> Without a published chain of transactions, there is no guarantee that the artist hasn't sold the same item multiple times.
> Without a verified on-chain transaction, there is a risk that either the buyer or the seller may be lying about the transaction price.
I mean, this is kind of the whole point - the published record on the chain is what actually matters. I don't like NFTs, but the anti-NFT crowd doesn't seem to get it and that is just as frustrating. People value status signaling tools. A lot. Image 99 of 1000 isn't a status signaling tool, showing you paid for the image is, the verifiable receipt is what matters.
This article is like suggesting the signature on art is what matters, but what matters is the actual provenance.
>> I don't like NFTs, but the anti-NFT crowd doesn't seem to get it and that is just as frustrating.
Oh! The anti-NFT crowd does get it. Unfortunately, only too well. And the thing is that there is nothing there to actually get it.
>> the verifiable receipt is what matters
No, this is just a marketing strategy to fool gullible and naïve people into aping into NFT. Nobody ever had a problem with verifiable receipts when attending concerts or buying a car or eating at a restaurant. NFT is a solution simply looking for non-problems to solve to justify its existence.
NFT is simply put 100% speculative asset. The only reason it got a big hype is because people want to spend 0.00001 Eth and sell it for 100 Ethers and then they don't have to work for the rest of their lives.
There is a suicide hotline that gets posts after every crypto crash. Inevitably the same thing is going to happen once the NFT market crashes (100% guaranteed) and regular people lose most of their savings for worthless jpeg that nobody else wants to buy.
The Real Real is a $1b company because people care about provenance in the real world and now there's a place for it in a digital space. Do I think Bored Apes are worth thousands of dollars? Absolutely not. Will it crash? Absolutely.
Do I think it is starting as a stupid toy and may eventually do more interesting things? Yes. If Reddit gives you an NFT for being a top poster for a year in a specific subreddit so you can show it off on Discord and Twitter, I don't see much value in that, but there are plenty of people who do, a lot.
Except a token is unnecessary unless it needs to be transferrable. Reddit is a centralized entity, so they can attest to you being the top poster (and even cryptographically sign that attestation) without the extra cost of posting it on a blockchain.
1. Artist creates work, signs it with his good old fashioned PGP key, publishes it.
2. Patron pays to "sponsor" the work. Artist makes a bundle of the work and patron's public key, and signs it with his own. Publishes it.
3. Patron decides he has to "sell" his patronage. He takes the bundle from 2, adds the buyer's public key, and signs it. Optionally, the artist signs it too to indicate he's OK with the "transfer". They publish it.
Are there ways to cheat? Yeah, if you're confident no one has downloaded the signed document that you published, you can try double-selling. But that's risky: if you're wrong, someone can publish the signed document and prove that you are a fraud.
This illustrates that most of the utility of "distributed blockchains" come from simple digital signatures. If all parties are accountable, public identities, this simplified scheme is strictly superior.
And remember, we're talking about art and public patronage here, not trade of illegal goods. The whole point is that you want people to see it and associate it with a public, accountable identity.
You do not NEED it, but it can enable it. In the situation above the benefit is you, the recipient, are never again dependent on Reddit to validate that award for you. As long as the blockchain continues to exit, you, the wallet owner, maintain “ownership” over that award.
Considering how much most HN users rail against centralized services and things others not to turn stuff off, it seems like the value is obvious to me.
> In the situation above the benefit is you, the recipient, are never again dependent on Reddit to validate that award for you.
You're assuming that Reddit would create an NFT that doesn't grant them any special power. Why would they do that? Why wouldn't they create a blockchain NFT with an admin address that they own and which can do pretty much anything?
> Considering how much most HN users rail against centralized services and things others not to turn stuff off, it seems like the value is obvious to me.
You can be centralized on a blockchain though, e.g. using an admin address as I described.
Specifically in that using my API won't require you to pay him money. There are other reasons they'll claim but once you dig through the chaff that's what it comes down to.
People definitely care about the price of the painting on your wall, the price of your car, and the price of the restaurant they’re eating at, though.
Even if they don’t directly care, you had better believe that the price of a Rolls Royce shapes the way that people think about them; and you buy one because of the way people will think about it. Same goes with the art you put on your wall (an incredible painting that you got for cheap will never be as cool as something by someone whose art is in the MoMA, even if it’s still very cool).
I’m not sure NFTs are going anywhere either, but some people definitely care about receipts. Conspicuous consumption can be very conscious.
Signalling is how mating works which leads to procreation that repeats the same process. If you don't signal your worthiness by winning contests, looking good, showing money, earning respect or in any other meaningful way, you are less likely to find a good matching spouse that will lead to more copies of you down the road.
Would you then expect rich people to be the only one able to reproduce, or at least that as a group they would reproduce more than poor people? Because the exact opposite is true in the US, the poorer you are, the higher your birth rate: https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
Fortunately, we have the option to aspire to something better. I’m not saying such signalling etc doesn’t exist, just that in the same way as I choose not to assault or murder people when I’m angry at them, I also choose to present myself and choose my partners based on personal qualities rather than superficial crap.
Seems I’m generally speaking a lot more fulfilled, content, and happy in life than those who choose to live like chimps.
You have definitely signaled to your partner, even if you're not aware.
And not everything you signaled was profound and you might not have even realized your partner chose you for the shallow parts, even if they'd never admit it directly.
If you buy a jpg for 300k while you could have bought a nice house with that amount of money, you are honestly unfuckable and being unfuckable and gullible is all that you are signalling.
Besides, it's women who do the signaling, that's because they can't approach to save their lives.
NFT crowd should grow some balls, approach, get rejected and repeat until success...like real men do, instead of buying monkey jpg to "signal mating"
> Nobody ever had a problem with verifiable receipts when attending concerts or buying a car or eating at a restaurant
Sorry, but spoken like someone who has no idea how the fashion industry operates.
Seriously though, it’s one thing to not like the superficiality of the fashion market, but to deny that NFTs exploit the same demand (for less-gauche proof of wealth) seems wrong.
I think OPs point is NFT style guarantees exist without NFT technology.
Recently I learned folks appraise ‘64 mustangs based on VIN and markings - so they know how close to the “first off the lot” that mustang was. They don’t need a blockchain to do that.
I think there is a valid point to this take - humans don’t need irrefutable cryptographic proof that something has a story attached to it; they just need enough compelling evidence the story attached to an object is true. And the kinds of stories folks value tend to be human stories (this is the crown worn by so and so, this is the finger bone of saint so and so, etc.) which NFTs can’t capture.
The NFT is not about cryptographic proof. It's about creating something that such a story can attach to for digital pieces of art; w/o the token, digital art has no ownable identity.
You indeed do not need a blockchain - the artworld has been doing it using paper certificates for a long time. But these are conceptually the same as an NFT, just accessible and tradable.
Hey, I have a ticket to your favorite band. I’m selling it for $25 and you really want to buy it from me, but you don’t know me - this is our first contact! How do you buy it from me?
If you sell it to me as an NFT, how do I know it‘s not a fake NFT ticket or even a fake event?
All potential solutions to that question have one thing in common: An event has by definition a centralized entity, which is the organizer. Everything that a blockchain supposedly solves in event ticketing is after all a solution due to digitization, not decentralization.
I don't like NFT too but have some knowledge about it.
> If you sell it to me as an NFT, how do I know it‘s not a fake NFT ticket or even a fake event?
This is actually not a problem at all:
- It's not likely you'd buy ticket for some event that you don't know/not interested.
- The event official (which you already know) should publish these info for query:
- The blockchain
- The contract address
- The NFT token ID
If you bought a proclaimed ticket NFT but it's fake, the only possibility is the official that you trust is a fraud.
Ok, so I‘ll have to check with the event official.
How often do you actually know who that really is? Let‘s say Beyoncé is coming to the arena closest to you. Are you aware of who actually organizes that event and is in charge? Ticket buyers most often don‘t know and don‘t care.
Plus, if I have to go to the central entity and check all that data, where is the benefit of going decentralized?
Hey, no matter how you buy a ticket, it'd have to be verified by the official eventually.
> How often do you actually know who that really is? Let‘s say Beyoncé is coming to the arena closest to you.
Interesting, so you are saying either:
- Beyoncé official publish nothing about the event
- We have no way to look up the ticket info
Not likely IMO especially if we are talking stars like Beyoncé.
> Plus, if I have to go to the central entity and check all that data, where is the benefit of going decentralized?
Well, de-centralization is nothing about convenience, and it's not just about ticket-selling.
I totally agree that blockchain & web3 is not mature at all comparing to how it is now, and I don't think it's going to be success unless they find a way to generally interact with real-world technically and legally.
The nice thing of selling on concert tickets on a public block chain is that it's public, so those tickets can be invalidated easily. Everybody hates ticket resellers.
A ticket is valid if and only if it gets you into the concert. You can ask the concert organizers to validate tickets for you. Most concert organizers have concentrated on two sites that allow them to validate tickets. That is why Ticketmaster is valuable, despite its terrible reputation.
A cryptographically signed I owe you is and will always be meaningless. What is meaningful is the signature at the end of the chain, when the concert organizer lets you in.
Stubhub has a 10% fee for the buyer and a 15% fee for the seller. It also can’t guarantee tickets are valid, they do guarantee a refund to the buyer if they’re false though. This is more expensive and less safe than an NFT ticket.
And what makes you think that ticket sellers would implement such a system? The pure goodness of their hearts?
(My understanding is that NFTs can be constructed to charge a fee on transfers. At least, this is what I've been told by people trying to promote their use for artwork...)
This would require a smart contract, a react front-end to make the UX a little nicer, and a little maintenance. If I charge $1 fees per ticket tx I'd undercut the market and it wouldn't be that hard.
Do you think Ticketmaster charges so much because their copy of MySQL runs on crushed Ming vases?
They charge as much as they do because they have removed a lot of competition from the market (see e.g. jwz - https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2018/01/31.html). There’s no reason why they would implement an NFT where they’d get less money — in fact, they’re the kind of unethical weasels who’d figure out as many ways to hide fees in the smart contracts and play games with the blockchain they use to maximize their take.
This is the whole point of Web3. The idea that these centralized services can be replaced by peer-to-peer transactions over open source software and the digitization of assets like gig tickets as NFTs.
Yes, and it shows why that vision is a pipe dream: Ticketmaster isn’t centralized by accident, or because there haven’t been hundreds of attempts to build competing services. They’re centralized because they spent many millions of dollars centralizing that market and related ones so they can extract as much money as possible.
Blockchains not only don’t change that, they encourage it by so heavily favoring the richest participants. There’s no way an unethical incumbent would use that as you hope rather than how they’ve used everything else, and without access to the venues and artists in their network you’re going to be limited to the smallest places and bands.
EDIT: remember, everyone not getting paid by them hates Ticketmaster. Their website has been terrible since the 90s and their random fees have been the subject of rants and jokes for just as long. There have been several generations of developers who thought tickets shouldn’t cost so much, knew their musician friends hated Ticketmaster, and said “hey I know Perl/PHP/Python/Node/etc. and could build a better website!” They all failed, and it would be really critical to ask what you’re bringing which is different and especially whether this is actually a technical problem or you have power to apply leverage to the business problems.
