The problem is that NFTs doesn't solve a problem that existed.
NFTs supposedly allow you to prove who owns something. However they don't actually form a contract for the thing that you think you are buying. You are buying the NFT, not the artwork them selves.
This is the main problem, so if you get scammed, or you try and assert what you think your rights are, you have no support.
To translate it to business, its like buying the sole share in some company, but its not actually the sole share, its a letter that says you've bought a receipt for a sole share from person x.
There is no assertion that you own the actual thing the bit of paper says its a receipt for, or indeed that the person selling it to you owned it in the first place.
This has been said time and time again about each and every "blockchain/defi" project for the past 10+ years: all the guarantees of blockchain protocols are within the blockchain. The very moment you try to put literally anything relating to outside of blockchain all you have is extremely inefficient append-only database - nothing more, nothing less.
NFTs are datums with an URL. That is all there is to an NFT. It's not a receipt for art, it has absolutely nothing to do with an art in question. To translate it to business it is a receipt for an entry to the Louvre with a URL pointing to an image of Mona Lisa. It does not prove your ownership of Mona Lisa. Anyone can access said URL without the receipt. There can be unlimited number of different unique receipts with same/similar URLs to same/similar image on Mona Lisa.
It is merely an overly complicated way of transferring cryptotokens.
The problem is that people don’t understand what NFTs are and talk about them with the idea that they are about representing digital art.
NFTs are about representing non-fungible digital assets.
For some reason, NFT art took off (which I don’t understand), but that wasn’t what NFTs were built for. NFTs can represent digital assets that exist fully on a blockchain and aren’t tied to off-chain assets. A digital ID, a in-game asset, a digital license, a ENS name, etc… are all NFTs and don’t need to reference any odd-chain URLs or images.
> A digital ID, a in-game asset, a digital license, a ENS name, etc…
These are literally things tied to off-chain assets. Your "ownership" of any of those things only matters if someone else cares about the particular block chain it lives on.
If you "own" a game asset on blockchain A and I only care about blockchain B, as far as I'm concerned you don't "own" anything.
There's nothing stopping anyone from starting yet another blockchain and reselling all NFTs on that new chain.
Besides, unless a URL a token "owns" lives on the blockchain it literally points to some off-chain resource. If that URL in any way becomes inaccessible the thing you "own" is meaningless.
Again, assets on a blockchain only matter if someone cares about that blockchain. If I only support blockchain B, it doesn't matter how many assets you have on blockchain A as I will never support it. If I'm invested in blockchain B there's little reason to add to my expenses to support other blockchains.
Even in the most practical terms, if I sell in game assets they're ones I made for my game. I know they work with my game. Why would I put in extra effort to import third party assets I don't make money on? If your assets are in a proprietary format I'd need to spend more money licensing some importer or build my own.
This only works if the developers choose to spend time implementing an import/export system. That’s a lot of work and since they need to have an arrangement for that anyway, why wouldn’t they use their existing billing system to retain control of it and a greater share of the profits?
Neither of these are good examples: the real value comes from the outside legal relationships. If you have an in-game asset, what matters is whether EA thinks you own it and you get what they choose to implement. Similarly, a Windows license key is valid to the extent that you have a legal agreement with Microsoft — if you transfer it and the license doesn’t cover that, the blockchain doesn’t mean anything. If they do allow transfers, you don’t need a blockchain since their SQL Server database is what matters and it does the job faster and so much cheaper.
Very few NFT concepts are different than this: the legal weight comes from the outside world and the cheaper alternatives are likely to win out once the VCs drop the subsidies and start trying to get money out of the system.
NFTs essentially are blobs of data on the blokchain. As soon as that data references anything off chain you need off-chain methods to sync data with a blockchain, at which point the blockchain becomes merely a datastore.
> A digital ID, a in-game asset, a digital license
All of which require off chain sync. For NFTs to have any meaning at all, the embedded data must be world readable. At which point that digital ID, in-game asset, license all are usable by anyone else. In order for that "ownership" to have any meaning at all it must be exclusive and therefore the service must check your identity one way or another, be it somehow checking that you actually own the private key corresponding to NFT, or using any other mutually agreed authentication method. If the service does not recognize the particular blockchain fork your NFT resides in your NFT is more than useless, because it does not prove absolutely anything to the service provider. Proving identity via blockchain is probably the most inefficient method known.
NFTs can only make viable statements about on-chain assets. As far as I am aware, there are no other on-chain assets than cryptotokens, therefore all NFTs do are provide a level of indirection to cryptotokens.
Can you explain what non-fungible digital assets are? Because the reason I think NFTs are a scam is that I think of digital assets as inherently fungible.
I think NFT's applied to art make only nominal sense. I myself had to come to the realization that NFT's are really just flexing for the rich, because as anyone realizes, right-click save-as is all you need to have the art too, just not the "key" or "ownership proof" to that art.
However when it comes to gameing, its a whole different story. Think of it more like a key to unlock something unique in the digital world.
Want to own some unique special edition sword with rare attributes in the Zelda-verse? Buy the NFT block chain address to it that says you and only you can have it. Want to own the penthouse apartment in the zucker-verse? Buy the NFT key that says only you have ownership rights. Want to be a unique character with unique pets in World-of-crypto-craft? Buy the NFT's to unlock these. Sell them if you get bored for more money, and the game developer gets a cut!
The gaming application scenarios are enormous. That's why crypto gaming will likely be huge and I myself have invested in it's foundations for the long term (Enjin, Seedify-fund, D-race, etc). It's one of the few applications that makes sense outside of rich snobs flexing.
"Only you have it. We definitely didn't copypaste the meshes and logic and sell it to somebody else because the idea of digital non-fungibility is a neat joke. We promise. BTW: when you buy this, our execs are buying Porsches and other things that are real. Cool, huh?"
This holds no water and the streak remains unbroken: nobody I've seen describe blockchain-fiddling with respect to games describes the process as anything that anyone who plays games wants. Nobody actually wants this except for the people who want to make everybody else play involuntarily into weird cryptocurrency schemes while the schemer still holds the bag.
Diablo could have individual uniques right now if they wanted and you could trade them if you wanted and nobody needs to burn a dumpster full of coal to do it. It is genuinely a social toxin and you should stop.
But how does the NFT actually help with that? Couldn't developers/companies just create copies of that item/asset and sell them as often as they want to?
If they want to sell assets/items exactly once nothing is stopping them from doing so right now, they are the only ones who can actually enforce that anyways.
I'm no expert at all, but this is how see it from an outsider perspective.
With an NFT you can prove the ownership of X digital asset, that proof of ownership is what is non-fungible
In order for NFTs-art to make sense to me, artist must attest that "whoever owns that digital asset in the ______ (ethereum blockchain?) " has the artist's recognition of ownership, and is a big UX problem for artists to really prove that, which I believe it's "solved" by platforms like opensea attesting on behalf of artist
So in practice, your buying the recognition of opensea that you own X asset, which opensea claims that is approved by X artist (it's also claimed by the artist on social networks or alike). there's still a problem there if the relationship between artist and opensea will be intact in the future, I don't know if or how they try to solve it
So in practice, most of it could have been done with a centralized database, but that would be missing the point.
