My comic books I've been keeping around since the 90s are feeling insulted. At least with those I can still read them if I decide to break the seal. A NFT doesn't offer that.
> At least with those I can still read them if I decide to break the seal.
Are there also digital versions available?
I'd be surprised if a noticeable percentage of the value of your comic books is that you can read them. It seems like it's essentially 0% to me -- almost as baseless as an NFT, and makes me think some sort of functionality isn't actually needed for lots of people to agree that something is valuable for a long time.
> I'd be surprised if a noticeable percentage of the value of your comic books is that you can read them.
Value in whose eyes, though? The commenter seemed to be stating that the utility provided by being able to read the comics is valuable _to them_. There are also a number of other uses for a physical comic book that provide "value": you could frame individual pages, use the book as kindling, etc. You can't do any of those things with a NFT.
And yet it would seem I can read it right there on the internet for free, and can surely get framed prints of individual pages much cheaper than 3.2 million dollars, and I can get kindling much cheaper than 3.2 million dollars. You can point at those things as properties it has that an NFT doesn't. But those things aren't what's making it worth 3.2 million dollars
It's worth 3.2 million dollars because someone trusts that it's worth 3.2 million dollars to other people. Value like this is an exercise in group trust that has had to build up over time. It's not actually a property of the functionality of the object
The object and guarantee of uniqueness are one and the same, there's no required group trust. I have the comic, I own the comic. The comic is unique and the rareness and desirability of the comic assigns it value. The NFT is divorced from the thing it owns, but somehow the NFT is the thing that assigns ownership and value. A perfect copy of "Charlie bit my finger" can be replicated trivially nearly instantly. There is no value there. The NFT is the thing that carries the value in that situation because the video being collected isn't rare, unique, or special.
The problem is the difference between a collector's market and a speculators market. A collector assigns value because you can read it or because of legitimate rarity at the time or other personal issues. A speculator just hitches on to "first appearance of!" issues of popular characters and slabs them up to resell.
Like for example, something like First Comics's Warp is incredibly valuable to me, because it's a comics adaptation/spin-off of an old science fiction stage play that doesn't seem to even exist any more. (By Stuart Gordon of Re-animator fame, no less.)
It's not the popular first appearance of a Marvel character we've seen for 50 years, but it's much more of a historical rarity imo. There's a lot of things which are of value to collectors less than speculators; something like trying to collect a lot of Carl Banks's Disney books simply because of the sheer quality of them for example. Or loving independent comics of the 90s and trying to track down the beginnings of the furry movement; Albedo, Hepcats, Omaha the Cat Dancer, etc. There are whole teams that are just ignored by the speculators; Wally Wood's DNagents for example.
It's just the speculators market is just actually trying to flip really common comics that are evergreen. Those really have little value to them; stuff like Spiderman's first symbiote costume appearance wasn't really that earth shattering a story. Secret Wars was kind of a lame crossover for its time and i doubt would even be considered one of the great crossovers. That's why its main interests are mostly forgotten, like the Beyonder or Molecule Man.
So yes, some of the value is in reading the comic itself. It's just the market is weird and never reflects it. Did you know the first video game tie in comic dates back to the Atari age, with DC's release of Atari Force? And it actually was a serious, decent SF comic? Yet you could probably find it in a store's dollar bins, while a spiderman or punisher apperance that was really common at the time is considered valuable even if all the story does is introduce something kind of commonplace or unspectacular.
Sorry this is one of my passion things, I'll get back to my usual growly self soon.
I could be misreading or mis-communicating, but I don't see any disagreement here. When we look at the big price tags of some comic books, it sounds like you're saying it's 99% speculation, which is hardly different from an NFT that's 100% speculation
I'm not trying to categorically throw shade at comic books, and I appreciate you citing a whole bunch of comics that are ignored by speculators but which have a lot of value to you. But that seems like it's exactly in line with my point, that NFTs aren't that new and different from other stuff we've seen before, which is comparably absurd; they're 100% speculation, but we've seen assets that are 99% speculation and manage to hang on for quite a while
At least you can hold an autographed baseball or baseball card, for example, it's a tangible thing that a baseball player took the time to autograph.