What do you think the transaction cost is in Ethereum for your NFT ticket? Cause from what I'm seeing right now, it's equal to the cost of your fancy concert ticket. 2 sales (one to the scalper, one to the sucker) means you've just paid 300% of the cost before the middleman even got paid.
Literally around 2 cents if you use the Polygon network. Layer 2 solutions would be perfect for this because A. you can bundle ticket sales and B. you don't need tickets to sell immediately, it's okay to wait a couple minutes.
Very fair question! On Ethereum the fee would be stupid high. However Polygon has fees of around $0.02 so say I'm looking to make myself a bit of a profit for making the UX nicer with a website we'd be looking at around $1 fees.
I keep using this example in NFT arguments but no one has actually done it yet. Screw it, I’m going to launch this and prove it works (or admit my defeat lol). Time to open vscode.
my story: I was in Barcelona, wanted to go to Primavera Sound to see Pavement, went outside the gates, met a guy who was selling his ticket, gave him the money and
> Nobody ever had a problem with verifiable receipts when attending concerts or buying a car or eating at a restaurant.
They do when buying physical artwork, coins, stamps, pokemon cards or other collectibles. There are plenty of things people buy that are only valuable because they are provably "genuine", and would be worthless if they were exact replicas with no provenance.
> Nobody ever had a problem with verifiable receipts when attending concerts or buying a car or eating at a restaurant.
My friends won a contest for an all inclusive trip to the Super Bowl a few years ago when it was in Arizona.
Flight was good, hotel was good, but they showed up to the stadium for the game... fake tickets. Someone scammed the people running the contest. (I think it was a radio station -- need to check)
NFTs fix this in a way nobody else in the industry is.
Right but which chain and which NFT? NFTs on the blockchain suffer the same problems which is the point made in the article. There are multiple blockchains and no guarantee that a particular NFT is unique or even published by the actual author.
That’s not really relevant for status signalling as long as John Doe can somehow be pointed to an easily accessible website showing Greg Moneybucket paid $10k for an image of a turd, regardless of what chain it is.
So just create your own NFT that claims you paid $10k, without actually paying $10k. That's the problem with this, there is no authority regulating which NFT's were created "correctly" and which aren't. For example, that person that sold an NFT claiming ownership over a tweet, anyone could make an NFT claiming ownership of the same tweet, none have more validity than others and the owners of these NFT's still don't actually own the tweet, since they have no control or copyright or anything over it.
There are several aspects to this. For basically provable immutability + decentralized you could build something on top of ipfs. For provenance (time-stamps and proof of transaction) but also practically tamper proof+decentralized+permission-less then a blockchain is necessary.
That still leaves authenticity, which necessarily runs on trust and reputation. Although you can mechanize and formalize many aspects of reputation, I do not follow the crypto/web3 scene close enough to know the practical aspects of this (my interest are in distributed systems and malicious actor resistant decentralized permission-less systems).
I'd say the reason why people can't just spin up new certifiers is the reputation aspect. With regards to art, people aren't necessarily trading copyright or items but basically a right to brag via verifiable certificates which claim links to origins or creators of some piece.
----
EDIT: This is a neutral observation on the unique technical properties of a solution concept not a defense of it. The necessity of storing logs on open/permission-less (no PKI setup) networks, which the provenance aspect runs on, can be argued. But once chosen, there are formal limitations (such as bounds on byzantine agreement and limits on asynchronous deterministic consensus) which force to a particular space of solutions ("blockchains"). The social aspect of status goods and signaling (which I've never understood) or the speculative bubble driver of participation are not commented on.
The authenticity part is straight forward: if token was minted from contract X then it is the real deal.
This can be an issue for brand new projects. Bad actors will duplicate it and list at low prices. Most users are savvy enough to only use links from a trusted source. Marketplaces also whitelist the real contract (and show warnings for unverified contracts). You can also look at the contract deployers wallet history to help determine if it is legit. IMO it’s easier to prove authenticity for NFTs than most stuff
You're right that it's not necessary to have blockchain directly. However, NFTs show you're close to a group of people who are connected in the cryptocurrency world, just like CSGO/Roblox flair shows you've invested in those worlds. And a lot of crypto people made a lot of money so it's a good status signal to be close to those crypto people.
All power to you if you want to flex with your crypto bros. But this is a very niche end result for technology that is nominally meant to be revolutionary.
For a forum allegedly full of programmers and technical people, it is surprising to see this sort of statement posted uncritically.
What characteristic of an NFT makes for "easy interop". Please explain to me how the information in an NFT would add a new skin to another game, in a different engine, by a different company, using a different asset pipeline?
1) It's technically easy to integrate due to being able to access any data without needing special API access. Permissionless open system.
2) There's a more collaborative environment with NFTs because project owners are more open to others giving utility to their NFTs as it drives value back to the project itself. It's not a sell something and end customer relationship model.
3) You can target any specific asset and give it any usecase you want - you don't literally need to map 1-1 every single asset.
… not to mention, anyone here should be familiar with at least the basics of copyright and licensing. If you pull the Mario artwork into Doom and say an NFT gave you permission, Nintendo's lawyers are going to be laughing all the way to the bank.
Kevin, the point here is whether that is a useful distinction or not. The article is putting forward a decentralised, cryptographic, non-blockchain equivalent that has the same guarantees as an NFT. My reply was specifically in answer to the parent comments point that it’s about status signalling on an easily accessible website. It’s immaterial in that regard whether the data source of said website is centralised or not because it’s about the social phenomenon not technical implementation.
I can buy something from myself on one of those sites for 10k and do the same thing. Also, I've not really heard anyone bragging. Price s get thrown around, but I never know who is buying.
As the article points out, the blockchain doesn't prove provenance either, that's because anyone can mint an NFT for anything. There's no proof that what's on the blockchain came from the original artist, you must rely on some external trusted authority (like their website, or twitter) to verify the authenticity of the NFT. The artist can just print the PGP NFT on their website and completely eliminate the need for a blockchain altogether. The "Pro-NFT" crowd cannot accept this simple technical truth because it is devastating to the NFT hype train.
The article is a symptom of arrogance of a certain technical crowd which has fully invested themselves into the "nothing new logic", simply refuses to consider that they might be missing something, and as a result ends up totally off-field.
The proposed scheme does not track ownership. The trick is to proof that I /no longer/ own a token. It's about having a ledger of ownership.
The only thing the blockchain does is provide shared state, a ledger. To rip out the one thing that matters in this, then claim you have the same thing, takes se kind of hubris.
The reoccurring question is "how do you map the real world and its laws back into this?"
If I've got a photograph that I took, how do I sell the right to print a copy of it? How do I make sure that only one copy of it gets printed?
Alternatively, if I sell a NFT, what does that mean in the world of copyrights and intellectual property that can be enforced by the courts?
Until that linkage from the real world to the blockchain is made, much of this "mining and selling NFTs" reminds me of my days of playing on MUDs and creating objects to populate a game with that have since lost every iota of value since that MUD does not exist anymore. Even then, people did tricks and exploits to get it so that they'd have more people in the room that the other clan did so that they gained control of the artifact (yes, we had 51% attacks back then too).
And there's my skepticism on this all. Until I can see the block chain data moving back into the real world, it's no more interesting than another news story on a game site about how many titans were made or destroyed in EvE. Sure, people spent real money to create in game assets - but it doesn't mean anything more outside of the game except as a headline to a journalist.
Let's see that venue that sells seats at concerts as NFTs that can be transfered as a competitor to Ticketmaster (I'm honestly interested in the permeant public ledger of everyone attends political rallies). Lets see the season tickets get managed by a NFT ( https://zonecoverage.com/2021/packers/the-insanity-of-the-pa... ).
Until then, all I see are tulips, beanie babies, and EvE titans. But at least the tulips grow in my garden, and my niece and nephew played with some old beanie babies and people trading EvE titans know exactly what they're trading.
You can use a Blockchain ledger to track real world assets but then the critics do make the very valid point that enforcement will depend on a centralized third party. The blockchain is then not the authoritative record of ownership - the real world is.
Maybe an issuer might still find it useful to hook into an existing standardized open financial ledger like Ethereum, but in the end, the issuer will decide who can attend the venue, not the blockchain.
The reason NFTs work is because they do not attempt to track ownership of real world assets. They are about creating a new asset that o my exists on the chain.
Just as a note, I find it ironic that an artist from 2018 is considered to be a "long history" and that the artist that is used as an example of is Sehgal who is doing part of his art in that medium and refusing to go abroad to minimize his carbon footprint is used as an example of art on one of the most energy hungry distributed applications in the world.
That said, you're trading json strings that have no real world application as part of an "experience" of art with others who want to have the same "experience" but has no real world application or ability to enforce anything relating to the intellectual property of that art. If Twitter deletes a tweet that has a NFT attached to it there's squat that anyone else can do about it; or if an artist loses control over their hosting site, or if a URL changes with a host upgrade... that's all too bad as it was the experience of the art that matters?
I appreciate the energy footprint concerns, but will say that I find this the least interesting part of the thing, and that certainly NFTs are being done an blockchains such as Tezos which have no energy impact of note.
When you say "trading JSON strings", it strikes me that you get hung up on technical details that are irrelevant. The URL is similarly unimportant. Think of it as sugar to help software display images in a standardized way. NFT platforms generally try to use IPFS to provide stable resource locators that anyone can seed, but even if that is not the case, and the URL goes down, as long as two (or more) parties can agree on what piece of art the token represents, they can recognise the ownership over it (not the copyright! - ownership over the digital edition.)
Early experiments from 5 to 10 years ago generally just encoded a hash of the file, and that's all that is required to create a link between token and file.
Yes, someone has to keep the file around, but there is no magic way to ensure that. The Sehgal article is actually an interesting connection here in that they explicitly discuss the challenge of keeping alive these experiences.
> NFT platforms generally try to use IPFS to provide stable resource locators that anyone can seed, but even if that is not the case, and the URL goes down, as long as two (or more) parties can agree on what piece of art the token represents, they can recognise the ownership over it (not the copyright! - ownership over the digital edition.)
So are we talking about "ownership" like name a star catalogs? or the "adopt a zebra" at the local zoo?
What does that ownership mean and what can a person do with it (besides selling it to another person)?
Is there any rights or privileges that the NFT "ownership" is supposed to convey?
And if the hosted file somewhere that it purports to claim ownership of moves to another site/url/resolution (or even goes offline completely) what does that "two or more parties can agree on what piece of art the token represents" mean? Is it "that URL is offline so lets pretend that the image is over there is what this represents?" What if that other image has a different NFT that claims ownership?
Aside from all of these "what ifs" - what practical use do they have outside of an art experience? Without much difficulty I can point to people claiming that NFTs will be used for {practical situation} and then there appears others who point to this as art and can wave away the issues with practicality as buying an art experience that will never translate to anything in the real world or a legal framework that governs copyright. Even in the comments on this post you can see people claiming that it facilitates interoperability between skins on csgo and Roblox.