There surely are knowledgeable NFT-creators who knows what they are doing and they can provide the attestation by themselfs, without any intermediary party, and that's where things get interesting with NFTs, look for example in gaming, especially where assets are shared among multiple games (otherwise it still could have been done with a database), it's just all impractical for non crypto-savvy folks
NFT can't prove ownership of anything but itself. Anyone can make a new NFT for the same artwork/game-asset/bridge/moon-plot and claim they own it.
There isn't even a uniqueness check, so there's no limit to copying other people's NFTs.
It's like buying a copy of an artwork in a museum gift shop. Your print is yours, but there can be thousands of other copies and there can be printed more at any time. None of them are the original artwork anyway.
> NFT can't prove ownership of anything but itself
That's why the artist has to publicly attest which NFTs he approves
> There isn't even a uniqueness check
Even if there were, it wouldn't change anything, it's too easy to change one bit, or the metadata, and voilá, a new totally different digital asset that looks exactly the same to the naked eye
Again, none of these work without the artist approval of the NFT itself, that's the only thing that adds value to it
But that claim means nothing if the in-game asset is not recognized in the game, and that copied artwork is for some crazy reason not recognized by other interested parties as the actual original NFT. None of them are the original NFT, minted by the creator.
NFTs are completely useless for this. Why would game use blockchain to store ownership of an item? There are exactly 0 benefits to doing that instead just tracking it on their won servers in old normal database. Since anyone can create duplicate NFTs they would have to track which ones are genuine which defeats the whole purpose.
If done well, it could prove to me that I could trade the asset at my will, without the game's platform blessing.
I know people that play games to sell their gold for real money, against the platform blessing, risking getting banned.
I also imagine that generating a market for real money in a game is a legal PITA for game developers, and NFTs frees developers from any liability since they are not in charge of its trading, transactions are not in their database anymore and they have no power over them
Also the same NFT can be used in different games, no need to change anything from game developers, just reuse NFTs. On the other hand, in the database world of games, it requires specific integrations with a centralized database
> I know people that play games to sell their gold for real money, against the platform blessing, risking getting banned.
Why would game developers ever implement a system that lets you circumvent the rules?
> Also the same NFT can be used in different games, no need to change anything from game developers, just reuse NFTs.
What? They still have to write code to interpret the NFT in their game. They still need specific integrations for every single token they need to support, and they also control what that token is. If they choose to interpret your really expensive sword as a common one, well, tough luck.
You cannot create duplicate NFTs. That is the whole point. The reason to have NFTs (and also fungible tokens) in games is that the gamers would know and be able to trust that the quantity of a given item was fixed. There may be more appeal to play a game where the economy was predictable and couldn't be later manipulated by the company or original game creators.
But the game developers own the database, so if they want something to be unique, they can already do that!
None of this are either actual problems that developers have, or things that users want. Never once has someone playing a game say "boy I sure wish all these hats were more expensive!"
NFTs neither do nor can enforce uniqueness too. Blockchain is a method to, as you put it, trustlessly couple a particular instance of a datum with a keypair.
Game developers can duplicate the blob describing in-game asset in their own database or on the blockchain. For off-chain data blockchains are nothing more than a datastore which provides immutable link between a datum and a keypair.
So yes there is an original keypair that establishes the data. But ones established it can be fixed in a verifiable way. A game client, community of art lovers, government agency, social consensus, then recognizes that nft as corresponding to some offchain asset. It cannot be later changed, duplicated, etc without some social consensus to do so. You don't need to trust a third party with control.
Game developers can mint more tokens at any time. There's nothing technical ensuring scarcity of NFTs, and gentleman's agreements don't need a blockchain.
For game assets the game is necessarily the central trusted authority. Ethereum has a speed of C64 and latency of a postal pigeon, so you can't run a game server on the chain. Therefore, you have to trust an off-chain game to actually honor what the blockchain says. This is not substantially different than Steam CS:Go skins, except for industrial-scale coal-rolling.
> Game developers can mint more tokens at any time.
That's a very valid criticism of most game implementations (maybe all? I only know like 3 and they are all centralized blockchains -- puke), and that's why I'm staying away from them too, at least for now.
But I cannot deny there's real potential here, I can imagine totally open source games without servers, just p2p connection for battles (like we used to do to play Age of empires) and its assets backed by NFTs
As has been said, how does the game engine enforce ownership of those assets? The best it can do is query a blockchain (and for p2p games without central server every client must also become a node in all backing blockchains) and check ownership of corresponding private key[s]. There is absolutely nothing stopping you from minting a new NFT describing in-game assets, therefore the *content* of NFT must be signed by players in a match or some other external entity, but the blockchain makes no guarantees about the content.
Most of the blockchain properties only apply to on-chain assets. The very moment you involve an off-chain party, blockchain becomes append-only database with performance of table top calculator and latency of postal pigeon and is therefore a shitty database.
The only valid use case I see is a smart contract that automatically issues certain assets, which could be seen as somewhat of a solution searching for a problem, but games are not the problem. With games all clients must agree on game state anyway, storing game state on the blockchain is too expensive/cumbersome and if you have to agree on game state anyway, the state can also include assets.
The "content" doesn't matter, all that matters is the NFT id (or hash, whatever is used to uniquely identify it). The game is what players have to coordinate about, make sure is the same one, and the exact same version of it. Because the code is the only thing that gives real meaning (the content) to that NFT. The blockchain is ONLY used to track ownership of and id (The NFT) nothing else is required.
I mostly agree on everything else you said as the current state of NFT-games. But unlike you, I do see potential for different kinds of games and dynamics that are not possible or impractical in database-games. I don't think they will be the same type of games we are used to, if you kill it now, we will never see into what it evolves.
The concert organizer acts is an inherent central authority. The whole problem is easily solvable with a QR code and a web API.
Using a trust-no-one arctic-melting decentralised layer on top of a thing that is inherently decided by a single real-world entity makes no sense whatsoever.
I think that the true value of NFTs will come from interoperability, where there is no central authority, and you can treat it as a sort of cross-platform standard for verifying ownership of digital assets. This doesn't really apply to concert tickets (except if someone grants some special privileges to people who went to a certain concert in some unrelated virtual space), but there are advantages to not centralising authority for certain things (say, domain name ownership, why should ICAAN control that).
What stops me from copying ticket data from the NFT and using it to enter the concert?
If the concert venue somehow checks ownership of private key associated with the NFT it means they are effectively using some form of identity verification and blockchain is really really bad for this purpose
You don't use the blockchain to verify ownership of a private key. You know the public key, and the owner of the private key can sign any message to prove that they indeed have the private key associated with that public key. This can be done completely offline.
Isn't a crypto wallet, literally a key pair, the purest form of identity verification? It's something you have (private key) and something you know (passphrase). No need for some central authority, no need for privacy concerns.
You are right on the latter point, a keypair itself is a pretty good method to verify pseudonymous identity.
However, we are talking about NFTs as tickets. Traditional ticketing relies on secrecy, or in other words possession of ticked-id grants entry. Data embedded in NFTs is (and has to be) public, therefore token auth model does not work, you must use challenge-response model. The very point here is that ticket data has to be linked with a keypair and provided at the moment of sale to be verified upon entry. Public key must be provided at moment of sale, blockchains are one way to store that link, private database of ticketing system is another. Blockchains bring their own disadvantages and the only advantage is trustless transfer.