The NFT cards with fake / digital signatures are particularly pathetic.
Or the way a physical card is designed, the way it looks in real lighting, the way its material properties exist and interact in physical space. There are qualities to that, and the manufacturing process involved, that you can never replicate with NFT collectibles. The same is true with physical vs digital art. Art hanging on the wall can have a majestic quality when it dances with lighting; digital art is flat garbage by comparison in that respect (even when it's really good digital art; it's bound to a screen in most cases). Manufacturing a nice physical collectible card to a high quality specification is dramatically more difficult than spitting out NFT cards by the zillions; quality control is a huge challenge in collectible cards. There's a scarcity effect generated in physical collectibles like cards, in regards to quality of manufacturing (damage, corners, centering, errors, etc), that doesn't exist in NFTs (unless you intentionally fake that, which would be something beyond stupid).
There are many aspects of physical vs NFT collectibles, where the NFTs will never be able to compete, not under any circumstances. And there are almost no benefits that an NFT has over a physical collectible, with the supposed simplicity of digital storage & transacting being the primary (which also has an obvious, huge risk / downside associated with it simultaneously).
Oh I agree, but let’s not kid ourselves—the market around them is the same in abstract.
For all the physical properties of a material thing we might admire, someone else might admire an NFT for the lack of those properties and inclusion of others.
There might be no more further reconciling than that. People will like what they like, they’ll pursue what they pursue, and sometimes they will enjoy their share of delusions. At least it keeps life interesting.
At least some are people who want to make quick $$$ and have missed out getting in to the cryptos early on. My sample size is exactly three, but one friend and two co-workers have been putting their savings to NFTs and been rather vocal at that. Preaching the ingenuity of them. And how they are going to explode in value in few years time. As far as I can tell, profit is their only motive.
Who knows. Maybe they will. Maybe not. But at least I’ve tried to remind my friend that it is a highly speculative asset. And that she should not put in more money than she is ready to lose. All or most of it.
Hindsight bias. If Superman Comic #1 would come out today, it would not be worth that much. So the reason that the second is less valuable is not because of "the nature of #2" but because NFT was a bubble and overhyped.
NFTs have been around for years, but the first ones are not really more valuable than the new ones caught up in the current hype phase. The market cap for Crypokitties peaked at 21 million in 2017, the recent peak was at only 3 million.
But Action Comics number 2 is still tremendously valuable. In the Golden Age of comics, collecting comic books and preserving them was not the hobby it would become. So there are very few copies today, but not because anyone set out to make them scarce in any way. Quite the contrary, in fact. DC would surely have printed many more copies if they believed they would have sold.
Yeah, it was kids that bought them at a nickel or whatever they were, and were treated as such for a very long time. Same thing can be said of stamps, hot wheels, barbis, baseball cards, pre war Native American handicrafts, CRT monitors, electric guitars... whatever. Even the super high end side of things of art, cars or numismatics had relatively humble origins. Money always cost what the money was worth. Cars were used and tossed; on the luxury end of Duesenbergs or Bugattis being discarded cheaply in their time. The concept of a starving artist has been around for hundreds of years, and the original patrons were picking up impressionist art for cheap.
Collectibility needs a few things in the equation: rarity and here is the _big_ component, some shared nostalgia or cultural history. NFTs don't have that really any of these things.
I would argue too that the scarcity of a collectible needs to be organic for whatever specific reason.
Taking the example of fine art, there is a clear reason that an original piece is unique. When artists release numbered prints, the buyers are aware that the numbering could have continued but the print run was stopped at an arbitrary point. For this reason, they are rarely anywhere near as valuable.
These days “chase” sports cards are often given extremely low print runs of just a few or even one copy. But in my view they will never have the collector appeal of older cards that are rare in large part because few of them happened to survive.