For example, if I sold a NFT for an image hosted on a server and then sold the art (and its copyright) to someone else who then removed its presence from the net and hung up a print in their own private gallery - is there anything that the NFT owner can do about it?
If the answer is "no", then it's as meaningful as names in a star catalog. If the answer given is "yes", then somewhere, someone believes that the NFT has meaning in the legal framework of the practical world.
People appear to be paying for these with the presumption that the answer is "yes" - and yet I've never seen anything with claims of how that would work or what that is founded on.
Personally, I'm waiting for it to be decided somewhere in court where either everyone who has fraudulently sold NFTs for works they don't hold the copyright on go "oh crap" or everyone else realizes that its digital performance art and has no other value.
> So are we talking about "ownership" like name a star catalogs? or the "adopt a zebra" at the local zoo?
Yes, I think is an apt reference, though an important component that critics who use it to disparage that is missing here is that the issuer of the ownership certificate is the creator of the artwork, and can therefore claim a moral right to do so; this is not the case with a company selling stars. A zoo maybe is closer to being able to claim to be some kind of authority. It's interesting to think about: Would we give a star registry run by NASA more credit for being non-scammy?
Do you feel the same confusion about what ownership means when museums buy immaterial or digital artworks for which they only receive a paper certificate (or indeed, not even that, as in the case of Sehgal)?
> What does that ownership mean and what can a person do with it (besides selling it to another person)?
Yes, nothing. You can feel like and claim to be the owner, and there is a community of people who respect that. For example, and this is the case today, by common agreement if a museum or gallery were to want to display a digital artwork that was issued as an NFT, they would certainly not do so w/o permission from the artist, and the artist would be expected to defer to the collector who owns the NFT.
Real-world laws about intellectual property certainly intersect here, and creators do often provide license agreements along side the NFT which are supposed to give legal clarity about their legal rights; sometimes CC is used, and on occasion some are given into the public domain.
> And if the hosted file somewhere that it purports to claim ownership of moves to another site/url/resolution (or even goes offline completely) what does that "two or more parties can agree on what piece of art the token represents" mean? Is it "that URL is offline so lets pretend that the image is over there is what this represents?" What if that other image has a different NFT that claims ownership?
What's the relationship between the file and the artwork? If the artist exports their Adobe After Effects composition into a 1080p clip, but still has the source file around on their hard drive, and later exports a 4K clip, is this now a new NFT that someone else should own? The artist can of course release as many NFTs and editions as they want, but conceptually, it's the artwork that the token represents.
What you want is not to forget or disagree on what the token represents. For the most famous NFTs, that is maybe already unlikely, but a good solution is to store a hash of the file (or /a/ file representing the artwork) with the token.
> What if that other image has a different NFT that claims ownership?
I can create a 100 NFTs right now that points to any Cryptopunk, or to the $60 million beeple piece, much in the same way as I can issue paper certificates representing a Sehgal or Sol Le Witt artwork; these would presumably not be desirable.
I find people become confused with the URL, but as I said: early NFTs experiments did not have them. Just imagine all NFTs w/o them, and just a hash of the file. To see what the NFT looks like, you have to go to the website of the artist, where the image is available. The collector may keep their own copy. If you want to display all your NFTs in an app, the makers of the app have to go around collecting the images of each NFT manually. Maybe the artist's galleries would take on the job of submitting the images to a place like artsy.com, so a registry could be built for easy lookup. That would all be conceivable, and again, very similar to how some art is sold using paper certificates today.
Then someone came up with the idea of adding a URL alongside the token to just make this all easier.
Rafaël Rozendaal was famously selling websites as artworks via ownership of the domain, w/ the collector then simply being responsible of keeping them online.
> Personally, I'm waiting for it to be decided somewhere in court where either everyone who has fraudulently sold NFTs for works they don't hold the copyright on go "oh crap" or everyone else realizes that its digital performance art and has no other value.
(Aside: Stolen artworks are not really a big part of the NFT market; there is a bot epidemic, yes, but those works remain mostly unsold.)
> For example, if I sold a NFT for an image hosted on a server and then sold the art (and its copyright) to someone else who then removed its presence from the net and hung up a print in their own private gallery - is there anything that the NFT owner can do about it?
> If the answer is "no", then it's as meaningful as names in a star catalog. If the answer given is "yes", then somewhere, someone believes that the NFT has meaning in the legal framework of the practical world.
I hold our legal system in great stock, and I know it as one that is very adaptable. There are probably a number of possibly legal claims that could result from an NFT transaction. Having said that:
The intellectual property is not on sale - as it isn't with physical artworks or paper certificates.
There are probably some practical license rights the collector requires for their own enjoyment of being the owner of the artwork. If nothing else, the right to have access to a copy of the file.
Ultimately, if the artist themselves (or a possible subsequent copyright holder) were to renounce the NFT and insist that no one may own a copy of the file, including websites were such NFTs are being displayed, then maybe the collector is just out of luck. But that's ok. After all, they are already relying on the artist to manage their career well, if they are hopeful that the NFT will have some kind of value in the future, which most of course won't.
>I mean, this is kind of the whole point - the published record on the chain is what actually matters. I don't like NFTs, but the anti-NFT crowd doesn't seem to get it and that is just as frustrating.
Are you sure it’s not the pro-NFT people that don’t get it?
It came out recently that the ecosystem around NFTs is all set up to trust OpenSea’s version of truth, regardless of what’s on the blockchain, and so it can be revoked at will.
You add in a centralized service that enforces these rules and feature-wise it is equivalent, except the service is in control. The leading service is the company that is most well-funded, well-connected, innovative, etc.
Whereas with a proof-of-work blockchain, whoever has 51% of the network's mining hash rate is in control, which is effectively who is the most well-funded, well-connected, innovative, etc.
Or a proof-of-stake blockchain, where whoever has 51% of the network's stake, which is effectively who is the most well-funded, well-connected, innovative, etc.
This is pretty reductive IMO. Instead of trying to sit and think about how it is an inefficient, slow version of the same databases we are used to using, try and steel man the argument a bit and think about what is unique and why some people value it.
It will cost millions of dollars to maintain a one hour attack against a PoW chain. It is crazy inefficient, it is slow, but it provides a level of trust that is unique. A software license NFT that lives on a blockchain is a perfect example - would you rather have that or one that depends on a centralized company keeping their server's running (like Adobe's with CS3 and before)?
> try and steel man the argument a bit and think about what is unique and why some people value it.
You were saying that the verifiable provenance is part the value, and I'm saying that that provenance is just as trustworthy as if a centralized service provided it because my trust that what they're asserting (that person X owns token Y) is true depends on how vulnerable they are to tampering, and all these systems are ultimately controlled by traditional factors like how much money you have access to, who you know, etc.
They're organizationally different, though, and therefore have different outcomes because the frictions lie in different places.
With the centralized solution all responsibility is defined with the operator. In practice this means that virtual goods markets are underexplored because it's a huge platform service investment - only the likes of Valve and Roblox will consider it. And in those cases it's also a monopolistic play since the exits from the market are barricaded in various ways, with restricted APIs and hidden data and so on.
The blockchain solutions create a public database with multiple frontends. A third party can add on whichever service they want to, e.g. verify the data's provenance, present trading opportunities or incentives. Therefore the platform builds from an aggregation of independent services, more like the early Internet.
This is the "consensus" part of the tech in action, and also differentiates it from signed receipts. The agreement of consent precedes the participation. If you don't like the agreement, it's public data, so you can launch alternatives. Threat of forking keeps stakeholders willing to stay at the bargaining table. It doesn't matter if you are a well-capitalized stakeholder if you torpedo the value of the chain. However, the early entrants to every space in crypto look scammy and try to jump ahead with hype because it's faster to run a scam than to actually work through the civic problems of maintaining the chain. To date, they always wash out with the bear markets.
> Therefore the platform builds from an aggregation of independent services, more like the early Internet.
Same as creating an open protocol like the article suggests and getting participants to opt-in to supporting that protocol. The difference being that open protocols would require you to either accept _any_ provider or vet and choose which services you trust, vs the blockchain where the trust is in the chain itself and it's inability to be tampered with, i.e. the consensus you're talking about.
And the core of my criticism here is that the factors that give one person or a group of people the ability to tamper are the same; the companies that don't really experience consequences for bad behavior are large, well-funded, well-connected, and these things will also let you buy tons of mining rigs, low-power-cost facilities, and connect you with other wealthy miners who are interested in whenever the next DAO reversal needs to happen.
If we've learned one thing from capitalism it's that it is _not that unlikely_ for a small group of people to get more than half of all the money. The structure still concentrates power.
Not only is it trivial, but a number of smart contracts support "flash loans", allowing users to receive a temporary loan of a large amount of cryptocurrency so long as it can be proven that it will be paid back immediately through other contracts. They're a common tool in smart contract exploits.
Tiny nitpick: aiui, it isn’t so much “if it can prove that it will pay it back immediately” so much as, if it doesn’t pay it back immediately, then all the changes in the transaction don’t end up actually happening, with the only consequence being that some gas fees were spent. So, it is as if the loan is retroactively revoked if it isn’t paid back within the same transaction.
The published records on the chain proves that you own #1186 ape or kitten or whatever. It doesn't even prove the hash of the picture or any other property of the image. Look at Opensea.io - NFTs for sale there are just numbers in the contracts of their issuers. These numbers correspond to images uploaded to the marketplace in the marked order. A hacker can swap images at the marketplace and suddenly the ape you own is no longer cool and top. But you still own #1186 token on the blockchain, it's just what it's pointing to is different now. This is such an unbelievable stupidity, if you don't want to use word "scam".
The actual provenance cannot be established with NFTs or by cryptographic signatures alone, because anyone can generate a pair of keys and pretend to be someone else.
How do you show that the person who created Bored Ape #99 was the person listed and that they signed a contract giving legal rights to the holder of the NFT? All the blockchain is showing you is that someone who held a particular key paid to publish a record. The ways you'd need to establish actual provenance work with or without a blockchain: even a tweet from the artist's account carries more weight.
As a reseller, publishing your PGP signatures on a git repository provides the same level of authenticity: you can't prove where it came from, and you can't silently erase past transactions to the eyes of people who have a copy of the chain/repo.
> This article is like suggesting the signature on art is what matters, but what matters is the actual provenance.
And blockchains can't guarantee provenance either, although they can help ensure that the claimed provenance (probably) hasn't changed since the data was first added.
This. Blockchains can't guarantee provenance, or that art isn't stolen, etc. Just that the agreed upon story has remained consistent, whether or not it was true.
It’s more than that. By it being on chain, it’s part of a permanent durable public ledger, meaning it can be consumed and verified now and in the future by any third party for any reason, without any orchestration, as long as that person has an internet connection.
...and as long as that blockchain in particular is still in operation. Maintaining a blockchain is not cheap, therefore there is very real possibility that at some point in the future nobody is interested in maintaining it.
If only one person was interested in maintaining it, it would become rather cheap for them to continue mining blocks for it
though, of course , it wouldn’t really be secure at that point, as it would be relatively cheap to make a fork that outpaces them (assuming proof of work. In proof of stake I suppose they would become the only one with any stake?).
So, I’m not sure quite how this impacts your point?