In what scenario trustless pseudonymous transfer of a ticket is an advantage worth disadvantages of the blockchain.
NFTs can be created that are non-resellable, you just build that into the smart contract. Even if they were, you can see the full transaction history and decide to reject anyone but first owners
For digital underlying assets, what is the social value of imposing scarcity? For non-digital underlying assets, what is it that ensures the link between the NFT and the asset?
I haven't been following NFTs closely, but it seems to me that it would be much more interesting to use them not to create artificial scarcity out of digital goods (which seems to be all of the effort), but rather to track ownership of physical goods.
Like, a company could issue a bearer-bond where the owner wasn't the person who physically possessed the bond, but rather the owner of token XYZ.
So, reverse the pointer. Rather than the token claiming to "own" a good, have the good claimed to be "owned" by a specific token.
The thing that largely seems nonsensical to me about NFTs is that the underlying ownership is...not valuable. You don't "own" anything other than the token itself. If you were granted the rights of ownership of the digital good (for example, if a worldwide exclusive copyright license were assigned to the bearer of an NFT, then it would "own" something).
> NFTs supposedly allow you to prove who owns something
This is fundamentally wrong.
NFTs allow you to show off who "owns"[0] something.
[0] for some generalized, possibly meaningless definition of "own". I say possibly meaningless, then again, what is property really, just a government-managed, non-fungible, token? Don't gaze too hard at the abyss, unless you are willing to let the abyss to gaze back.
Only in a specious sense. The point to money isn't "scarcity", the point to money is TRUST. You trust that $1 is going to be worth $1 tomorrow, and that it will be worth $1 to the shopkeeper and the bank and your family and everyone else. So anywhere you want to trade for something, you can do it in dollars. It's true that to provide that stability you have to control the supply, so money is "scarce". But only in the sense that the economy it represents is finite.
NFTs don't provide that, therefore they aren't a good medium of exchange. They aren't "scarce" in the way that money is or has to be.
They're also a Tulip bubble, but that's a different thing.
> It's true that to provide that stability you have to control the supply...
Doesn't sound specious to me. The artificial scarcity is real, and has real consequences for real people. While trust is the primary property of money, scarcity-at-any-point-in-time is a fundamentally necessary (but not sufficient) to be a money.
The NFT-signed work is beautiful and also hanging on my walls (both digital, such as social media, and physical, in that I own prints representing the tokens, signed by the artists who have distributed the same NFTs).
The media does not evaporate as it is either on-chain, or distributed via IPFS (ie: peer-to-peer rather than a central server).
None of the artists I have purchased NFTs from have tried to trick me (including Anders Hoff, mentioned in the OP article, who has distributed his work as an NFT).
And, most importantly, the artists and non-profit organizations in the arts are getting paid via NFT sales.
And I think for most people getting a piece of paper, physically signed by the author stating that it's their work is far more valuable than some UUID on a computer.
Some NFT platforms also support credit cards. But, I'd rather buy art in a way that doesn't include exploitative third parties that take a significant cut (Stripe, Shopify, PayPal, currency exchange fees when paying an artist in another country, etc).
For reference, the last NFT I purchased on Hicetnunc.xyz had a protocol fee of 0.002947 XTZ (around 1¢ USD) and a platform fee of 2.5%, the rest of the sale went directly to the artist's wallet.
To your second point; this remains to be seen—society can place value on many different abstract concepts, "ink on paper" may not be the only valuable vehicle for art and culture.
In practice, the fees in traditional e-commerce systems tend to be significantly higher than 2.5% (I say this as an artist running a Shopify print shop for a few years). Some services like Bandcamp are upwards of 12-18%.
Hicetnunc fees are fixed, and the free market gives an opportunity for other platforms to improve on this if the community desires a marketplace with lower fees (it's much easier to build an alternative to Hicetnunc than an alternative Stripe/Shopify/PayPal). Artists are also given a 10-25% royalty (which they decide) for each resale of a token on the Hicetnunc marketplace. And, of course, since it is all peer-to-peer, you are free to exchange art tokens with no fees at all, save the negligible protocol/transaction fees.
> society can place value on many different abstract concepts
What society definitely can't place value on is a URL to a digital asset that may or may not be there tomorrow, because an uninsured, untrusted value store can't be relied on.
There's nothing saying NFT artifacts have to be digital, though, I'd think. Using them to facilitate trade of physical artifacts would back the trade with (relatively) reliable value stores (physical artifacts) while benefiting from the low transaction fees.
For many reasons, including lower fees (see [1]), acquiring ownership of an artist-signed asset, rather than a digital media file (the limited-edition token is cryptographically signed by the artist, the media file is not), participating in a digital art community, supporting decentralized systems, etc.
A simple way to frame Hicetnunc is a social media platform that is not driven by FAANG, advertising models, and "Like" buttons, but instead by artists, collectors, and OSS developers participating in a digital economy: selling and trading tokens, and also exploring ways to steward and maintain that work without solely relying on traditional centralized third-party services.
> For many reasons, including lower fees (see [1])
The lower fees derive from the medium used (crypto instead of traditional payment processors). You didn't need to involve a NFT to send crypto to the artist's wallet.
> acquiring ownership of an artist-signed asset, rather than a digital media file (the limited-edition token is cryptographically signed by the artist, the media file is not)
I'm going to refer to the rest of this comment thread about whether 'ownership' is a suitable word for having a cryptographic signature applied to your blockchain address, when the media file in question is bit-for-bit identical.
As you can guess, I hardly think so. There is nothing you can do as an 'owner' of a digital ape picture that anybody else who right-clicked it and saved it can't also do, with the possible exception of getting kudos from the artist for the money you gave them. But a simple donation would have had the same result.
> participating in a digital art community
Which hardly requires NFTs, only your involvement and communication. Online art communities go back to Elfwood.
> supporting decentralized systems, etc.
Tautology. "I use NFTs because I want to support the use of NFTs".
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> A simple way to frame Hicetnunc is a social media platform that is not driven by FAANG, advertising models, and "Like" buttons, but instead by artists, collectors, and OSS developers participating in a digital economy: selling and trading tokens, and also exploring ways to steward and maintain that work without solely relying on traditional centralized third-party services.
I'm a Fediverse user and I want to nuke the FAANGs, so I'm fully on board with promoting alternative, decentralized social networks. I just don't believe that adding glorified baseball trading cards to the recipe makes them better or stronger in any way.
I never heard anyone saying that Team Fortress 2 became a better community after it became an online market for ugly digital hats.
And I can copy that url off of the chain, pay nothing, print it out and hang it on my wall. You bought nothing. If you want to support an artist, give them money. NFTs are the new penny stocks. Pump and dump.
One interesting aspect of NFT's is that the artist can continue to get paid on each sale of the item, automatically receiving a set percentage of the sale price on each sale in perpetuity.
On Hicetnunc.xyz, buying a token on the marketplace automatically deducts 2.5% of sale to the platform (for services rendered), 10-25% to the artist (or whatever they set as royalty amount for the token), and the remainder to the seller. This is enforced via the blockchain contract, i.e. it cannot easily be circumvented on that marketplace (but it can be circumvented via peer-to-peer transfer or an alternative marketplace/contract).
The wallets can all be anonymous; it just sends these tokens to different addresses.