Creating artificial scarcity is an obvious way to manipulate collectors, and NFTs are completely built around that practice.
Absolutely, there is a reason for the scarcity and people will put value on that. One carve out may be things like SUPREME, or some rare Air Force Ones, but that probably boils down the amazing marketing on their part, and may not stand up to the test of time. Clothing is kinda a weird one, as fashion is cyclical and the nature of collecting means you don't use it. The only things I think commanding huge prices are dead stock 1890's Levis or band tour shirts (which I would argue are not so much "fashion", as it more of the cultural relevance of the band). When adjusted for inflation, old high-end haute couture come out to be around what they cost back in the day and this can be said of pretty much all clothing, jeans being an exception.
Eh, it works with video games though. A few companies like Limited Run games release physical copies of digital games banking on artificial scarcity to drive sales, and that scarcity really drives up prices on the secondhand market. This is despite the fact that you can buy the game for $5 on a digital storefront. Something like Celeste for example.
There are other examples where you are right though. Comics in general with variant or the dreaded hologram colors were an attempt to do so, and it's kind of rare to see them valued today.
Tax evasion is what i think is happening here, like in art. Person owns 20 paintings. Person 1 sells 1 painting at auction to person 2, establishing a high price. Now he has 19 comparable paintings which can be donated to an art museum and get a tax writeoff which is anchored to the priced painting as a comp. Next year the buyer/seller swap roles, so they don't care about the price, they actually want as outrageous a price as possible.
This is really not it for the most part it. The thing is there are a bunch of people that are really really rich and they're creating this NFT economy powered by cryptocurrency. The high ticket NFT sales are a way of shoveling tens of millions of dollars into this economy to fuel it's growth. If they succeed it's a cheap land grab for them, if they fail they won't miss the money they "lost" on NFTs, because they really are that rich.
Same. Give me the ability to hold fractional ownership of real-world assets (e.g., real estate, buildings, resources, etc.). I'm not interested in a 100% speculative concept without having real-world assets backing it up.
Now I want to buy a $10 million NFT of a doodle of a bridge at a garage sale for 50 cents.
The questions are:
How were the the "dumb money" NFT buyers ever going to liquidate their "investments" on the other side?
Did they ever intend to cash-out or just show-off how much money they can burn?
Or is it 95% blackmarket money (i.e., drugs, sex slavery, worker slavery) that had nowhere to go except buried in the ground or in the walls of houses?
I don’t understand the money laundering theory. There are a hundred liquid crypto assets to use for that. Big NFTs are high visibility and worthless so it’s the worst of all worlds
It's because there's no price, so you can use it to justify money that came from elsewhere. Like if I made a million dollars selling drugs, I can put up an NFT, create a straw buyer (really me) who buys it from me for a million dollars, and now my black money has turned into white money.
Doesn't make sense to me. Say I have 1 million dollars of BTC that was stolen, what NFT would I buy so that I can later claim my 1 million is legal? In theory, you would say just create an NFT but in practice that wouldn't work or remotely be easy. I would have to create an NFT that is worth say 100 dollars and pretend it went to 1 million. There has to be a justification with previous sells of similar NFTs etc. This is a case where theory and practice doesn't match.
Yes in fact artwork has traditionally been used for this sort of thing as well. It's the kind of thing that could sell for a million dollars, without any way for an outsider to determine that this is a fair price. NFTs just supercharge this dynamic.
Exactly. There isn't enough artwork that has enough value. NFTs create "artwork" out of (almost) nowhere to satisfy the limited market of people with too much money to hide or wash.
I've always said the best money-laundering / money-stashing instrument are paintings in a rugged floating tube that can be stashed in a yacht equipped with salt plugs in-case it ever went down.
I'd agree with this, while it may be possible, if you can already launder the coins just stick with that and forget about the NFT angle which would just be more surface area for a mistake.