There's only one real blockchain; the longest one. That's the whole point of the blockchain. It's a global solution. If someone's trying to sell you on parallel blockchains they're trying to scam you.
> ...the anti-NFT crowd doesn't seem to get it and that is just as frustrating. People value status signaling tools.
The fact that it's even possible to not "get it" means that NFTs are not an effective status signaling tool. If it has to be explained, the status signal was not received.
Lamborghinis, yachts, and large diamonds inspire a visceral reaction; there's nothing to explain.
You're giving a visceral reaction right now. Being able to flex by buying a jpg for hundreds of thousands and having people on boards like this lose their minds over it is part of the appeal, you're feeding the beast without even realizing it.
The interesting thing to me is that many discussions around NFTs (my previous comments included) focus on whether people will treat these digital markers of provenance the same as physical markers of provenance (like a signed portrait). The thinking goes that since the physical markers of provenance obviously and provably have value (sometimes multi-hundred millions in value), the digital ones should as well.
I wish instead that there would be more discussion around how fucked up it is that provenance is a thing that has value to begin with, digital or physical. There are literally huge swaths of humanity that are nearly starving on a daily basis, yet others spend obscene amounts of money on things with 0 tangible value. Say what you want around billionaires blowing their wad on flights-of-fancy space projects, at least they are building something real that could have value to humanity. Paying for provenance is just a place to stash wealth, when extreme wealth inequality has made it difficult to find places for the wealthy to store their dough.
I don't really have any purpose with this post - human nature is what it is, and having value in displays of status is as old as the species. I still think it's horribly fucked up.
These were discs of a special stone used as stores of wealth by the Yap Islanders. Over time, both because of the difficulty of moving such a large stone, and to protect it from damage, it became customary to simply keep the stones where they were and maintain an agreed upon (oral in this case) log of the history of ownership of the stone. There were even stones that sank in transit between the islands, and since everyone agrees the stone existed and no one has a way to pull it up, you can just keep the log of ownership going even with no people having physical access to the stone.
Where the comparison falls flat for me is that those stones started as a (at least for the purposes of this conversation) fairly traditional currency that large chunks of their economy depended on, before transitioning to a more abstract concept. Not that many people's retirements are tied up in beanie babies (albeit probably non zero) so there isn't that structural and heavily collective force of will to maintain value. That's what NFTs look like to me.
In defense of provenance, there's value in saying "I have contributed to this by chipping in". You can print off a digital painting on your inkjet, but paying for a signed print means you are enabling the artist to create more art, and you can justifiably take pride in that.
Of course, that's not how the world works. I wish provenance of something was not as valuable when we're talking about art made by dead people (or already reach and famous). I wish art was not used as a money store. And I feel that NFTs - and this PGP-based idea in particular - offer a possible solution to this, due to this one bug-that's-a-feature:
>Without a published chain of transactions, there is no guarantee that the artist hasn't sold the same item multiple times.
In short, the value cannot be driven up by scarcity, because there is no way to verify that. What you pay for is the record of paying someone.
We kind of have this with political donations already (public rosters of donors serve that purpose), and we have Patreon, but if I wanted someone to take pride in supporting my art with $5 - and make them able to publicly show off, which helps me too - there's no obvious way to go about it without physical tokens, or relying on 3rd parties, like Patreon, which may or may not exist in 10 years.
That's one reason vinyl and tapes are taking off like crazy. It's not just about the medium. The physical token matters.
The inherent flaw of NFTs-as-stores-of-value (and digital signatures/provenance proofs in general) may also be their saving grace.
It counts a very little bit if you are buying it in public while the artist is still alive and producing, because it helps establish the value of their art in a way that they can profit from.
But that's not anywhere near as good as buying it from the artist.
It's a thing which can be added to a real-world contract.
"Buyer agrees as an unalterable condition that:
if Buyer or Buyer's estate sells, gifts, donates, or transfers the Artifact in any way, Two Percent of the Current Market Value of the Artifact is due to the Artist or the Artist's Estate within 30 days of such sale, gift, donation, or transfer. The Current Market Value is the higher of the most recent price paid for the Artifact or an appraisal made by an independent, reasonable expert up to 1 Year prior to the sale, gift, donation or transfer."
> What value is there in a receipt that says "I paid money to the person that supported the artist"?
Because that allows more people to support artists in the first hand. If the art was guaranteed to lose value, or keep the value but not increase in value, then fewer people would want to buy art from artists directly.
One thing I don't understand is that, afaik, and NFT and the record of transactions have no legal weight or enforceability like the assignment of copyright.
Sure it does, the NFT sales are like a bill of sale - both parties have to agree on a price before the money & item change hands. But the legal side doesn't really matter for what you'd traditionally want it for, as this public ledger literally cannot be changed by force nor the focus of an entire government attempting to do so (well, they could jail miners and people not using their fork with the forged transaction, but still).
That's the core issue though with ownership of NFTs. If a court says one thing, and the immutable ledger says something else, it's the immutable ledger that's wrong.
Which confirms my suspicions that NFTs are not enforceable because they have no laws governing them, except by everyone agreeing to the rules of the game. What I don't know, but what I suspect, is that no one is getting arrested for not following the agreed upon rules.
We can look to cryptocurrencies for precedent in how NFT ownership disputes will go. Courts have had no issue looking past meaningless technicalities about “immutable ledgers” and “key-based ownership” to adjudicate disputes about who actually owns cryptocurrencies, and have had no issue with reaching decisions that, for example, cryptocurrencies were stolen because they were transferred to a new address without the permission of the current owner.
Then perhaps it's a ledger of possession instead - a court can't alter reality and say "plaintiff is now in possession of item", however they can order the a defendant to give back stolen property.
A ledger of possession is certainly a much better model than a ledger of ownership, but it still falls a bit short because frequently when dealing with more abstract kinds of property than a literal physical object, like intangible property (intellectual property, mineral rights), immovable property (land, water sources), or property in the actual possession of a custodial third party (money in a bank account, a company in the care of the board of directors), a court order can change possession, since there's less distinction between possession and ownership of these less concrete forms of property.
So it's fair to say that a blockchain can serve as a ledger of possession of those things that are themselves on the blockchain, but not of any thing that is external to the blockchain.
Is an NFT different from other blockchain transactions? If I steal your wallet, am I also stealing your NFTs? If an NFT is designed to send some percentage of a sale to the person who minted it, is there a way to prevent me from selling you my wallet without going back to the blockchain?
> is there a way to prevent me from selling you my wallet without going back to the blockchain?
Besides hardware wallets, most people wouldn't take the risk of buying a wallet since the seller could then send the NFTs to a different address they control, thus leaving you with a worthless wallet you paid above market price for.
> If I steal your wallet, am I also stealing your NFTs?
(once again, besides hardware wallets) stealing a wallet itself is only possible if the owner doesn't have the private key / secret words jotted down somewhere. A much more likely and common attack after finding a private key is to immediately transfer all NFTs to another address for cheap.
Rich people spend money on useless things, provenance isn't required to pose the same question. End of the day life has no meaning and people find it in whatever they do. It's unfair that people starve while others have so much but such is the universe. The photon that gets gobbled up by a dark hole doesn't think itself more or less lucky or worthy than the photon that crosses the universe.
If the meaning of life is to help the poor, what is the meaning of life for those that are helped? What is the meaning of life when there's no poor?
I agree helping those that need more than you is very noble and I aspire to do more of it, but it's not because it has some deeper meaning, I'm just human and have compassion.
>Rich people spend money on useless things, provenance isn't required to pose the same question.
It's not just rich people. Pretty much everyone living in a developed country from the 20th percentile up pisses away an inordinate amount of their income on stupid shit. Why? Because it's fun!
> Later generation will look down at our barbarism the same way we look at tribes of cannibalistic neanderthals.
I believe this is true of any philosophy that believes itself the path to progress.
If I believed my philosophy would result in future generations looking back at us as a pinnacle of human rights and technical progress - I’d look for a different philosophy.
It’s also fair to say the path to that progress you referenced in comparison is historical record - we know the societal structures in place when we accomplished that.
Couldn't agree more. they all think that they are investing the thousands of dollars that went to the NFTs, I think if a stupid monkey drawing became extremely expensive in a little time, it will become worthless in less time.
If you pay for something that already exists, like a piece of fine art, that money doesn't disappear, it just changes hands. The buyer could have spent that money on fighting poverty, but now the seller has the money, and you could say the same thing about them. The net amount of wealth in the world is unchanged.
Buying things that need to be produced is the real problem. When you buy a new private jet, you're adding demand to an industry. That transaction re-allocates tens of thousands of man-hours to aircraft production, man-hours that could instead be going towards any other cause that has marginally more utility to the rest of society.
Provenance isn't the issue, the issue is people with money paying others to work on projects that solely benefit themselves rather than benefiting the less fortunate.
Humans are by nature self-serving. For example, it's easy to to point at blockchain as a burden on our environment, but of the people that do so - how many will needlessly consume meat on a regular basis, or by single servings of items in plastic wrapping? It's all just cognitive dissonance.
My point is that the beef farming industry makes bitcoin's carbon footprint look like a drop in the bucket in comparison, so it's disingenuous for folks to shit on crypto because of it's environmental impact if they are going to be hypocrites and put a burden on the planet in every other way imaginable.
NFTs are not scarce. A painting is scarce because you can never replicate the original painter physically impressing whatever they see in their mind on a blank virgin canvas. If the original painter happens to be on the right side of the Power law and becomes famous, then the painting value also skyrockets because said canvas was touched by them (e.g. Leonardo da Vinci)
Stuff on the internet cannot be scarce, you'd need the metaverse with its own rules to create scarcity. E.g. "Ferraris" and "Lamborghini" cars in GTA V. Their rarity is enforced but as soon as the internet gets hold of it then the scarcity is immediately eliminated on the PC version with mods
This is why provenance matters. The NFT with the same provenance is scarce. When an artist mints an NFT and sells it, the NFT provenance is part of the value.
If I mint an NFT pointing to a frame in Pulp Fiction, no one cares. If Quentin Tarantino mints one, now it has value.
Except of course, that [i] the provenance of Quentin Tarantino himself minting it (and not also offering his blessing to other NFTs associated with that frame) is entirely trust-based and off-blockchain and [ii] its hard for anyone to argue with a straight face that some cash in digital certificate made by some programmer three decades after the film is the "original" in the same way that, say, a square of canvas that some famous artist actually applied paint to, or at least a garment Travolta actually wore. So whilst the provenance exists, it's more autograph level than original artwork level, and not necessarily a step above a scrawl on a bit of paper in terms of trust and uniqueness.
> When an artist mints an NFT and sells it, the NFT provenance is part of the value.
Except when I buy a painting I can lend it to a museum and get a steady income, with NFTs you are only hoping that some bigger fool will buy your jpg, because everybody sees what you see, and a jpg is not a painting, you don't have to stand in front of it to appreciate it.
An example was the recent sale of the original picture from National Geographic 1983 issue. The "Afghan girl" is one of the most famous pics of 20th century if not the most famous.