The wallet address is your id. So essentially if I create an nft, it is forever associated with my wallet as the creator. I set a royalty amount in the smart contract and the transfer of the nft / token takes place through the contract and automatically sends the percentage of the fee to my wallet. The token does not go directly from A to B, it passes through the contract where the logic to transfer the token is implemented.
pretty much. You lose access to the wallet and don't have your private key backed up, then its gone. Most wallet providers bug you to back up your key seed and even test you to validate that you have.
All of these things between physical and NFT are such huge differences in order if magnitude that they can't really be considered the same thing.
In my 40 years, I've never had someone break into my house and take something and I've never had a house burn down. Yet putting a file on the internet, it will eventually get copied, probably some time in the next 3 months. And I have a bookmarks folder full of once-very-popular sites that are now just completely gone, plus a bunch of still-popular sites that have changed their site layout completely. Hell, it's a bit of a meme that one of the only sites you can count on to never disappear is the god damned original Space Jam movie website.
Depends on a lot of things. Usually paintings are hanged somewhere where you can see them, usually not in safes. But with NFTs, you can have the display on the wall while the wallet is in a safe. You could put a painting in a safe too, but you won't be able to as easily show it off then.
You can't honestly believe the same skillset applies here. Hacking digital assets is not the same as breaking a quarter inch pane of glass and turning a knob while no one is around.
Exactly. Hacking digital assets is a lot more accessible. It's almost guaranteed to happen, whereas most people live their entire lives without getting robbed.
Here's another physical asset theft category that says 1/3 americans have experienced - something tells me you're also wrong about how many people have been stolen from as well.
Ok, so you're comparing absolute numbers between things in different categories and with wildly different liquidity levels. And then I don't get how comparing NFTs to "leaving valuable packages completely unsecured outside" is supposed to help your case. And if we believe 1/3rd is accurate, the easiest crime of theft on the planet is only getting us to 1/3rd? Last time I checked, 1/3rd was significantly less than 1/2. Generally, when people say "most", they mean "50%, plus at least one person".
This is why I've muted "NFT" on Twitter. You can't get answers out of proponents without them massively shifting the goal posts.
Weren't you just suggesting more hacking attempts happen against NFTs because they're accessible and now you're saying package deliveries are more exposed to theft and so the comparison is unfair?
I agree these comparisons aren't perfect, but I certainly wasn't trying to move the goalposts - I am trying to understand how you've not done just moved the goalposts yourself, though.
"Looted" art was not stolen off somebodies wall. It was taken by "explorers", occupiers, colonizers, Nazi's etc. That is a terrible link for this discussion.
I have dozens of signed prints and it is true that all you get is an accompanied verification document and not any form of legal ownership over the original.
But what you do get is a guarantee from (a) the author and (b) the fact that prints are reasonably difficult to duplicate that there will only be a limited number in circulation. And this enforced scarcity is what makes it valuable even though it's just a print of the original.
If NFTs could limit duplication of digital art that would be something but right it seems like they are more akin to a payment system like PayPal only psuedo-public.
Many signed prints I own do not even include a verification document (not all artists distribute this).
NFTs do not need to limit duplication; the tokens are already unique, as each is addressable to a different contract hash. This is why, although there are many copies of the CryptoPunks contract for example, there is only one CryptoPunks token that tends to have a market around it[1]. Those tokens are linked with a contract address that has become widely recognized as stemming from the original project.
I am not talking about the NFT but about the artwork.
If you had an image file format that embedded an NFT and every device would refuse to allow copies then that would be something. But right now NFTs seem pointless to me because I can always just copy the underlying image once I see it online.
I answered a similar question here[1]. The economic value of art has historically been tied to the scarcity of access to its media. NFT presents an alternative paradigm that separates the signature (artist-signed token) from the artistic media (image, GIF, conceptual art project, etc), allowing the former to remain scarce & uniquely transferable while the latter remains abundant & widely accessible.
> How so? The author can (and probably does) sell signed prints all the time.
Artists in the signed print run business don’t generally run new runs, for the simple reason that they understand the moral contract and more importantly the economic implications: if you do reprint, the value-add of your assertions plummets.
The same artists will usually have other non-numbered or print-on-demand art.
> How is a print difficult to duplicate?
A multi-layer screen print is not trivial to replicate without the original assets for the individual layers, and material information about the inks. That’s like asking how a painting is difficult to duplicate.
I have many NFTs that I have purchased, and although there was no license agreement (just as with signed prints), it is reasonably expected that I may display that art (on my digital or physical walls, or in some other fashion).
I can of course sell these tokens to others (again, as with signed prints), but if I attempt to copy/clone the tokens and distribute more, I enter into legal/ethical grey area (again, just as with signed prints).
But... There's no legal grey area? And the ethical grey area doesn't need NFTs - that could be served just as well by the artist asking people other than the buyer not to copy it?
All digital artwork are "prints" when you save or transfer the work. There's really no concept of "original" in digital as they are indistinguishable. NFT's attempt to add time as a metric of scarcity (this artwork exists on this blockchain at this point in time, regardless of copies). It relies very heavily on a social and cultral decision to place value on this new form of provenance.
If there is no original than all digital artwork is worthless because it can be endlessly copied which would diminish its value.
Rarity is what dictates price, not only social decisions.
If I make an NFT of my photograph and sell it to someone, what is stopping me from making copies and selling it to someone else again? Or giving it away? Nothing. This will crash the price of an NFT if the NFT's value was dictated by the artwork.
> If there is no original than all digital artwork is worthless because it can be endlessly copied which would diminish its value.
Digital art is worthless, though. It's as you said. There are no original copies, all of them are equivalent. They can be trivially and endlessly copied. Once created, the cost of creating more copies might as well be zero.
It's the artist's labor that's valuable. It's the artists themselves who are scarce.
Of course. At zero copies, the art does not exist. At one copy, it exists. The artist's job is to generate that initial copy. This is what all human intellectual work boils down to: discovering data, numbers whose bits are set just right.
Once that initial copy is found, any number of copies can be created and distributed at zero cost. Value is determined by supply and demand. If supply is infinite, value must be zero no matter what the demand is.
That's the big question. Will there be any cultral shift in recognising NFT's as legitimate signals of "value" after the hype dies down? You can stretch the hype train out by convincing some big brands to get on board, this will push the price up just by force of recoginition but are the fundamentals sound for what values the NFT? as like you say, there's no real scarcity and we still rely on meat space for settling real disagreements about ownership.
And a public proof that you purchased the NFT, not the artwork itself or any particular license or rights in it.
As the OP mentions, people are selling NFT's with URLs pointing to art without the permission or involvement of the artist. This demonstrates that ownership of an NFT does not "prove" anything about ownership related to the art itself.
I'd go further. Only NFTs that have the image stored on chain are signed digital copies. It's the association between the signature and the actual data that's important and if that can rot it's bad.
Which only leads on to the next problem of how you associate the signature with a real human.
> You are buying the NFT, not the artwork them selves.