You can tumble coins so they can't be associated with the dirty wallet they're from, but that doesn't explain how you ended up with the coins. "someone sent me a million dollars of crypto for no reason" isn't very believable. "someone bought my NFT" is less unreasoable.
The tumbling thing has yet to keep anyone out of jail as far as I know, and the origin of the money you better hope was as careful? I dunno. I see what you're saying, but a lot of crime tries to be two sets of books or whatever and they still go to jail.
People have this idea that because NFTs are selling for $10M some moron must think that particular NFT is worth $10M and have spent $10M to buy it - presumably thinking it will be worth even more in the future and s/he can sell for a profit.
What an idiot, most people think...
However, it could just be that people are buying NFTs from themselves (like CryptoKitties) for massive sums, to attract the interest of get-rich-quick retail investors to spend ~$100 dollars on NFTs - just in case they're suddenly worth $10M a piece in a month. FOMO.
It's not like retail investors investing millions of dollars into NFTs. They don't have millions of dollars in the first place!
That buyer most definitely wasn't some normal middle class person. He was someone well known in the NFT space who also runs an investment fund related to NFT's.
The Christie's beeple auction was a normal middle class person? If you are referring to the $69million Beeple auction held by Christie's that buyer was Metakoven. Who is if the financial backer of an NFT investment fund called Metapurse. So he absolutely wasn't some normal middle class person.
Is there any proof that he got the vast majority of the proceeds immediately as encumbered cash? Maybe this is just my cynicism, but I would expect that he would receive partner shares in the fund that purchased his work. Probably the same with Masterworks, or any other art scam pumping on Facebook.
Shilling-bidding in a comparables marketplace. Gotcha.
I should bring crime and decay to the neighborhood, buy my neighbors' houses out, and then sell my own house to myself for $10 million. Who wants to invest? Now offering NFTs as stock. :B
The metric is the amount of transactions, because NFTs don't have a market price. Since each is unique (mostly), they have to be sold on something that works like eBay auctions. There's no liquid market where identical shares are traded and the bid and ask prices are reasonably close, like the NASDAQ.
So NFT markets don't crash, they stall. As I mentioned previously, this works just like Beanie Babies on eBay. High asking prices, no bids.
I never got the hate for NFTs. It seemed like the logic translation of collectibles from the phyiscal world into the digital world.
If an artist makes a painting, that original painting has collectible value. If the same artist makes copies of it, those copies have less value. That seems to make sense to most people.
Now imagine if an artist makes a digital painting. Is that work of art any less meaningful or valuable? Of course not. But there's been no way to define an "original" in the digital art form, and so there's been no way to assign collectability to digital works of art. NFTs seem to provide a way for an artist and fans to collectively agree that some digital object is the original, and to treat it as such.
The bonus is that it provides another avenue for digital artists to make money, which to my mind is always a good thing.
I get that the concept is hard to wrap our brains around, because at the end of the day it's a collective delusion. Everyone just agrees to say that some arbitrary string of bytes is the "original" and anything that comes after it isn't. But ultimately how is that different from the arbitrary rules we use to define which physical object is the "original" and why those arbitrary rules define value.
That said, I haven't looked too deeply into the technical side of NFTs, so this is more my take on the concept than the application. I'm sure there's slews of caveats, like how most NFTs only store a hash, the importance of exchanges, etc. And I totally agree that the market was in a huge bubble, so that's definitely worth criticizing (to an extent; I mean people can do whatever the hell they want with their money ultimately.)
Is there a flaw in my take here? Are NFTs somehow more arbitrary and asinine than other collectible markets simply because they're digital? Or is everyone hating because hating new technology is as cool as it has ever been? I suppose Dropbox did turn out to just be git+rsync, so shrug /s
One of the main complaints was that minting and selling NFTs was incredibly expensive - not just in terms of the USD cost of the fees, but the amount of proof-of-work compute involved. I think if they had launched on a proof of stake network people would have been way less negative on them.