The "original" sold for a mere 63k, that's because it doesn't give you anything more than the pic which was on the cover of NG or you have seen countless times on the internet since. Compare it to famous paintings or even a Banksy and it's a very small sum of money.
Most famous jpg sells for less than 1/10 of a mediocre painting
Also most importantly once you have taken the painting from the artist hands you are in power. With NFTs the artist needing money can and will mint the exact same JPG undercutting all the fools who bought the previous NFT.
He will get the money and the praise (ohh distributing his work to everybody instead of select few how cool is him!!!) and you'd get a huge financial loss.
> With NFTs the artist needing money can and will mint the exact same JPG undercutting all the fools who bought the previous NFT.
People will still be able to ascribe meaning to which NFT was minted when. So an earlier minted NFT may be more valuable to some than those that were minted later.
Just like when Banksy “destroyed” that piece by shredding it half way, the “destruction” actually worked to increase the value of the piece. In the same way, conceivably, a first batch of NFTs that supposedly should lose value after the artist starts minting a bunch more, could turn out to instead increase in value, because of their history of having been minted and sold before the event of the artist minting a bunch more.
> So an earlier minted NFT may be more valuable to some than those that were minted later
Are dollars printed during the 2008 recession more valuable than those printed during the 2020 recession?
> In the same way, conceivably, a first batch of NFTs that supposedly should lose value after the artist starts minting a bunch more, could turn out to instead increase in value, because of their history of having been minted and sold before the event of the artist minting a bunch more.
Wyndam-Matson giggled. "That's my point! I'd have to prove it to you with some sort of document. A paper of authenticity. And so it's all a fake, a mass delusion. The paper proves its worth, not the object itself!"
Actually, reading your post made me realize I do have a point with my original comment. I'm certainly not arguing for communism, and I'm kinda surprised one would take that from my post.
But, as you point out, people will pay for social status. Thus, my hope is that the elites will come to view paying obscene amounts of money for provenance as exceedingly lame. Totally agree, people should be free to spend their money on whatever they want. And to me, if you spend a ton of money on an NFT for the purposes of telling people "I've got the only one of these" (instead of its current primary purpose of looking for a greater fool - that reasoning I understand), it just tells me you're an asshole with no imagination.
Of all the things you could choose to spend money on, be it helping the poor, starting a new company, a wild night out with hookers and blow, a brand new spaceship, whatever, all you could come up with is "I want to be able to tell people I've got the only one of something, despite that anyone else can download an exact, bit-by-bit replica for free". It's just pathetic honestly.
> view paying obscene amounts of money for provenance as exceedingly lame
This is pretty much it for me. Some people have personal reasons to buy specific tokens for normal-goods prices, and I can still respect those people - but to spend thousands or millions on a few bytes is to advertise ridiculously poor taste.
The fuckedupness is connected to the vast popularity of authoritarianism over empiricism.
For 99% of the population, what you see is less substantial than what authority asserts. (authoritative individuals, the authority of consensus, mob-style-debate, the authority of the hivemind...)
The money they pay also has 0 tangible value. You can't pay humanity out of poverty, that's a ficticious dream. Poverty is a structural problem, and a political one. It has more to do with what other countries are allowed and not allowed to do within the larger financial superstructure dominated by western capital.
That money absolutely has tangible value. If Jeff Bezos is willing to pay $500 million for a yacht, but I'm willing to pay $600 million to build schools, the market should favor building the schools and society ends up with a bunch of schools rather than a single super yacht.
That's why we need some kind of significant wealth tax. Take the money away from people that will choose to allocate resources to yacht building and other frivolous things and spend it on stuff that has an obvious benefit to society.
Inflation may be a bitch, but last I checked I could walk into McDonald's with a green piece of paper with a "$5" printed on it and walk out with a Big Mac, no questions asked.
That's what "fiat currency" means. The green piece of paper is useless in a vacuum (maybe unless you're a fan of tiny origami or in search of kindling), but because everyone just agrees (and the US government enforces) that a particular kind of green paper with a "$5" printed on it has a certain value, then it can be used as a medium of exchange.
It doesn't scale, is the thing. You can't walk into a macdonalds and walk out with a billion burgers just because you're a billionaire. What seems to make sense on a micro level is completely nonsensical on a macro level. Money is mostly tied up in property, stock, loans and financial derivatives anyway. It's largely a ficticious element, which is printed by the billions every day.
Of course it scales. Sure, he'd probably need to call ahead (like, way ahead), but if a billionaire wanted to buy a billion burgers, it's not like that's an impossibility.
> It doesn't scale, is the thing. You can't walk into a macdonalds and walk out with a billion burgers just because you're a billionaire.
That's only because the super rich are dictating what's in demand. If you take all the money being spent on luxury watches and start spending it on dental care for children, the market should reduce the supply of watch makers and increase the supply of dentists in order to meet the demand for each.
Most money is invested in assets designed to retain wealth or increase profits, directly or indirectly. Their wealth and power is contingent upon that very scheme.
you can't pay humanity out of poverty, but you can help humans out of poverty. don't look at it as a global problem, it's an individual problem. so the thousands of dollars that went to stupid monkeys, if you take just 1% and give it to someone that values it is much much better
> But there is so much more that can be done with NFTs. For some thing, ownership actually gives you an advantage.
I have an unwritten blog post about what "ownership" means in the digital realm, but the gist is that ownership is control. This is complicated by laws imposing meatspace-minded artificial scarcity, mainly by forbidding the duplication and/or reverse-engineering of certain bytes on your own hard drive (programs which have restrictive licenses).
So NFTs have nothing at all to do with ownership because they don't touch those dynamics (at least not in a way meaningful to the end user). Even an NFT that granted you certain privileges would have those privileges enforced by some external system, so you're again only borrowing the authority from someone else so it's really they who own it and you're only buying a license to use it.
Open source software, on the other hand, is about ownership because the license is granted to users to assume full control of what they possess with no third-party arbitration.
Most people peddling it, including all the influencers and celebrities, are only in it as a get-rich-quick scheme with the small possibility of it gaining in value over time and paying dividends to the original artist every time the art is traded. But it's not bad technology, it works well for what it says - tracking a specific bitstream's history of sale so other technology can leverage said history to verify ownership.
There's a bit of that in The Unincorporated Man (which at times reads more like an economics paper with a plot than sci-fi).
At birth, you're incorporated. Instead of getting taxed, the state gets some portion of your shares as do your parents and you. The majority shareholders can make some important decisions. Additionally, if you want to go to college, you sell some shares of you that you own to the college.
If ownership is not transferable, then how can you call it a token, and what is it non-fungible in relation to? This categorically seems like it is not a non-fungible token, or even a token at all. It's just an artist signing a file using PGP.
So many articles throw around the term "NFT" nowadays without stopping to even break down the acronym, let alone consider what it actually entails.
The NFT part is only the “I paid for this item” part. You can make a chain by making a further transaction with the ID of the last one (which arguably indicates you own the file hash indicated).
I don’t think the NFT actually does anything but identify a certain bunch of content? The important part is the transaction history.
> The NFT part is only the “I paid for this item” part.
The most important thing (or even the only important thing) of cryptocoins and NFT is a proof that "I no longer own it and as such I'm unable to sell it to anyone else."
The difference with NFT is that it's used for art, and art comes from a specific artist, and usually in the world of art what gives value to the art is the artist. So, if I have a thing signed from the artist, it's as good as it can get. If they want to double spend or do other things, then they will lose credibility as artists and will no longer be able to sell what they sold so there's no incentive in cheating, hence no need for a central authority or blockchain. All you need is them publishing their public ledger of what was sold to whom, no blockchain necessary.
No it can't because it has no legal standing whatsoever to do so.
No court and no law creates any legally binding standing for an NFT, because an NFT sale does not establish any sort of recognized contract between the parties - it does not even establish the the terms of use or ownership under which the NFT can be recognized. The nature of NFTs at most would lead to a recognition of the the token being legal property, if your wallet was stolen, but not whatever you think the property actually is.
>It does not tell you if the artist has sold the piece multiple times.
If you purchased a NON-FUNGIBLE-token, you can be sure that nobody else owns the same array of bytes which may or may not prove that you own a piece of art.
There may be many prints of the same original work created in multiple NFTs as there are in the art world... but it's not possible to sell the same NFT twice... on the blockchain at least... without re-acquiring it first.
Plenty of NFT sellers sell multiple issues/prints/copies of the same original artwork.
I think digital prints in NFT format are ridiculous but I digress.
If you have the NFT signed by the artist's PGP key is the same thing though, no? You're the owner. Or the person you sign it to afterwards. What does the public blockchain offer in this case, except for fees?
I wondered about that, too, and thought of a difference: if you sign it over to someone else with PGP, the first owner still has a file that was provably sold to them. They could fraudulently sell it again. A public blockchain would contain the whole chain of ownership, so you could tell who the current owner is.
Yeah except you could sell the NFT on a different blockchain.
As far as NFTs are concerned, the existence of multiple incompatible blockchains is indistinguishable from what would be considered a network partition within a single blockchain for cryptocurrency.
@stagas:
> Can't they have a public personal ledger somewhere for people to audit?
Then you need to coordinate on a common authority to rely upon for the timestamping. Blockchain's whole purpose is to eliminate this dependency.
This is true, except there would at least be a record on some blockchain where the artwork was first proven to exist via a hash. This is at least stronger proof against the artist and for the buyer.
As it stands this isn't very valuable yet but in my mind an important milestone.
Still not convinced. I can audit the message so the only way to game this is we both have to be playing a game. Against who? A third person who we will try to sell afterwards? Same thing can happen in the blockchain as well, no-one can audit what happens off the chain which could be people coordinating.
I don't know what you mean by "audit the message."
Without third-party timestamping or blockchain, the same token can be sold to multiple buyers, and nothing can be used to determine which buyer is the first ("real") buyer.
This is the whole reason blockchain was invented. It wasn't possible to do it at all before that.
Can't they have a public personal ledger somewhere for people to audit? Saying I sold X to Y. Like a tweet in a personal account. Why is the common blockchain necessary? Seems like centralization of information, is this what Web3 is about? Power to the gatekeepers?
You don't really need Twitter, you need a platform and require the people that use the platform to bring in their ledgers so they are auditable by the public. I can view someone's work and examine if they're trustworthy or not. Similar to how people are signing their signatures, they could be just bringing together their ledger, which could be a bloom filter so it's just a single line of hash that I can verify I still own the thing they selled, you only need a system that can compare these and see if anything has been double spent. The point is, you don't need a running bitcoin-style blockchain for this. You can achieve the same validity with different means.
Using a bloom filter as a distributed hash means you're edging quite close to a blockchain, the only question your schema now has is consensus - how is work examined for trustworthiness? What prevents network spam?
I haven't puzzled it though but intuitively it feels like you wouldn't be able to achieve the "same validity" (aka you'd have a weaker set of guarentees) without the liveness of a blockchain like system. Whether you agree with what threshold of validity is acceptable is a different matter.
A signature is simply that, a signature. It doesn't guarantee uniqueness and doesn't prevent you copying it any number of times.
An identity + timestamping mechanism would guarantee uniqueness of ownership, and a blockchain performs this in a relatively decentralised and trustless manner.
