will remain special because of this. Simply because we assign special meaning to that.
You can print an image of Peppa Pig on your own shirt for free but that doesn’t mean the rights holder wont make an obscene amount of money this year anyway. But, is there an NFT bubble? Dear god, YES!
> the real story is about how to capitalize on 40k Twitter followers.
As is pretty much every tech blog post on “I’ve made <significant amount of money> in <short amount of time>”. Most fail to mention step zero of having an established audience.
I wonder what percentage is disingenuous (trick you into thinking anyone can do it, to hook new followers) versus delusional (honestly don’t realise the prior audience is what made the difference). Maybe the perception flips after a given number of followers.
Author here. I don't think many of my followers ended up being purchasers directly. The vast majority of sales I can attribute to the collection finding its way to various private discords and Telegram groups for folks interested in NFTs.
And how did your collection find its way into those discords... You outsourced the marketing to your followers, that's what social capital is. If you were a no-name individual with 20 followers, your NFTs probably wouldn't have sold despite being exactly the same, because the probability of them ending up in front of the right people would have been much lower, unless you went to considerably higher marketing effort. Thus the point of the parent comment stands.
So are you saying that someone just happened to spot your collection from OpenSea, and then posted that to various NFT groups? I have no idea if that actually happens, just curious
1000 true fans is a great article that is well worth reading. It really does go to show that building a community can be a worthwhile task, even if it does take time the long term benefits can be huge.
A lot of dunking happening here - titles like this article's can definitely turn people away, as people have learned that money means something (undesirably) different in "crypto." That said, the article does provide a pretty good job documenting the creative process, the path to minting, and the launch of a campaign. I encourage anyone interested in the space to get past the triggering headline and give it a read.
edit: looks like the submission got flagged/removed from the feed on HN. sigh
As sold now, nearly all NFTs will end up being a poor investment. A write-off. Some people hope to get rich quick and will punt on pretty much anything.
Longer term, and several rebrands later there's potential here.
The digital economy as it curently stands is a shit-show. Just attention grabbing for money. A race to the bottom. But it needn't be so.
A digital economy based on assets rather than attention could eventually emerge.
Asset licencing may be sub-1 cent per copy. That'd be fine, when the necessary payment infrastructure is in place. High volume, high efficiency, low cost.
Put your money on the infrastructure. Get rich slow.
I read this article with some interest because I'm thinking of getting a new kitchen, and while I understand the technologies involved (both generative art and Ethereum), the part I'm struggling with is... why on earth anyone would pay money for these things. Can someone explain it to me?
My only guess is that the people buying these things already have large amounts of theoretical money in Ethereum anyway and thus spending a small fraction of it on some sort of very poor glowing Mondrian-esque art is little more than an amusing distraction that seems cool?
Why do people keep acting like this phenomenon is confusing?
Like gee maybe people are really into mini Jpegs now. Or wow I guess if people really like spending buy-a-house money on a Twitter avatar this will be a thriving sector of the economy.
I mean people really like gambling.
Actually they fucking love it. Like they’ll build an entire city in the middle of an uninhabitable desert just to do it. They’ll give up their kids future for it. People making $7.25 an hour will spend hundreds of dollars a week on scratch off lottery tickets in order to participate in it.
An endless demand for new ways to gamble is the least fucking confusing cultural development to ever happen.
Put people in a prison and they’ll do it with cigarettes. Give a bunch of construction workers a lunch break and they’ll bet on which pigeon is gonna to take off first. Hand a group of people a round ball or a deck of cards and they’ll figure out how to do it.
Beanie babies, little ceramic figures, baseball cards, coins. The desire for people to speculate on synthetically created scarcity is boundless, spanning generations.
Speculation is common to every culture in every era of human history.
NFT’s are a gambling fad, an extension of the more general crypto gambling fad. People will do it until it’s banned, matures, or gets replaced by the next gambling craze.
Specifically, the discussion of the "pogs" craze in elementary schools in the US in the 90s.
"Basically, a nice little gambling ring was growing amongst us starry-eyed 2nd graders."
The OP would certainly read differently if he wrote, "How I won $50K in 3 days with NFTs", rather than saying how he "made" $50K.
Also the Gordon Gekko quote from "Wall Street":
"Money itself isn’t lost or made, it’s simply transferred –- from one perception to another. ... I create nothing. I own."[1]
> NFT’s are a gambling fad, an extension of the more general crypto gambling fad.