This is my primary objection (and an objection to crypto in general as well).
You have a meme, and someone sells you a little laminated card saying "I own the meme at this URL", and all it costs is $80,000 and you have to burn down an acre of rainforest. It's purely asinine in every respect, and, like a lot of crypto, is basically just a gold rush plus pyramid scheme.
>Now imagine if an artist makes a digital painting. Is that work of art any less meaningful or valuable? Of course not.
Of course yes it is - its less valuable after it is created because copying it costs nothing.
Valuing a work above the creation cost of the work is what the art world certainly does, but replicas of the art are still valuable for being appealing and taking some work to create - a digital version is appealing but takes so little work to create and store that its hard to justify the rest of the collective delusion.
Adding scarcity to non-scarce things is just stupid.
You appear to be assuming that painting something with a brush is substantially more time consuming than painting something with a drawing tablet. Other than maybe mixing the paint and letting it dry, the effort seems to be able to same
My sentence might be a little confusing - I don't believe that - when I say create the digital version I mean the copy - the initial act of creation (imo) is still highly valued because it creates something from nothing digitally or not, pixels or not.
A marble sculptor shouldn't be valued more than a digital sculptor, its really just about time and effort either way.
The difference is not in the original but in the copies. A copy of a painting can be a work of art, but it is different. It did not sit at the artists' atelier, it hasn't traveled through different places to finally hang at the buyer's living room.
That is not the case for digital works. If we get strict about it, everything apart from the original file sitting in the artists' computer disks are copies. The file you downloaded after purchasing your "original" is a copy.
Presumably the bronze sculpture was still produced with the authorization of the artist in a limited series and thus still represents their original work and intent. I think the key difference is that viewing a sculpture doesn't implicitly grant me a perfect replica of said sculpture that I would be free to save, duplicate, and even mint my own NFT for were I so inclined. Digital objects are not scarce in the way that physical objects are.
That depends. If that sculpture survived decades or centuries and then put on display in a museum far removed from the ability to recreate that sculpture from the original molds, then in a way, yes, it is an original.
However, if the molds are still available and another can be cast and finished, then no.
Still a specific instance of an unoriginal item might be special. It could have been painted post-casting by someone famous, or survived a war or shipwreck, and so forth. Originality is now no longer a distinguishing aspect of the sculpture's value.
> A copy of a painting can be a work of art, but it is different. It did not sit at the artists' atelier, it hasn't traveled through different places to finally hang at the buyer's living room.
Yes, and a copy of a digital work still has some value, but there's only one NFT that the artist issued to represent ownership of the digital work. These are precisely identical stories. Even if you could create a physical copy of a physical painting with arbitrarily high fidelity (perhaps at the atomic level), there would still only be one painting that sat in the artist's studio, and I suspect the art world would still only value that one as the original.
In other words, the fidelity with which one can create copies of an original work is irrelevant to the determination and valuation of originality.
There's something here which I'm not following. are you equating the timeeffortskill with the value?
It seems like you might be interpreting the word "value" in a different way than the previous comment meant.
> Of course yes it is - its less valuable after it is created because copying it costs nothing.
I think you can apply that same argument to something like a normal painting. Sure, the price for making copy isn’t zero, but it’s practically zero when comparing to the millions of dollars that the most expensive paintings are sold for. So why do people pay so much then? Because they want the original. That also applies for wanting to own the original version of a digital painting.
> But ultimately how is that different from the arbitrary rules we use to define which physical object is the "original" and why those arbitrary rules define value.
It's different because the artist actually put their brush on the original canvas, but not the copies. I could buy that the emphasis we put on the original having more value is arbitrary, but there's nothing actually arbitrary about selecting which painting is _the original_.
The problem I see with NFTs is that the arbitrariness is shifted from deciding which piece has value (original vs copy) to which one is _the original_ (copy A or copy B). They're both copies.
> It's different because the artist actually put their brush on the original canvas, but not the copies.