The blockchain sounds very centralised if it's the only place I can participate to verify my ownership. Decentralised would be if there was no third party(in this case the blockchain) necessary for verifying ownership. Which it actually isn't, because all that is needed is the signature of the author and maybe a timestamp or some other metadata signed along.
Of course! The blockchain is only decentralised compared to a centralised service such as Sotheby's and doesn't remove the third party entirely. The thing is unless you restrict the requirements of the artwork and the transaction not involving a third party actually restricts future guarentees that can be made to third parties.
If the restrictions of never involving third parties (in proofs of ownership or otherwise) is acceptable, then there's no need for any schema bar making the transaction itself.
The issue with removing the third party entirely (as the auther suggests) is the verifiability of the timestamp to any interested third parties. The simplest scenario is proof of existence of the artwork at time T. Without a timestamping mechanism there's nothing stopping the creator lying about when it was created, or when this transaction took place.
It prevents the artist from signing the same thing twice. So with PGP you might be the owner of a thing, but you might not be the only owner of a thing.
By quoting this section, you allow sceptics to latch onto the "artists can mint multiple NFTs for the same piece of art" thing.
But the author also says "resale is out of scope", but it really isn't. More than the artist selling a token multiple times (they legitimately are allowed to do so), we need to make sure that any owner seeking to transfer a token loses ownership.
How would people validate ownership of an NFT when there could be hundreds of blockchains in the future? Would I have to go and verify each one of them to make sure my NFT hasn't been sold multiple times already?
For major artworks, people would simply Google the piece and see that it sold for however much money in some headlines previously.
The real issue is proving that a specific sale was the “true” one. There have already been incidents of people trying to sell other people’s artwork as NFTs. If you buy an NFT and the artist later comes out and declares that your NFT wasn’t authorized or licensed or whatever, the value would presumably drop. The artist could then sell the “real” NFT.
Of course, none of this real-world authorization or provenance is actually encoded in the blockchain, nor can it be. The value lies entirely in the off-chain perception of what an NFT represents and whether or not it’s real / authentic / authorized / legitimate.
The blockchain hype has led to a misconception that blockchain solves everything, but they’re all still limited to whatever we all agree the on-chain data represents what we want it to represent.
Ding ding ding. These people have literally no idea what they are doing. You think the average tech VC is a clueless about NFTs? Wait to you talk to people in the art world.
Nothing prevents someone from making copies and selling each "unique" one.
Since it is decentralized, there is no centralized authority to take down the copies (that is, a DMCA-style take down).
The "no one can censor you" upsides of decentralization are not without downsides: you cannot censor or take down others, even in cases of copyright breach.
And even though there may be tens of thousands of these search engines/registries built in the next two years, Google (for example, pick your poison) can step in any time and own this if NFTs turn into something more than pet rocks.
NFTs only make sense within the context of a system (or ecosystem) that has a protocol for recognizing it.
For example, if an NFT represented a game asset, then the game (or potentially a whole ecosystem of games) would be the system that recognizes it, and the NFT would have value within the context of that game.
I really don't understand the use case of NFTs for in game assets. How is using a block chain to trade assets an improvement over the in game marketplaces we already have for games like TF2, DotA2, etc?
The usual answer is that representing those assets as NFTs will somehow make them portable to other games.
This is, of course, a pipe dream. First of all, there's no business reason for any game to implement this feature -- they'd be undercutting their own sales of cosmetic items by honoring sales of items by their competitors. Second, actually porting assets between games is nontrivial; even if two games are built on the same engine, there are significant barriers to transferring assets between them (like differences in physical scale, art style, or game mechanics).
It's a growth/marketing tool for new games to leech specific types of people from other games. You can target a very specific demographic of people (say whales, or hardcore grinders) and reward only those people.
That is actually first somewhat reasonable implementation I have heard. Still, traditional SaaS in this field might be better option. Not that I think it is big enough market for anyone to enter considering all the involvements in financial side and potential legal implications.
That you can have cross-game assets and universes between different games and developers. Your special Dota skin works as a skin World of warcraft (?) or it might work in ancillary services around the game: could be used as a feature unlock or even log-in for services around the core game.
It can setup a marketplace of unique items without the game founders having to create anything at all, or users recurring to unsafe selling and buying mechanisms.
Game applications are definitely interesting to explore and experiment with.
This idea doesn't work at all. For your dota skin to work in world of warcraft, the developers of WoW would have to acknowledge that 0x1fab... corresponds with $ITEM in $GAME and then spend the time actually implementing that item in the game.
Since that would take an inordinate amount of effort for *absolutely no benefit for WoW or Dota*, this would only ever feasibly be used *between games made by the same company*, which at that point they would just use a centralised database for obvious reasons.
The Movable-Game-Assets thing has been done before on a huge scale by the biggest gaming company in the world, with nintendo's Amiibos. Look at how they turned out! Barely any games on the switch actually support the full set of amiibos, and those that do don't give much. Amiibos already implement the exact thing you're talking about without any blockchain at all.
> This idea doesn't work at all. For your dota skin to work in world of warcraft, the developers of WoW would have to acknowledge that 0x1fab... corresponds with $ITEM in $GAME and then spend the time actually implementing that item in the game.
Yes? Why wouldn't that work?
Since that would take an inordinate amount of effort for absolutely no benefit for WoW or Dota, this would only ever feasibly be used between games made by the same company, which at that point they would just use a centralised database for obvious reasons.
> The Movable-Game-Assets thing has been done before on a huge scale by the biggest gaming company in the world, with nintendo's Amiibos. Look at how they turned out! Barely any games on the switch actually support the full set of amiibos, and those that do don't give much. Amiibos already implement the exact thing you're talking about without any blockchain at all.
Nintendo is a super closed system. But also there is a difference in kind: games that implement API for cross-game assets will get users, players and payers, by implementing an entry way to an already existing community.
The future is uncertain, but if you are not curious about this i don't know what to tell you.
Because videogames are different? There's absolutely no logic connecting items in one game to another in almost all cases. As such, the set of items the developers would actually want to implement (ever) would be only those that make sense inside their game, and they'd have to reimplement the models and statistics.
Even more so, the effort necessary to implement new items in any game means that they'll only ever bother with the most expensive items (that also happen to make sense within their world), which restricts the set of items *massively*. Oh, and the developers get absolutely nothing back for doing this except a PR disaster.
Furthermore, it's entirely centralised anyway. You have to trust the game client to interpret 0x1fabc3... as $ITEM when the game client could completely lie and change what item that corresponds to, or how useful it was. This is quite literally just an expensive API call.
NFTs serve literally no purpose here. There's no decentralisation, there's no reason why items in videogames should ever be cross-compatible anyway (It's literally like asking why you can't write C# and Haskell in the same file and just have it work).
The benefit of no store commissions is immediately negated by gas fees.
Public Metrics on usage is already possible without the blockchain, you can do this with a centralised database and an API. If your retort to this is "what if steam change your progress underfoot?", that is nonsense because they gain absolutely nothing from doing that except annoying users.
No country, age or identity restrictions is a disaster. The age one primarily, since it is necessary to require age restrictions on things like online gambling for ethical reasons.
Also, what the hell do NFTs have to do with implementing joystick input?
Developers of WoW would care to do so if incorporating those items gave them enough marketing buzz and/or financial incentive to make up for the effort of development and then some.
Like let's take something that already exists in games, like Shovel Knight. Shovel Knight is such a popular video game character that other developers incorporated the character as cameos or even playable characters in their games. Here's the Wikipedia:
"Shovel Knight appears as a playable guest character in several games including Indie Pogo, Blade Strangers, Cook, Serve, Delicious: Battle Kitchen, Move or Die, Dino-Run DX, Runner3, Riverbond, Rivals of Aether, Blaster Master Zero, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, Road Redemption, Epic Manager, C-Wars, Starr Mazer, Runbow, All-Stars Dungeons and Diamonds, Ghost Police, Mutant Mudds Super Challenge, Pixel Noir, and Mighty Quest.
Shovel Knight characters make cameo appearances in Brawlhalla, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Azure Striker Gunvolt 2, Two Brothers, Yooka-Laylee, Aegis Defenders, The Reward: Tales of Alethrion, River City Ransom: Underground, Creepy Castle, Puzzle Depot, Crypt of the NecroDancer, Enter the Gungeon, Katana Zero, and For Honor. Its music appears in Just Shapes & Beats and Voez. Shovel Knight collaborated with Arby's in March 2021 to release a set of toys, which included Arby's themed cheat codes for the game."[1]
Now imagine an NFT collection that's popular enough to have multiple games wanting to incorporate it into their games (I'd argue at least Bored Ape Yacht Club is this popular, it's being incorporated into many things already). Yes developers would have to spend time or effort coding it, but the buzz and increased sales from being able to advertise integration with that popular NFT collection could mean some media attention and sales they might not otherwise get.
For Indie Game developers in particular it could literally be the difference between getting any attention to their game from the media at all, or not, and thus between success and failure. Hence why Shovel Knight is in so many indie games (with permission from the original creator).
Shovel Knight didn't get popular because it was crossed over into so many games, Shovel Knight got incredibly popular for being one of the best platformers of the decade that kept releasing high quality free DLC.
It was notorious for being a kickstarter that actually gave back. The reason it ended up in so many other games is because it was so popular. The exact same thing happened with UNDERTALE.
> Now imagine an NFT collection that's popular enough to have multiple games wanting to incorporate it into their games(...)
This was *already done* with amiibos. They just weren't NFTs, and were infinitely more efficient. Literally any game developed for the switch has an api to interact with amiibos, the names in amiibos are some of gamings largest characters, and barely anybody uses it.
You are seriously detached from what gamers actually want if you think they'd react positively to Bored Apes being put in WoW. Not only would it be a PR nightmare for the developers of WoW, but they would quite literally gain nothing from it except an expensive, comically inefficient lookup table of hashes to items they don't care about.
It is silly to try to save money on the mechanism for NFTs. That defeats the entire purpose. The entire purpose of of an NFT is to publicly demonstrate that you wasted money on it. This is the case for all status symbols; if you are saving money on it, it loses its value as a status symbol.
As a person that has worked on a product that did NFTs before they reached mainstream [1]: This is not what we were trying to achieve.
And before anyone comes with the classic HN argument that blockchain is a hammer looking for a nail. Sorry no. In 2015, we did what any other startup would do to create a product and talked to a whole lot of customers and did story elicitation.
What customers were interested in was:
- being able to prove the existence and hence authorship of their digital artwork upon creation: blockchain anchoring was a good fit
- being able to make their art digitally ownable (precursors were e.g. Rafaël Rozendaal's ownable TLDs)
- making money from their creations
- transferring/consigning/loaning
- generating a certificate of authenticity
- licensing/copyright claims
Many of these things aren't important in today's modern NFTs anymore. But what the author has created is not what artists were looking for in those days and it's not what they're looking for today. If they did, surely they'd do what the author suggests.
This works if you just want to prove that you and the artist agree that you paid the artist “for” the work.
But, if you can’t transfer it to someone else, is it really a “token” in the relevant sense?