I agree with you to the fullest, very well summarized.
The issue around crypto at the moment is that because it is poorly understood by both the masses and the evngelists (the tech, the economics, and often both) you have a lot of people who don't want to be left out of the "next big thing" and so they've pivoted their careers to convincing people that crypto and related assets are part of a healthy portfolio. This may or may not be true in the long run, but nobody walks around thinking scratchoffs are part of a good portfolio allocation. The same is not true for these other assets, and we've seen in each cycle when people get hosed and lose it all, they are genuinely shocked because they don't view it as gambling.
So many people think gambling is the preferred investment that they’ll not only use all their own available cash and assets, they’ll surreptitiously make use of the cash and assets of their family and friends.
This comment is meant to be only mildly humorous, unfortunately.
Although you may be right, OpenSea (the NFT Marketplace used in the article) does lazy minting. Of course, one can still not make any money if no one buys the NFT.
The author writes about it here:
> There's a bit of nuance to how OpenSea does things. They do so-called lazy minting. While you may need to pay an initial gas fee to list a new collection, each NFT listing does not require any fees. This works because the NFT is not actually minted yet. It gets officially minted once the buyer pays the gas fees to mint the artwork on the blockchain.
Smart contracts get compiled into byte code that get run on the blockchain. Each instruction costs a certain amount of money. This fee is called a “gas” fee, because you need to put in enough money to execute your entire contract, which varies by how complex it is, similar to how you need enough gas in your car to drive a certain distance.
Art is in the eye of the beholder.
Just like value.
So, in a sense, art is the perfect expression of the subjective theory of value.
And by the way, it resembles religion in that, one must believe in it.
But as every good artist, salesman and priest knows, it is of greater importance that as many others as possible be convinced of how valuable it is.
Nothing new here.
It doesn't matter wether there is the possibility of a 'perfect' copy.
You just have to convince your connoisseurs, buyers, believers that art is a process and a story/history not a product.
Et voilà que.
There is your uniqueness!
And/or you license it and go mass market, see Dafen in China.
sometimes i like to blow my own mind by considering the fact that nfts and cryptocurrency are really just open source and decentralized drm in its purest form.
Is it really that wrong? Buyers know exactly what they get for their money. I'm not a fan of NFT stuff and think it's a giant pile of bullshit, but people know in advance they they are spending money for something that is pretty meaningless.
Why do you need an expert to vet something when you buy it from the artist that made it? And in turn, when the artist put a piece on a blockchain you can trace it back to the artist. That's the point of NFTs kind of. But if you mean you'd rather have a physical original of an artwork than a digital representation of the thing, I see what you mean I guess.
I am calling it now: that blockchain royalty system on NFTs? It is only a matter of time before Hollywood makes NFTs interact with DRM. Your movie purchase will be an NFT with hardware-backed chain verification.
They could, but why would they? Right now, they can lock content behind a subscription, remove listed content, edit and re-release content, and pretty much do whatever they want. You don't buy a movie, you buy the limited right to watch what goes as the current iteration of a video file for a certain amount of time. You can't resell your purchase, so everyone has to pay full price to the sellers.
Using NFTs or other cryptographic DRM would be hugely beneficial to consumers, but what's the point of helping the consumers? It'll only cut into costs because NFTs require some kind of cryptocoin network to do a bunch of calculations, which is expensive to run and wastes enormous amounts of electricity.
A simple RSA signature could be used to license a file to your computer and some DRM comes pretty close to that. If the industry wanted to give you ownership, they already could've done it before the NFT speculators set up the current hype.
I... don't like where those ideas are going. At this point I long for pre-Internet days, where physical media (tapes, CDs, books) achieved the same goal while wasting much less resources than it takes to keep the blockchain that would support the NFTs.
I also think that anything that further solidifies IP enforcement is going to kill the future.
Consider that one of these days, we might progress enough to be able to build something approaching a replicator from Star Trek. The utopian society of the show is built on "too cheap to meter" energy that allows replicators to meet everyone's basic needs (and even fancy whims) for free. But even if we reach a similar level of scientific and technological advancement, we won't be able to realize the utopia part if designs for every replicable goods are owned by a small group of people/companies extracting rent, with technology and law preventing circumvention.