And, identically, the NFT of a digital work is different from copies of the digital work because the artist actually issued the NFT.
> I could buy that the emphasis we put on the original having more value is arbitrary, but there's nothing actually arbitrary about selecting which painting is _the original_.
And again, the situation with NFTs is identical. There's nothing arbitrary about determining the NFT issued by the artist and who controls that NFT (assuming the NFT blockchain technology works as intended), in fact it should be much easier than determining the originality of a famous painting.
NFTs have no mechanism to define originality, or even atomicity (an NFT might have a single owner, but it points to something external for which countless NFTs might point). It isn't a copyright grant, a contract, legal ownership, or even a binary container (beyond some token tiny amount).
I don't think it's "hate" for people to marvel at the insanity that are NFTs. You have people literally posting and selling NFTs for other people's creations. And even if those people post NFTs, their NFTs have no additional claim to what they represent than the other people, beyond some social "oh that's the guy who made all of those crummy doodles".
There is a notion of digital ownership, copyright assignment, etc. NFT is an extremely poor proxy for any of those.
Owning a rare gun skin in CS:GO is much more "real" than an NFT is.
> It isn't a copyright grant, a contract, legal ownership
Exactly the problem. If these were used to prove legal ownership of real assets, whether they be intellectual or physical, they would have value. Selling individually numbered digital pet rocks is not valuable.
You've inspired me to add NFT DRM to my Pet Rock Remote Control, so you can cryptographically lock your remote control to the digital pet rocks you own, so that nobody else but you can send them commands to "sit", "stay", "play dead", "roll over", etc.
>NFTs have no mechanism to define originality, or even atomicity.
It always links to a wallet and thus proves originality. You're right, anyone can mint a mona lisa and claim it's a van gogh, but if it wasn't minted using van goghs wallet, it's not van gogh.
>It isn't a copyright grant, a contract, legal ownership, or even a binary container
Say i have an octopus NFT. I am the only person who can transfer ownership of my octopus. you don't need 'Legal' ownership, this is real 'ownership' of my keys. You can show that this EXACT Octopus sold for $50m and was previously held by a wallet associated with mark cuban. Yes, some random can make a duplicate octopus but it won't be created by my wallet, mark cuban wouldn't have previously owned it and it wouldn't have previously sold for $50m in the metadata.
>Owning a rare gun skin in CS:GO is much more "real" than an NFT is.
How many people own the 'Rare gun skin in CS:GO? would you trust the company if they said only 5 people owned that rare gun skin? What's stopping them from infinitely minting the rare gun skin and saying there's only 100 of them. Would you be willing to pay more for the CS Skin if only 100 people could have it, than if it was inifinite? If CS:GO was to adopt a standard blockchain for the sale of their NFT's, you could see exactly who had what skins and what the bidding price is for them. Complete transparency in scarcity.
I am Leonardo da Vinci. My wallet is ABC. Would you like to buy the Mona Lisa?
I am NYC. My wallet is CBA. Would you like to buy the Brooklyn Bridge?
The notion that a wallet is authoritative is not grounded in reality. There is no central authority. There is no registry. There is no legal correlation.
And your Octopus NFT isn't an Octopus NFT, it's an NFT with a pointer to a reference that points to an octopus. Great, now I just minted an Octopus NFT with a pointer to a reference that points to the same octopus. Now what?
But you're claiming that we need to backtrace each NFT to some wallet which somehow (even though there is no authority, by design) I guess we'll find a MySpace posting by Mark Cuban saying it was his NFT. It borders on parody.
Could Valve "mint" guns through a blockchain? Sure, they could. There is another game (an F1 game) where they do something similar for tradeables. But that is neither here nor there with the reality that NFTs as currently implemented are effectively equivalent to selling certificates offering people a plot of land on Jupiter.