You can not buy ownership of a digital artwork because the whole concept of owning a digital work is nonsensical. Ownership in the world of physical goods is not a law of nature but a legal concept. Ownership is essentially the right to control some resource. A collective of people agree that you have the right to control (by force) some physical thing, which is useful because otherwise everyone would be fighting violently for the possession of that thing. In the typical case the sovereign enforces the property rights. In the digital world this makes no sense because you can't possess information and you can't enforce property rights. Anyone can make a copy and everyone can have that information without anybody else losing anything. NFT is only a record that tells you who supposedly owns something but ownership means nothing without possession. NFT is like buying a land deed from a dysfunctional state: Yeah, everyone who beliefs in that state may agree that you are the owner but what use is it to you if a bunch of guys with guns are squatting on "your" land and you can do nothing about it? That is ownership without possession.
NFTs, like bitcoin and other blockchains, are another step on the road to digital property rights. They don't work yet and no one has figured out how they will work.
One thing to remember is that the first stage of a technological advancement is the bubble stage that leads to an influx of capital to build out the infrastructure.
Eventually we will be able to use this infrastructure to build out businesses with more economic value.
They can't ever work. You can't prove digital rights to a non digital asset. It doesn't matter what the blockchain says owns a property when the county courthouse says you do. They tried the same thing for "produce on the blockchain". "You can prove that this crate of apples was grown organic in Kenya". But all you can really prove is that someone put that claim on the blockchain and attached the hash to some paperwork. You are still trusting something and someone not on the blockchain. And how do you make sure this crate isn't swapped for another crate of apples that this isn't true for. You are trusting that no one did that during its transit.
Blockchain can't work for anything that isn't a self-referencing currency. It only ever exists on chain so the chain can be trusted.
Bitcoin IS a fungible token! NFT literally is "non-fungible token". Do you even know what you are talking about? Please go take a casual 5 minutes to google a topic you are unfamiliar with before spouting off about it.
Bitcoin is definitely not fully fungible, because you can easily trace its origins. And so you could "stain" certain bitcoins. "We don't accept bitcoins coming from transaction X"
NFTs and Bitcoin are both forms of tokens, which represent digital property rights.
The parent comment almost certainly understands this and was talking more broadly about forms of digital ownership. So your blasting them was kind of cringe.
because NFTs are built in (and for) digital artifacts. In the digital world the actual "artifact" (the object of art) is digital. NFTs 'solve' this problem by not caring about the fact that the artwork can (and will) be freely copied with no cost.
Maybe it is better to think about NFTs as public official (blockchain-backed) certificates of donation (or support) rather than assets.
There is nothing official about NFTs, and since they can be traded they aren't a donation log either. When I watch a youtube video they often display donors, that is official. If the artist himself posts about donors, then that is official. If the artist posts "these NFTs are official", then why couldn't the artist just post "these people donated" instead? It is the same thing, it is the same level of authority, the NFT itself doesn't make anything more valid or official or less likely to get corrupted or forgotten.
Why would you trade support for an artist? Do you really think that people want to trade support for an artist? Like "I don't really want to get credit for this artist any longer, so now I sell it for profit!"? How does that make sense? And then the next guy who paid me for it, why didn't he just support the artist directly instead of giving me a cut? It is all just stupid.
> That's not machine readable and it needs action from the original artist.
That is the whole point, I donate to the artist and the artist shows me gratitude by performing an action for me, like including my name in his videos!
People buy funny hats to use them in games. Currently, the scope of NFTs is quite similar to that. That doesn't mean that we won't see better uses of them in the future.
> That is the whole point, I donate to the artist and the artist shows me gratitude by performing an action for me, like including my name in his videos!
If that's what you want that's fine. But there are artists that don't do videos and some people want other kinds of rewards.
Also imagine if e.g. Twitter would implement support for profile pics with NFTs. Then as an owner of a NFT you'd have something unique to display.
Does an NFT provide a mechanism for enforcement of ownership? If not, how is it better than copyright law? Under copyright law, I immediately own a work of art I create (in your example, a Twitter profile pic I created) and have the right to decide who can display copies of my art. The issue isn’t proving ownership, the issue is copyright enforcement (I may not be able to afford the cost of defending my copyright claim in court).
NFTs don't solve anything on the copyright enforcement level. How could they? Your printer doesn't enforce copyright either when you print a document or an image you aren't allowed to print.
Although I don't think there is any problem in doing a NFT like an ebook or a movie that is encrypted and the decryption key would be transferred to the wallet of the buyer when you sell or resell the NFT.
But that's not how NFTs are used currently. Right now it's just "I bought this" (with not many rights being actually bought).
What NFTs allow are open markets for these NFTs. Imagine the million dollar homepage redone with NFTs. Every pixel would be a single NFT. The homepage could automatically be generated from the public data and more importantly, the buyers of the pixels could try to buy more pixels on the open market after all pixels have been sold without the original artist/seller being involved.
Or gaming assets. DLCs today can only be bought from the game developer. There's no secondary market (or at least not a legal one). Why? Because the game developer doesn't get a cut from resold DLCs. With NFTs this could change. The game developer gets a cut on every resell and even more important, you wouldn't be confined to the game developers shop system but could sell the DLCs on any shop that is compatible with the NFT standards.
> NFT can be exchanged without the original artist doing anything and the artist can still get a provision from that.
Which only goes to prove that NFTs don't provide ownership. The doctrine of first sale limits the power of IP by giving consumers ownership. This mechanism eliminates the doctrine of first sale, giving even more power to IP holders and destroying the concept of ownership.
If the NFTs don't care that the artwork can be copied, what is their use case? If I own the NFT for a digital file that other people have copies of, what do I actually use the NFT for?
The only thing I can think is proof of authorship, but private key cryptograph already solves that.
Edit: after reading some other replies I've come to the conclusion that NFTs provide a way to prove who put a file on the blockchain first. Thus the use case is trustless transfer of the ownership of this fact of "being first", which is where the scarcity of the NFT comes from and thus the value.
Except that, so far as I know, there's nothing stopping someone else from putting the exact same data in another block in the chain, and claiming that is "first" instead. And unless you already know the first copy exists, there's no way to find it via the blockchain itself, and so no way to prove "first" without already knowing it's the first.
I only have a fairly basic understanding of crypto, so this may be a very naive view, but I thought it was the same as bitcoin, whereby the whole network eventually comes to a consensus on the order of transactions / blocks on the chain?
Sure, but if I post data to the blockchain (perhaps a URL to an XKCD comic) and someone else posts that exact same data another time, how would we even know each other posted it? At some point, it's practically impossible to search the entire block chain.
Now suppose each of use are selling the 'first' post of that data. How does a buyer know that we're really the first?
And so I'm saying that even claiming 'first' is practically impossible via blockchain. Even if someone knew about both of the instances above and could arbitrate between them, there might be a third, older instance yet.
Why is it impossible to search the block chain? Isn't this how bitcoin works: to accept a transaction, all transactions with the relevant accounts must be searched and summed to ensure there are enough funds?
My understanding is that people don't even mint whole files due to the cost of minting scaling with the size of the data, so they are minting links to the files, which you then have to hope always point to that file.
In-game items are a great use for NFTs because they provide ownership outside the game and can traded on 3rd party markets.
For example, i purchased a plot of land on cryptovoxels. Each individual plot of land is linked to a unique NFT. When i log into the game with my ethereum account (web3), then i gain build access to the plots of land that i own the NFTs for.
How is that different from paying for it with a microtransaction? You still have no rights outside of what the developer implements[1] and when they shut down, your token’s value rapidly approaches zero.