Not that I think there’s much value in the NFTs corresponding to digital images, outside of from people being somewhat silly in what they value,
but this nevertheless doesn’t satisfy all of use-cases of those blockchain tokens.
With those blockchain tokens, as this article mentions, you do have to trust that the author is the actual author, and that they aren’t like, issuing more than they say they are (perhaps using different addresses),
but these are adequately handled by reputation and the author simply having a single well-known-to-be-their-only-official address/public-key .
But, this trust is only needed for the origin of the token, not for resale of the token.
Whereas, with this system, attempting to use these “tokens” as something that can be resold, would be vulnerable to the double spend problem.
Now, if all you want is to be able to prove to others that you and the author agreed that [you paid the author money in relation to the image or other document, and that they received the payment], then 100% yes this is a better solution. Why get an expensive public ledger involved if all you want it is to be able to prove to others is that you and someone else both attested to a particular claim? That sort of thing is exactly solved by public key cryptography.
(If people don’t know your public key is yours, but they do recognize the artist’s public key, there are standard ways to prove you control a key (though not that no one else does))
Whether this serves the purpose that people want NFTs “of”/about digital images to serve, well, that depends on what that purpose is.
And, I’m not sure what that purpose is exactly, seeing as, again, while I recognize the subjectivity of economic value, I still think buying such tokens is kind of silly.
> Without a published chain of transactions, there is no guarantee that the artist hasn't sold the same item multiple times.
That's not the problem. The problem is every "owner" of such item could just copy it and sell it to multiple people. And they would have no way of knowing they are not the unique owner.
Preventing double-spend is the only thing block-chains do that other things don't. That's why they exist.
> Whether that claim can be meaningfully sold on to someone else is outside the scope of this discussion.
The issue of sidestepping future interactions is that such a schema has no meaning. If I go a step further and stipulate that the transaction doesn't need to be proven to third parties then having any schema bar making the transaction itself is completely meaningless!
It is only when you attempt to prove or sell the claim in future, to third parties does such a schema and blockchains have some utility.
An NFT is uniquely addressable by its contract address. Copying it would produce a new address, and it would be obvious the artist is trying to sell the same work again. This is why it is “non-fungible” and what makes it uniquely different from mere files, receipts and signatures.
So you have two unique NFT's claiming ownership of the same piece of art or tweet or whatever. Maybe on different blockchains, maybe not. Now what? Which one is the "real" one that conveys said ownership? How do you prove which one is the "real" one?
When it comes to fake artwork you at least need to be skilled enough to produce a convincing fake, which isn't trivial. In the NFT world anyone can trivially mint an NFT for anything, at any time, so there's no way to prove that "the first one" is the "real" one without relying on a trusted authority outside the blockchain. Thus any need for a blockchain is completely obviated.
Hence “or whichever the distributor/artist says is the real one.”
This does not prove copyright; it merely proves ownership of a token. It still requires a strong social consensus that the token and its addressable hash was indeed distributed by the artist (as in the case of most NFTs that are trading for any significant sum). This is very much like a certificate of authenticity of an artwork as it also requires social consensus (fwiw, a cert is far easier to forge than, say, a CryptoPunk).
Sure. My point being that the blockchain adds nothing useful. Social consensus does all the heavy lifting, the cryptographic signature is an implementation detail, and the blockchain is wholly unnecessary.
The entire point of the distributed ledger is to help secure a stronger social consensus and build a traceable record of value transfer.
Forking or copying a CryptoPunk (or Fidenza, to use an art related comparison) will not do much to sway the consensus that has formed around its contract address and transaction history.
You don't need the distributed ledger to build a traceable record of value transfer though, the PGP NFT itself can be signed with an amendment documenting each transfer.
Eventually you will need a public ledger (to support hundreds of thousands of these signatures), and the choice of making it centralized (mutable) or decentralized (very difficult to change). This is how you end up with a public distributed ledger aka blockchain.
If the first one wins, that would mean that if an artist produced something, someone else makes an NFT even though they don’t actually own the art, then sometime later the artist wants to create their NFT, they’d be shit out of luck.
You assume that the UI/marketplace you're viewing the NFT in doesn't do this for you. If something is sufficiently famous (ie the artist is well know to the UI) it's trivial to validated that an NFT is made by one of those artists and have the equivalent of a twitter blue checkmark.
For stuff that's not sufficiently famous, then the question of duplicates is probably not a real problem. Who cares if someone copies a <$1 digital asset. And if the artist ever becomes famous and is back-filled into the UI's known list, then all their previous works gain the blue checkmark.
These UI's will probably have a few centralized winners (which is why VC's fund crpyto startups) but there can be a long-tail of decentralized UI's as well. How much you care about authenticity will guide you to which UI's your willing to use.
So you make another layer of PGP file where you first make a token/id that indicates you created the file (which ID doesn’t change between transactions).
The problem is it still wouldn’t be obvious because nobody can verify anything.
Yep - I can make an NFT of a CryptoPunk, but since the addressable hash of my contract will be different, probably nobody would see value in acquiring my tokens. Social consensus (and, by extension, tooling and network effects) have built around the original crypto punk contract address, which seems to give it value over any other copy contracts that might be deployed after the fact.
So it’s replicating the worst thing about the art market — the speculation and nonsensical pricing. But without the best thing about the art market — actually owning a piece of art.
That may be one view. Another view is that it allows artists across the globe a digital-first mechanism to distribute and earn revenue on their digital artwork. See Hicetnunc for example.
This view is wrong. The NFT isn't the artwork. Distributing an NFT of the artwork achieves nothing in terms of distributing the artwork. Meanwhile getting paid in return for nothing is called "a donation", and you don't need an NFT for that either.
The entire premise of this article is that a digital signature is analogous to a handwritten signature on a photograph print, in that it turns a mass-produced print into a unique (i.e. non-fungible) object. This is wrong. Digital signatures are themselves fungible, since they are made of digital information. You cannot attach something fungible to something that is also fungible and expect that the result will be non-fungible. A digital signature is like a rubber stamp, not like a handwritten signature.
You seem very certain that a cryptographic signature can never replace a handwritten pencil scribble to enable scarcity and provenance (and non-fungibility). Artists using this technology are less certain. We will see what happens over time.
Generally (with NFTs), the supposed 1-1 mapping of art piece (or other artifact) and token happens on meta-level, right? So for sure, an artist can issue many tokens that represent the same art piece (and don't tell me the token is a hash of the image or whatever; it still can be sold on a different technology, or noise can be added to the image, et cetera). Because of this object-/meta-level mix up, it seems that NFTs guarantee pretty much nothing, they are just great at facilitating speculation, because the whole thing takes so little effort...
If the person/entity minting them commits to only using a particular address/public-key when minting (such that only ones from that address would be regarded as legitimate), then one can still check all the transactions they’ve made, and,
well, if they mint tokens for other files which you don’t know what those files are, and have no way to retrieve them, then yes, you could be uncertain as to whether or not those are essentially the same image but with some noise added.
If there is a list of what all those files are though (maybe the files are all available for download on the author’s website? Doesn’t have to be the author’s, just any source providing each file. Doesn’t need to be a trusted source either.), you could check that none of them are essentially the same.
Though, the reliance on all the images being publicly available, does go against what it seems like the way many seem to want to use NFTs,
and so for the use cases which are completely incompatible with all the images being publicly available (e.g. people who want to be the only person who has access to an image), your point is entirely valid, and there is presumably no way to achieve the use-case that those people seem to want.
As for “what about on other technologies” I think this fits under the “the author should just make well-known all the [address+chain combos] they issue from, and instruct people to treat as illegitimate any which is issued from a [chain+address combo] that is outside of this well-known list as illegitimate” thing.
It doesn’t seem like that serious of an issue?
That being said, I don’t see much point to tokens like these. I’m just talking about "what can be done under different goals + assumptions" .
I highly recommend the new south park post covid special for anyone who still doesn’t understand what an NFT is or who just thinks the whole thing is kind of silly.
Value of NFTs is purely fictional and based on some buzzwords with a spice of ponzi scheme on top of it. People who are into NFTs don't care about the functionality and usefulness at all. They are pulled to NFTs and shitcoins by a old get rich quick marketing tactics.
I can't help but feel like it doesn't even matter if NFTs (and cryptocurrencies) are a scam. At this point just the mere fact that you can provably show some NFT was sold for millions is enough, some people entering these scams will still get rich, it's just the people at the end that won't. But looking at it this way, there are plenty of people willing to take the risk to try and be those early people that get the money and don't get screwed, so it doesn't really matter if it's a scam or not in the end.
>But how can you prove that you've paid an artist for a specific piece of work?
Again, another author talking about NFTs who doesn't understand what an NFT signifies. An NFT does not confer ownership of the underlying work it just confers ownership of the NFT itself, unless you ALSO agree to a secondary contract in the process of buying the NFT. Which, at that point, you've just negated the supposed value of owning the NFT in the first place.
That seemed reasonable because almost everyone selling NFTs conflates the two unless pressed. The way the community talks to journalists and potential customers seems very bait and switch — go through this thread alone and see how many people are talking about ownership without even a tiny footnote saying “… of the receipt, not the referenced URL”.
An NFT is not the artwork. In an extreme simplification of the actual technology, an NFT is _conceptually_ an identifier of the form:
(Blockchain, Publish Date, Comment, Unique ID, Signature)
Ownership of this token is independently verifiable. It’s creation date is independently verifiable. It is transferable via a decentralized market. It is transferable only by the owner. The creator of this token cannot sell multiple, because the token is unique and can only belong to one individual. The token cannot be sold on a different blockchain, because it’s only valid on the blockchain it belongs to. Even if the Token’s creator later creates and sells similar tokens, this token is unique and only one person owns it.
One use case for NFTs is to act as a _public_ digital certificate of authenticity. Extra emphasis on _public_. When an NFT is published, it is published with all of the above independently verifiable information.
If today Quentin Tarantino publishes an NFT on Ethereum claiming ownership of frame ‘X’ of Pulp Fiction on Ethereum, it would _conceptually_ look something like this:
(Ethereum, 12/18/2021, “Pulp Fiction Frame X”, “043f6ca3-f445-46f1-a048-5613d512a7d0”, “xoxo QT”)
If tomorrow he decides to publish a new NFT on Ethereum claiming ownership of the very same frame ‘X’ of Pulp Fiction, it would look like this:
(Ethereum, 12/19/2021, “Pulp Fiction Frame X”, “ 17aff37e-74f7-4e3e-b5bc-e023c2ded975”, “xoxo QT”)
These two tokens cannot be mistaken for each other. This is why NFTs are conceptually and technologically useful.
Compare this to physical collectibles, for example artwork. If you had an original painting and a forgery that was identified down to the atom level, but you could verify which one was the original, someone would still value the original more than the forgery.
Don’t be mistaken, the NFT landscape today still warrants skepticism and criticism over the concept of ownership many are trying to sell. Many people are being tricked into investing into NFTs thinking what they are purchasing is some actual ownership or copyright of a digital artifact. In the scenario described above there is nothing inherently preventing Quentin Tarantino from selling millions of certificates of ownership for that frame of Pulp Fiction. But one thing he cannot do is sell more than one copy of the NFT he made today, because there can only be one.