You're right, the crux of the argument is whether you believe wallets have authority. I regularly interact with crypto, have participated in ICO's and have bought and sold NFT's. People who are into NFT's do believe in the authority of wallets. Granted, they are about authoritative as a hacker news display name. I can ping the wallet and see if this wallets monikor has a large amount of crypto, see their past transactions, decentralized social media's, etc. A wallet only gains authority slowly as someone uses it. Say a particular NFT was sold by _X_, which is a big name who has sold alot of cool digital art in the past. If I duplicate the Art, or use a pointer to the same reference it was never generated, nor sold by _X_. The art is only half the story and within NFT's the other half is the transaction history and how you got it. It's cool to look at different transactions, how much it was sold for, etc. Also, dismissing NFT's because art is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There are alot more uses for them, it just seems like people like to talk trash on things other people just generally think are cool and quirky.
> NFTs seem to provide a way for an artist and fans to collectively agree that some digital object is the original, and to treat it as such.
The point is that it remains to be seen if humans actually care if we declare "ownership" in this way, when as a non-owner I can see and get access to the exact same bits as the "owner".
With physical goods, even though the value assigned to an "original" is arbitrary, it does seem that humans care more about "I know this collection of atoms is the original, and no one else can copy this same collection of atoms" that just the idea that there is a record of ownership on some blockchain.
Exactly this. Not only that, the original will have minor differences in implementation that are impossible to copy due to the physical limitation.
To contrast, every digital good is exactly the same as the original. Heck, once the computer is turned off the first time, the original is technically gone, and a new copy was made when the computer turned back on.
The concept of originality goes away on a digital world.
You can also get a reproduction of a famous painting that is indistinguishable from the original to all but a small group of experts (and even experts might be fooled by very skilled forgeries). If you just like how a painting looks, you can absolutely get the vast majority (perhaps even the entirety) of the aesthetic value of it from a (relatively) inexpensive reproduction. Yet the vast majority of the immense value of very famous paintings comes from originality, as determined by a small group of experts which the rest of us trust. This is not so unlike how NFTs work.
While I agree with what you've written, this sentence, "This is not so unlike how NFTs work", is the critical point that remains to be seen. My opinion is that it's unlike NFTs enough in the average human mind that the analogy falls over.
Yes, pretty much all of the value in expensive works of art is in the provenance of the artwork, not the actual image. But the fact that that provenance is embodied in a non-copyable physical piece of art, versus a ledger in the literal ether that is just a piece of text that says "Yep, this person bought it", is a critical difference that I think is unbridgeable.
> My opinion is that it's unlike NFTs enough in the average human mind that the analogy falls over.
Absolutely, that remains to be seen, and I think we're very clearly in an NFT craze at the moment that is going to result in a lot of people putting money in and losing it. My argument is simply that it is not absurd to use an NFT to represent originality for a digital work and for collectors to value that originality more than digital copies, and in fact it's extremely similar to how the determination and valuation of originality already works for physical paintings. I do think that a lot of the actual financial activity going on with NFTs right now is absurd, but not fundamentally more absurd than much of the financial activity going on with most assets in the world!
> But the fact that that provenance is embodied in a non-copyable physical piece of art, versus a ledger in the literal ether that is just a piece of text that says "Yep, this person bought it", is a critical difference that I think is unbridgeable.
My prediction is that it won't be any less bridgeable than the notion that the amount of money you have in your bank account is actually just a tiny amount of digital information stored on a computer somewhere in your bank's computer closet. The bank isn't actually storing the physical cash that you deposited, and moreover, that physical cash doesn't even represent anything physical!
I think this hits the nail on the head. My response to seeing "the" Mona Lisa is much different than seeing a reproduction of the same, no matter how faithful that reproduction may be. In a digital space where anything and everything can be losslessly duplicated ad infinitum that distinction simply doesn't exist.
But I'm presuming you're not an expert, and you just trusted that the museum was showing the original. What if they show a fake one, and the original is kept somewhere more secure? Or what if all experts are wrong, and the one we think is the original is not actually the original? Would learning that diminish your value of that viewing experience?