1. For example, say they sell to one of the big companies and the new boss with an MBA in gamer milking decides that virtual land needs annual property taxes, utilities, and improvements purchased from the company store or it’ll be reclaimed or simply that they’re creating new, more desirable terrain which will devalue yours. They control the code and servers, so your options are paying, giving up, or trying to convince other players to build, operate, and adopt a clone. The blockchain’s heavy cost doesn’t appear to be providing anything significant.
In a virtual world why the shit are you paying for a "plot of land"? It's not real land. There's not a finite amount. It's not made out of only the finest free range grass fed bits.
Except they really don’t. The tokens are blockchain-backed, the digital artifact itself isn’t.
To be what you define, I should not be able to copy-paste the digital artifact and then create a second token. The token should, in some way, behave like a hash, where the blockchain should complain that this digital asset has been accounted for already.
Technically even the token isn't directly blockchain-backed. ERC-721 (the base standard) only requires a URI to a metadata file. That file may contain a link to the asset (JPG or whatever). So there are 2 indirections. Hopefully both are IPFS addresses.
Of course, there are other NFT implementations that store metadata directly in the smart contract, but that requires a lot more gas.
> The problem is that NFTs doesn't solve a problem that existed.
In a way they do, they solve the problem that crypto was only about fungible stuff (money) before, now there's also non-fungible stuff. I think the point of NFTs is not exactly to prove that you own something, but to offer people an easy and non-fungible token to exchange with other people. The goal is not ownership but exchange (some would say speculation). At least that's how I understand it.
How do you exchange something that neither of you own? Beyond bragging rights, you will need some way to establish legal ownership of something because you own the corresponding NFT. So why not sell that ownership directly without the level of indirection that is the NFT? I guess the reason is that you have decoupled ownership and the ability to sell that ownership, making it easier to speculate independently of legal domains like countries.
Really, it's just adding a level of indirection, as always :-)
> I guess the reason is that you have decoupled ownership and the ability to sell that ownership, making it easier to speculate independent of legal domains like countries.
> Really, it's just adding a level of indirection, as always :-)
If Nvidia provided an nft for every graphics card they sold, and every online marketplace like ebay required that you provide that nft to resell the card, then that truck of stolen graphics cards becomes much harder to move.
I can't tell if you're being facetious, but Jesus what a terrible idea. What if you lose your private key and lose access to the NFT? Can you not use the graphics card? Or can you not sell it? What if NVidia goes out of business someday in the future and the card gets bricked because they stop maintaining the chain that held all the NFT's of the graphics cards?
Ahh, in that case, the problem this solves is the database owner has admin power, and could take away your graphics card.
This is similar to how I was always worried that Bank of America would arbitrarily change the balance in my account for some reason, but bitcoin solves this problem. Now I just have to worry about losing my password or getting hacked and losing all of my money, and that's just much less realistic than a major bank abusing their centralized admin powers to change my balance.
There is so much Poe's law content in this thread - not sure if you're being facetious or not. But I'll bite.
If Bank of America deducts money from your account, you can call customer support and threaten to file a complaint with a regulatory agency, threaten to close your account, or just take them to court. No guarantees that you'll get your money back, but at least there's a chance.
If you lose your wallet password. It's game over. 0% chance of ever recovering any of that money.
The difference is that nVidia would not be able to remove your NFT from its db of serial numbers, because the association between the number and you, instead of being in a DB it is in the blockchain itself, and the only one that can change that association is the holder of the NFT.
So in this scenario would the NFT be burned onto the card's ROM, and basically serve as a serial number you can trade without the participation of the manufacturer?
Until someone made a counterfeit, sold that (with the NFT) and kept the original. They can simultaneously "prove" they've sold the original and also reap the benefits of having the graphics card.
The same thing applies to other similar "NFT as certificate of authenticity" schemes I've seen, such as around luxury goods.
> (...) then that truck of stolen graphics cards becomes much harder to move.
That sounds like a convoluted and impractical solution looking for a problem. Mobile service companies and hardware vendors managed to implement services that support activation and bricking without getting any crypto-related buzzword in the way.
Yes, this is correct. For now, people are willing to participate in the collective delusion that these tokens are what they claim to represent: real ownership of an off-chain asset. I don't think that's going to last.
It's possible to imbue an NFT, itself, with real value. Like if it was a legally recognized title. Or if ownership of an NFT could be used to produce an authorization token for access to some physical or digital experience.
Smart contracts are a very generic concept. NFTs are a smart contract design pattern. They typically employ standardized smart contracts (e.g. ERC-721, ERC-1155) so that services can be built to interface with any standard NFT contract. But it's also possible to make custom smart contracts to manage non-fungible digital assets.
An NFT is a certificate of authenticity, but it applies to something easily copied. If you think the certificate of authenticity is worth something, great; if you think it gives you ANY kind of legal rights or protection, or any kind of DRM or digital anti-copying protection, you're in for a surprise.
TL;DR: NFT's are a money laundering and tax evasion scheme. There is no value for average consumers, unless the NFT appreciates in value over time and there remains a buyer's market for them. But that's highly volatile and uncertain.
It's like a certificate of authenticity that was just written on a napkin by some guy you found on the corner.
How much authenticity does such a certificate convey?
But then you make sure that napkin is really hard to copy! there's only going to be one napkin you got the guy on the corner to write on yesterday attesting to authenticity of something else. (There might be other napkins other guys on other corners wrote on, but only one copy of this one!)
Does it convey more authenticity by virtue of being really hard to copy?
Why does an NFT convey any "authenticity"?
From the OP:
> Alongside platforms that make no effort to prove ownership of artworks for sale, artists are waking up to find that their digital artworks are being sold by fraudsters to unwitting victims.
What authenticity do these NFT's "prove"? Authenticity in what?
Replying to myself, it's actually not even that, you didn't even have the guy on the corner write anything about authenticity on the napkin, you just had him write the title "Mona Lisa" and sign it.
But you can prove this is really the very same napkin you had a guy on the corner of Park and High write "Mona Lisa" on, at 9:45ET on November 9th 2020. It's the very same napkin! So surely you should pay me what the Mona Lisa is worth for it, right?
I can throw in a napkin with "Brooklyn Bridge" written on it if you like...
Everyone likes to talk about how NFTs are just 'a money laundering and tax evasion scheme' as it makes a good story but as far as I see most big investors don't treat it that way and nobody has shown if that's the case for more than a minority of sales.
my understanding was that you'd buy an NFT at some inflated price using cryptocurrency to be laundered, and on-sell it (having affected its perceived value with the previous inflated sale) but I could be off.
The other use I read about recently was using them as a proxy for buying some sort of illicit good or service, i.e "here's $600,000 for that wink NFT wink I wanted".
So what? Say you have an account X which holds funds from criminal operations (e.g. ransomware payments). If you cash it out directly there's no doubt you're a criminal. But if you use that money to pay yourself for an NFT, now you can possibly deny that you have any knowledge about source of X income.
Better yet send money from X through a bunch of privacy oriented tokens like monero, tumblers and mixing services, losing 20-50% in the process and consolidating the rest in account Y. Now you have plausibly clean money but you can't pay taxes yet as there's no paper trail for this income. Solution is easy, buy an NFT from yourself, declare it, pay taxes and buy a new yacht.