Digital art isn't scarce by its very nature - NFTs are an attempt to re-introduce scarcity, and it's fucking depressing. My childhood dream of improving the world by inventing things is a pipe dream; every bit of progress gets mopped up by the people who need it least.
Artists directly making money from their art without intermediaries taking huge cuts (and with resales giving them a percentage on top of it) is absolutely not going to kill the future, it's just going to incentivize better creation of art. Scarcity makes economic sense for various kinds of art and there are many fields that have been destroyed by the Internet (i.e. music). It's only natural for the solution to also come from it in this manner.
It would also allow the recreation of something like the original Netflix DVD service but purely digital.
No more having to manage a half dozen plus streaming subscriptions. One company could go out and start building a comprehensive library of NFTs for every film and series.
When you want to watch something you check out the NFT from the library. When you’re done you return it. For very hot items, there may be a waiting list, but you’ll get it eventually. No more being stuck in a content ghetto like with modern streaming services.
Mila Kunis has an NFT project where only token holders can view the associated episodes of a cartoon and upon NFT resale, a percent of the proceeds gets remitted back to the project creators [1].
I don’t disagree and there’s two things I find interesting:
1) Remittance is easily implemented in a smart contract.
2) This aligns long term interests between the project creator and the NFT holder (and one can imagine different incentive structures can be implemented for different projects).
I'd agree that it is "interesting", but as additional reasons to be opposed to cryptocurrencies.
1) Remittances for resale imply that ownership was not fully transferred. The item isn't mine, but is some weird mix of being mine, but still having some link back to the person who made it. This is already a problem with digital goods, where I cannot lend an ebook to a friend in the same way that I would lend a physical book.
2) The long-term interests are already aligned due to the existence of a second-hand market, and do not need additional technological protections. Somebody who buys cars new and sells them after 5 years still cares about the maintenance costs of a 15-year-old car, because those impact the sale price at 5 years.
2a) The siphoning of money from a re-sale discourages a second-hand market. If the original maker of an object absconds with 20% of the re-sale price, that gives me less of an incentive to sell it, rather than just throwing it away. This is both from an economic standpoint, because there's a decreased profit motive, and from an emotional standpoint, because somebody is laying claim to my efforts in securing a resale without having a valid reason to do so.
That’s a negative sum view of the situation (if the creator takes more, the buyer takes less).
Consider the positive sum view: the creator is encouraged to do activities (marketing? Community management?) to drive the price of the sold items higher and resold more frequently.
True, both outcomes are possible, but I think the negative sum outcome is more likely. We've already manufacturers reach for more and more control with ebooks (can't lend like a physical book), heavy machinery (John Deere won't let you repair your tractor), cell phones (need to "jailbreak" in order to install your own software), cars (Tesla revoking a software feature after deciding that it was only enabled by mistake), and we've seen attempts to do so with computers (Clipper chip, DRM in general).
Manufacturers are not to be trusted with a tool that can assert ownership over something that they have previously sold.
That would make way too much sense... I predict online streaming on poor services that will shut down in few years with no option for backup. With both monthly subscription and individual purchases, and user losing purchases if ending subscription...
That is pretty smart. How is this not already implemented for film distribution and avoid leakages and pirating? Honest question, i've been on all forms of streaming since 2000, back to torrenting lately to avoid cartelization
It wouldn't be effective. If a human can watch it a computer can copy it. They'll take it right off the output pins of the display driver chip if they have to.
NFTs won't work with DRM, because with DRM you need to encrypt the content and then decrypt it to view it. But you cannot put the decryption key in the NFT, because everything on the blockchain is public. If you put the decryption key with the NFT, everyone will have it.
So you will still need some kind of centralized system where you will issue the decryption keys to your viewers, and probably the easiest way to track subscriptions and keys is to use a database like MySQL.
Slightly off topic, but I built a web service to create NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain without the need to set up a wallet and buy Ether beforehand. You pay the gas fee on in USD, the service takes care of everything: https://nuftu.com
The only real world analogy we kind of have is if we could freely “duplicate” physical goods with the press of a button. Would the Mona Lisa be valuable if DaVinci could have made 1000s of EXACT copies? I’m gonna say no, but that’s exactly where we are. It’s cute someone says they own something like an NFT, or that it’s the original, but it’s nothing more than an illusion of uniqueness.
Edited: slight wording tweak for clarity.