Can someone ELI5 why at least some of the problems mentioned can't be solved by a third-party escrow[0]? There even already exist "Internet Escrow" companies, per that article.
The escrow can provide a signed message to the effect, "I, Jess Crow, have received .01BTC from Joe Buyer, and on receipt of signed assurance from Joe Buyer that monkey.jpg has been received by them in satisfactory condition, I have disbursed that amount (less my fees) to Sue Seller who has acknowledged receipt."
This at least removes the question, "was the transaction price as stated, and was it actually paid". It reduces the motivation for fake transactions (immediate kickback to buyer) because of the fee paid to the escrow.
Escrow could be performed in the same, informal way as proposed in the topic article.
Yeah it was never about the so called art, it's just the latest way to hype up and get people to fork over cash for something that's functionally the same as buying crypto anyway. Though you do get the bonus tax evasion, so that's neat.
Perhaps the biggest problem that the author does not identify is lack of timestamping. Thus their schema provides strictly weaker guarentees than NFTs as they exist today.
Timestamping would have to rely on a trusted third party (an example being publishing the transaction on twitter which already has an identity mechanism, provides timestamping and does not allow editing) or inventing a blockchain like mechanism to reduce the influence on the third party (twitter COULD disable your account and make those tweets unavailable after all).
Without publicly verifiable timestamping verifying multiple sale is incredibly difficult, as is guarentee of future unique ownership. Apart from this the author is very on point with his criticisms and I believe most do not realise the limitations of what NFTs can achieve by themselves.
It hurts a lot when the shit hits the fan and you notice things that were clear all the time and you just didn't notice it before because you didn't want it to be true.
Git. You want git. Git does this. Please use git. You can even validate your transactions with a hook.
I've joked about making a satire product website for a revolutionary new crypto. And because most people deep into NFTs have no idea how it works, I'd bet they'd love it. GitCoin? I'm out of energy, feel free to steal this idea.
Originally I meant author of the piece who would confirm the sale. But basically anyone who feels like writing into the commit log, which can be a creator, a consumer for confirmation, a trustee or a clearing entity that creates merge commits. Even multiple commits by the same person are thinkable if there are handshakes.
> The whole point of a blockchain is for people who can’t trust each other.
I guess that's a very valid point and from my understanding the anonymity baked in is quite unique. And yet, even if I bought say coffee from an independent online market. Probably it's good to have a chain of trust to the seller to know that it's high quality. (Like Amazon reviews)
After all this is what GPG or x509 provide, a chain of trust.
You can achieve consensus at small scale with an empty merge commit that merges several commits made by a quorum of trusted authors. You do not need to solve consensus at a large scale with no trust, and you cannot solve consensus at a large scale with no trust. Bitcoin has some mathematical approximations, but they are approximations, and the 51% attack is not only possible, but highly feasible. There's a reason why " six confirmations" was a long-lasting meme in the Bitcoin community
That's actually kinda funny because at first I couldn't think of a single reason why that doesn't solve exactly the same problem.
I guess you can't prove who is 'in control' of the repo - the author could have sold the key privately and there's no way to tell if they sold it to multiple new owners.
Kinda like art in the 'real world' - you can 'prove' its the original but no way to tell whos hands its changed through over the years.
Just because they don’t know how to verify it doesn’t mean it isn’t important to them. They just need someone to be able to. If you can’t verify a fork, then you aren’t going to be able to sell your coins, and everyone wants to be able to do that.
> How would you gain consensus on which git repo is the original?
That is a problem with blockchain just as much. The only way to know what the original is, is to listen to the central authority here, which is the artist.
It’s the main branch of the canonical repo on Github, obviously, and there is an automatic test to verify the ledger.
But now you have to decide who to trust as committers and they have to decide which pull requests to commit first. This might not scale as well as we hope. Transaction latency might be a little high.
If defi hacks can be conceivably clawed back under legal threat, I don’t see why a legal structure like a foundation can’t be relied upon to onboard new administrators of the Git repo.
We could use something like multi-signature Git commits [1] to enforce repo integrity. Clients could cross-check the signatures against an approved list published by foundation members. Anyone who co-signs an unapproved fork of the foundation’s repo could have their shares in the foundation slashed.
Post a ledger containing $JPEG balances to the Git repo, and require prospective foundation members obtain N JPEGs to apply for membership.
The ledger would operate at a snail’s pace, but “blockchains don’t scale”. We’d just need someone to design the “L2” of Git.
Is the way people can tell which blockchain is a fork because it is shorter than the original? And it is shorter because of the difficulty of adding blocks via proof of work?
The valid fork is the one with the most blocks that adhere to the rules of consensus. Most “forks” have changed the consensus rules, which is why they’re “forks” rather than the canonical chain.
blockchain should have been called timechain, it’s a timestamping service
To know who was first, you can just record timetables with git and have various mirrors - if you can trust them to be adversarial such that if one alters its history that mirror gets flagged and rejected, then you have a distributed timestamp you can trust - but at some level of distribution and automation you reinvent blockchain
P.S.: This is of course a joke - pretty sure that the GP had a more rather than less restrictive definition of "blockchain" in mind ? (So I agree with you.)
I have a similar draft for this in progress (using signed PDFs instead of GPG), where I realised that you can do a lot with a Merkle Tree (Git) alongside a convention set on the public Cert Transparency log.
Effectively using the CT log as a cheap side-chain of sorts (LetsEncrypt!).
Something I realized: NFTs are basically "adoptables" from DeviantArt, with crypto mumbo jumbo attesting that you have adopted the adoptable, instead of relying on the community. A lot of the artwork involved even looks like adoptables.
There's going to be a bunch of new laws after enough people lose all their money, especially if they are the adult children of the ruling class in Washington D.C.
For anyone that still thinks that NFTs are only meant to be overpriced jpegs to be used for money laundering, consider two different projects: ENS [0] and Unlock Protocol [1].
ENS treats domain names like NFTs. So we can have applications that use your ENS domain as your identity, it can work as a decentralized / uncensorable alternative to OpenID, it can be used as an actual domain (you can use <your ens name>.eth.link to redirect to a IPNS name for instance, and the ENS devs are working to get a top-level domain that can integrate with actual DNS.
Unlock uses NFTs as keys for access control. This means that you could have decentralized alternatives to substack or any kind of paywalled content, but one thought that really interests me is that we could imagine in the future that kind of service provider will not be able to lock you into a contract, and we will be able to avoid any type of billing overcharges of surprise bills. Coupled with the idea of "streaming payments" (i.e, periodic transfers of micro-payments), we could be able to run subscription services by the hour/minute/second, and to cancel it you can simply close the payment stream.
This raises a very interesting point. Much of the problems with blockchain's, i.e. proof-of-work, on-chain transactions needing everyone to know about them, are because there are no central authorities baked into the design that can behave in opaque ways.
Yet, centralized services still spring up to handle transactions: OpenSea for NFTs, Coinbase for cryptocoin transactions. These services in turn still rely on a sea of middlemen which take a cut, or "gas" fees for their work. If you are transfering coins among several services then there are fees for each transfer, etc.
So tying this back to present day, mainstream, finance: When you run a credit card there are several middlemen between the cardholder and the merchant. This diagram (https://merchantcostconsulting.com/lower-credit-card-process...) suggests 4 intermediaries, each taking a cut.
In theory each of these provides a service - but how many are required in modern times? Let's say that the cardholder just wants to pay the merchant, and the merchant wants to maximize their take. In cryptocoin-land you would have a direct transaction with the merchant. This works because you cannot double pay. In trad-finance land you need to have your issuing bank state that you have the funds. Credit cards provide a level of abstraction where the merchant gets paid now and the credit card provider collects later. This all happens live.
What if instead you had a system where:
- Card holder uses a computing device (say a smartphone with TPM) and that cryptographically signs transactions to say that the card holder requested this.
- Issuing bank gives the card holder a signed certificate each week saying: This is account holder #XXXXX. They can purchase up to $YYY at one time.
- Card holder provides the cert to merchant upon wanting to make a purchase along with a signed receipt indicating a transfer of money. You could add a pin to be entered on each transaction as 2FA.
- Merchant gets this crypto-receipt and has some reasonable amount of time to turn it in to the issuing bank (say 1 month) and collect payment.
- Issuing bank gives merchant money for receipt and charges account holder. Account holder does normal procedures of paying for things, complaining about charges, etc.
This scheme has a few advantages and feels very similar to how I sort of understand credit cards work in Europe.
- Issuing bank can get a larger take since there are less intermediaries.
- Merchant can get a larger take since there can be less fees.
- There is a reasonable assurance of lack of fraud due to 2FA, and TPM storing signing key.
- This does not require live internet access nor live responses.
Why is there nothing like this? What are the drawbacks? Tying back to the parent discussion, is this a reasonable optimization on top of crypocurrency as it exists today?
What stops someone from sending (large number) of transactions which each spend less than $YYY at any one time, but total much more than their balance?
If you have an actual person named and you have their street address and whatnot, you (rather, the bank) can hold them accountable for the missing money using like, laws and courts, but, if this is all pseudonymous internet money, there doesn’t seem to be much recourse?
So, in that case, the case where you have no recourse if they don’t actually have all that they’ve paid, it is important to be able to verify their current account balance including all transactions they’ve made so far, not just ones that have already been fully processed (or at least, be able to provide the good or service in a way that only takes effect insofar as they end up actually having enough money to pay).
If you could somehow limit the number of transactions they are capable of making in the given amount of time, what you said could work, but I don’t see how to achieve that?
I guess maybe if the computational cost of making a transaction was large enough, you could make the limit on the size of individual transactions small enough that they couldn’t produce enough to use their whole balance within the allotted time period, because they don’t have enough computational resources?
But then how do you know how much computational resources they have?
Seems like this could result in mining farms being able to spend more than they have.
Though, if this attack was only possible with a large hardware investment, one could still detect the attack afterwards, and just, delete the money spent this way?
Oh, or, if one can’t spend money that one got since the previous periodic amount of time, needing to wait until the next signed message from the bank, then, there would be no transactions that are only seemingly valid because of the invalid ones,
and so, then you just have people not getting the money they were expecting,
But if the only way this can happen is if someone makes a really big number of transactions, then probably many of the recipients were in on the scheme, and so them not getting the money is maybe fine??
Hm. But not clear how you could determine which ones were in on the scheme and which ones would be unfairly harmed by not getting the money they were promised.
Though, if you are going to have a bank centralizing things, why not just, send the transactions through the bank? Are they any more of a middleman when they process the transactions as part of the paying the money instead of later?
> Without a verified on-chain transaction, there is a risk that either the buyer or the seller may be lying about the transaction price.
I mean, this is kind of the whole point - the published record on the chain is what actually matters. I don't like NFTs, but the anti-NFT crowd doesn't seem to get it and that is just as frustrating. People value status signaling tools. A lot. Image 99 of 1000 isn't a status signaling tool, showing you paid for the image is, the verifiable receipt is what matters.
This article is like suggesting the signature on art is what matters, but what matters is the actual provenance.