If buying a virtual good from oneself at any arbitrary price was easy, money laundering would be solved problem for criminals, regardless of NFTs or not, wouldn't you agree?
That's exactly what's happening right now. But before NFTs the most plausible ways were either opening a business accepting crypto (not unlike meatspace money laundering involving cash-accepting businesses) or having lucky strikes on gambling platforms (where you can play against yourself).
For a larger operation going business route is still preferable but on an individual level NFTs are much easier due to ridiculously high margins that have been normalized there.
How do you know this is exactly what's happening right now? Do you work in the sec space or with tax authorities? I'm genuinely asking, as I'm a layperson in regards to these subjects, and, in my ignorance, I don't see the difference between that and, say, Counter Strike skins selling for 15k USD.
To my understanding, all these things leave simple 1-1 paper trails that can be followed later and lead to consequences, but I might certainly be wrong.
I'm trying to separate people who simply don't like cryptocurrencies and NFTs (which might be your case, I don't know) from actually informed thoughts about what's happening.
Sure, but half the point of laundering is plausible deniability. Bob now has an explanation for why he's received a lot of money in a short space of time from foreign accounts he claims to know nothing about.
You need to pay me for some illicit activity. Instead of having you pay me directly, I produce a set of minimalist pieces of art and issue NFTs for them. You buy them or pay your associates to buy them. The transactions now appear as legitimate trade.
Since both parties have to (supposedly) declare their expenses/income (if the value is high) in their retrospective countries, this scheme is as failsafe as just sending the transaction directly between the two of them.
In your example you have successfully transferred the funds between two parties, but you have not laundered anything here.
> But how do you recover the funds again? You'll need to declare that you sold art for X, and tax it so you can actually use it.
Yes, in every respect you treat it as legitimate trade, when in fact it's payment for something illegal, in order to conceal that it isn't payment for a legal service or good. That's a basically a dictionary definition of money laundering.
I'm not sure what you expect of it here, or why paying taxes matters. The point is not to evade taxation, but to conceal the illegal transaction and make it appear as though it's legitimate and legal.
> Again, nothing has been washed here, you've just made a normal transfer with zero benefit.
Something has been washed in the sense that you've intentionally created a plausibly legitimate cover for the transaction in order to conceal the illegal goods/services the payment actually concerns.
I think there are several use cases people associate with NFT. One is money laundering and that is indeed hard as you mention.
The other is payment for illegal services and goods. I can't wire you money for "one assassination" but I can wire you money for "art" because who knows how much it's really worth.
Well, you're wrong. Seller declares income and pays taxes, but they don't have a duty to track down buyers real identity and check their income sources. Thus you could easily be both buyer and seller but only declare seller part.
This type of money laundering has always been possible somewhat easily. Shell companies can be used for that, and look way more legitimate than paying possibly millions of euros on speculative art - I'd imagine that declaring to the tax man that those extra millions you made this year came from a few ms paint drawings would eventually get one caught.
Physical art has strict laws about sell value and speculation exactly because of that, if NFTs really take off (somehow), it's easy to imagine that the same scrutiny would follow.
I'm curious to understand how NFTs would be used to launder, for instance, drug cash. I often see the expression "money laundering" being used in these discussions without a real understand of how it would work.
And anyone can create their own NFT for the same artwork. Now we just need a (centralized) registry of "official NFTs" to know which one you're supposed to consider, from a trusted authority :)
One use case I was wondering for NFTs; would it make sense for photographers?
So if I took some "amazing" photos of stuff, whether it was art, landscape or 'stock' style photos. I could list them on a website to be sold, and sell the NFT of the photo.
Yes - anyone can "right click -> copy" the photo, but we are talking about the licensing side of the photo. This proves the person using the photo(s) in their product or website etc has the "right" to use that photo, in the same way open source projects have licences that people are expected to follow?
The person who bought the photo could on sell those rights at a later stage if they no longer wanted to use my photo (since anyone can sell the NFT).
Basically shutterstock.com or something, but with NFTs? Its about the only genuine use case I can think of...
I think this is kind of the idea, but it has basically the same problems as other areas. You're relying on meatspace legal and copyright systems to associate "ownership" / "right to use" with the NFT, but you could just use that same system to associate those rights with the purchaser directly.
The only tangible different is that once you've establish the meatspace laws, the ownership can be transferred on chain and still hold a valid claim, instead of having to result in meatspace in order to transfer it.
If you want to transfer ownership (copyright) within the traditional legal framework, you’ll also loose your say in what happens next, so you can’t guarantee that a subsequent change in NFT ownership automatically means a change in ownership of the rights.
What you could do is retain the copyright yourself, but accord an open-ended copyright license (like the way oss licenses are written) that accords certain rights to the owner of the NFT (and have the license describe how to determine who is the owner of the NFT).
This is the value of blockchain in a nutshell. Programmable trust. All manner of tokens (represented things - both digital and not), can be moved, modified, leveraged, etc. It is a public ledger and api for trust.
Probably people still under-appreciate the utility, liquidity, and overall productivity boon this will be.
But we already have a mechanism for licensing, its copyright.
NFTs provide no new tools or even solutions for tracing, enforcing or indeed arbitrating licensing of a thing. Its just a hash. Photo stock sites already have perceptual hash tracing.
However for them its useless as they only ever sell licenses to use the artwork, not "ownership". They still retain the original copyright, which allows them to sell licenses to use the image/sound/thing
One problem that I have noticed in the NFT space is that the platforms only deal with transaction between wallets, not persons. The association between wallets and persons is tenuous (by design). You don't know if you are buying from the real right holder (e.g. the author), and on the other side it is difficult to prove that the owner of a particular wallet is you.
How does this improve upon copyright in practical terms? Because finding out who the rights holder is becomes more straightforward? I’m not aware how minting an NFT works exactly, but wouldn’t the person to whom the NFT points still have to prove they’re the rights holder and have engaged in some legal contract for that claim to be valid?
Here’s a general issue I don’t yet understand yet for NFT’s.
Suppose you take an amazing photo (or create digital artwork), and pack it up as an NFT on platform A using token/blockchain technology Alpha. Alice buys this token, and has some sort of limited ownership of your picture.
I (a nefarious user) take the same digital photo you displayed on your website, and sell it to Bob on platform B with blockchain Beta.
I also take your digital photo, make some minor alterations and put it up again on Platform A with Blockchain alpha and sell it to Charlie.
Alice, Bob, and Charlie all think they own the picture, and while they do own their own versions, how do we know Alice is the “right” owner of your photo?
Especially in the future when you’re not around to confirm the version Alice has is the right one?
No, you understand it well. NFTs are completely divorced from anything that does not exist on the blockchain. All recourse for establishing ownership in the eyes of the law requires consulting external, centralized sources of authority, making the involvement of a blockchain utterly pointless.
No crypto expert but I was thinking something like this:
Artist decides to make a run of 100 copies of the work, and generates 100 work signing keys and generates a list of "1/100, work public key 1" etc. Artist then signs this list with their artist signing key, gets a signed timestamp, and publishes this somewhere on their site, along with the public portion of their artist signing key.
Artist then signs the (uncompressed) pixels of each copy of the work using the corresponding work signing key. Signature is embedded in the image file along with the work copy details, "1/100", say as a PNG chunk or similar.
NFT is created for the work copy, and I'm presuming there's something akin to a signature of the image file in the NFT to link them.
If you then get a NFT you can verify that the image file is indeed what the NFT refers to. You can download the work public key from the artist and verify that the public work key is from the artist, and then verify that the work (pixels) is what the artist signed.
Then again I don't know the domain enough so might be completely silly and or flawed idea. And obviously it requires a non-lossy image format ala PNG.
it still doesn't solve anything. You have no way of knowing if the pixels were originally signed by the real artist or not.
The only reason it works right now is because that NFTs are so recent that you can just send a DM to artist's twitter to verify if the original set of crypto keys/wallet belong to them. When the artist himself is promoting it, it's not hard to figure out if it's genuine or not. But what happens in 10 years or if you can't trace the original artist?
How would you know if I took the picture myself or if I stole it from flicker? if reverse image search doesn't work, it would be impossible.
That's no different from a real picture/painting though is it?
Regardless, if you get the current verifiable statements signed by a trusted entity every now and then, you should be able to verify the trust chain, no?
Before the old keys expires you get someone to verify and sign with a new key, rinse repeat?
what you are describing just proves that the blockchain adds absolutely no value to the art. You still have to rely on a piece of paper on which someone pinky swears they are the original owner. The blockchain doesn't make it more secure in any shape or form and you would have absolutely no way of knowing the picture I'm selling as an NFT was taken/created by me or stolen from reddit.
If we're doing cryptography, then why go through the blockchain at all then? I could sell the original private key I used to sign the picture to somebody, and they can prove their ownership all day long. I don't see the value add of a fancy database.
You can't sell a private key because you can't provably delete any potential remaining copies you might have. You could continue to sell the private key to others.
Artist still could sell the same artwork multiple times on a single or multiple exchanges. Or someone could steal their keys and sell the artwork multiple times.
> I also take your digital photo, make some minor alterations and put it up again on Platform A with Blockchain alpha and sell it to Charlie.
That's the same as making unlicensed prints from a manipulated copy. That's a copyright violation. The physical world doesn't protect you from that either. You need to sue either way.
Yes, but that's not the point
We're trying to find a use case for NFTs, a problem they solve. But there doesn't seem to be one, at least not one I could find in this thread
So now the race to prove ownership is to upload it to a blockchain first? If you publish your art on deviantart but while you’re uploading it to the blockchain, I sneak in first and upload it, suddenly I can say that I have a tamper proof ledger showing that I uploaded it before it was copied by you.
Kind of. It would be desirable to put your work on the blockchain before anyone else.
There are other things people could consider though, in terms of evaluating the history/authorship of something. The blockchain is just one data point.
Suppose someone scoops the artist’s work and sells their artwork first, without their permission?
Eg, I recently saw the “Charlie bit my finger” family will sell an NFT of their video. Is there anything stopping someone else from selling NFT’s of other viral videos before their makers do so?
Timestamping would only work for works that are tokenised at the same time as (or prior to) their public release.
When you take someone to court over a copyright violation having proof that you control a wallet that was the first to have minted an NFT representing the work in question would be one piece of evidence that you may be the original author.
If there is other evidence, e.g. the other party has a YouTube account which uploaded a video years ago of the work, and is publicly known to be the author of the work, then the judge will probably rule the NFT is not sufficient evidence of ownership/you are not the copyright holder.
There is nothing technically stopping people uploading NFTs of things that they don’t own the rights too. That won’t hold up in court though, not even the court of public opinion.
How do you check who was the first in practice? Blockchain is large and will grow larger. NFTs hold URLs not hashes, so the same artwork could be represented by multiple hashes. The url could also point to a different artwork now compared to what was there before.
This happens all the time. What is worse is someone minting someone else's art, and then the buyers starts posting takedown requests to the original artist. Amongst others, this happened to Simon Stålenhag of Tales from the Loop fame...
This happens outside of NFTS, this happens with everything, US dollars, physical contracts, licenses. They can all be faked. NFTs actually do a better job at allow people to identify fakes, lmao. Do better research.
There is nothing wrong with my research. I reported a fact. OP explains how NFT doesn't solve these problems. But it also confuses a lot of people about what it means to own something.
Simple: Have the government recognize NFT ownership and enforce it. Perhaps that's the future of blockchains: Automated records for the masses enforced by central government, with courts to provide exceptions.
But aside from re-minting it with alterations, you can mint the exact same digital artwork on different NFT platforms, so how do we know which platform is “right”?
The right one is the one the original author of the artwork released it on. The thing about NFTs is the connection between digital items and their authors.
If you're like most art collectors you'd follow the author anyway. You'd buy one because you're a fan of the author and enter their nft sales funnel.
This doesn't address the problem either. How do you know which platform the original author released it on? How do you verify who the original author is? The answer: by consulting a trusted external source. Which raises the question, if we're involving a trusted external source, why not just use that source to track the token rather than involve a blockchain? NFTs are a solution in search of a problem.
Well, you don't. Things don't have identities, not really, and so all the superstructures built upon such concepts collapse the moment when demonstrating this dirty philosophical secret becomes practical ― and digital entities are perfect for such demonstrations.
The simple answer is provenance and blockchain provided this much more than the physical world.
The old world analogy to your scenario is you go to a museum and take a picture of an Ansel Adams work, make a print and try to sell it to Bob. Why would bob pay for this. you have to convince him it's a real Ansel Adams.
Same thing with NFT. You would have to know artist on alpha is real and beta is not. It's non trivial but again I don't think it's actually that different from the real world today. NFT does not attempt to solve this part. Instead it let you check that the nft you're buying is from alpha and the original artist.
I think whether its perfect or not is irrelevant. You can make a high enough quality one that Bob wont know the difference. Same with any traditional art like paintings. Forgeries are not impossible.
Photographers (and digital artists) commonly already use something called a “Certificate of Authenticity” or COA, a physical document signed by the artist verifying that the item is one of a batch, and that the batch has a fixed, limited size.
NFTs aren’t providing anything beyond what a COA provides, and the COA comes with a physical handwritten signature. Neither is any actual protection against determined forgers. As an occasional artist and photographer, I wonder if the solution to authenticating and valuing digital art is to sell the copyrights along with only a single digital and/or physical copy of the art, and then delete it. Make it unique to the buyer the same way a sculpture or painting is unique.
Yes. Except NFTs, for one reason or another, have introduced a whole new set of people to the idea of paying for an COA; they are suddenly really easy to buy, easy to sell, and the ledger creates a community of owners who recognize each other's COA as meaningful.
That's incredibly powerful; because a physical COA in my cupboard that none of my friends gives a shit about is less interesting.
how does this help with enforcement of the license terms? There's no technological enforcement, so lawyers would need to be brought in... if legally the nft had the same standing as a regular license contract.
So I claim this is worse than a regular license because you have to jump through crypto hoops that most people don't understand.
NFTs supposedly allow you to prove who owns something. However they don't actually form a contract for the thing that you think you are buying. You are buying the NFT, not the artwork them selves.
This is the main problem, so if you get scammed, or you try and assert what you think your rights are, you have no support.
To translate it to business, its like buying the sole share in some company, but its not actually the sole share, its a letter that says you've bought a receipt for a sole share from person x.
There is no assertion that you own the actual thing the bit of paper says its a receipt for, or indeed that the person selling it to you owned it in the first place.