Except physical art is copyable too, there are plenty of examples of people being tricked into buying forgeries of physical art. The whole debate is whether people trust these art "experts" who can be just as easily tricked over the trust of a "piece of text" on a blockchain. It's clearly not unbridgeable for some people or there wouldn't have been this huge boom in NFTs. Though it remains to be seen whether they'll remain a niche online collectible or become more mainstream but I think it's trending towards broader acceptance.
The real value in having an authentic painting comes from the history of the piece, that it is the same canvas and pigments that were touched by the (famous/reclusive/dead) artist (or at least one of their assistants)
The same could be said of any museum piece. There is a weight and responsibility attached to that physical item that is carried with it.
With an NFT, the digital asset you hold can never convey anything tangible about the creative process and history of the work; it's not like owning that unveils the PSD file and Youtube livestream of the artist at work with their Cintiq. The stream of bits is the stream of bits. Everyone gets access to the same stream of bits, except one person gets to wear a special hat while they look at them.
It's like you started with a print or reproduction of the masterwork, but on a new canvas. Like you're saying this is print #00001, and you get to have that specific one. Sort of.
What I'm saying is that NFT _itself_ does not embody any aspect of the creative process or context. With the exception of the fact the artists issued an NFT in the first place on such-and-such date, and that might mean something in the future when we look back on this topic.
What if the artist issues the NFT during a live stream of the creation of the digital artwork? It seems odd to me that we would consider a physical painting to “embody” the creative process, but somehow the creative process of a digital painting is lost forever?
It's not just art... It's why otherwise ordinary items have sentimental value. Like a specific stuffed animal, or a mile marker. NFTs lack an intrinsic to convey this that goes beyond the digital item itself. Having or looking at a digital asset can itself be nostalgic, but the NFT does not specifically effect this, except in the sense of the act of buying it.
Again, it’s the fact that the artist issued the NFT. Why are autographs from famous people valuable (sentimentally, and sometimes financially) even though signing autographs doesn’t require much creativity or effort, and signing autographs has nothing to do with why the people are famous?
They're valuable because that meant the autographer had to be present and see and individually touch whatever was being signed. Often times it is a memento of a fan meeting their idol.
If you’re talking about NFTs that weren’t authorized by the artist, then of course I agree. I have been talking about NFTs that are deliberately issued by the artist.
An original painting has more value than a copy because it has the original brush strokes in it and was touched by the artist. For whatever reason humans value objects that they can touch and that have been touched by others that they find valuable.
> Are NFTs somehow more arbitrary and asinine than other collectible markets simply because they're digital?
They're precisely as asinine as a certificate of ownership, if a certificate of ownership used a household-month of electricity to produce. And the paper it was made out of attracted assholes.
There's a difference between "hate" and persistent disagreement. There was a breathless hype cycle around NFT's. This has become another instance of "crypto use case XYZ's moment is here!" turning into "XYZ hasn't taken off but remains very promising!"
NFTs I think haven't found product market fit yet. Imagine skins in a video game. People pay good money for those even though it's "just pixels", and I think there would be sustained interest to trade and own skins in a limited run, for example, autographed by an e-sports player. Or, in a digital trading card game, decks could be represented as a bundle of NFTs, and players could rent them to participate in a tournament without having to go buy all the carts themselves.
I don't think the current model where everyone and their mom doodles something and mints an NFT is sustainable without external anchors of value.
> If an artist makes a painting, that original painting has collectible value.
This misunderstands the ultimate reason why art becomes valuable.
It has nothing to do with the scarcity itself. There's a billion works of art out there that are 1/1 originals and yet are worthless.
So scarcity alone doesn't bring the value. What does?
Mostly media and public relations originally, and if an artist gets attention for long enough, government, non-profit and educational institutions will legitimize that media coverage and write an artist into the mainstream "lexicon" for history going forward.
You need both the scarcity combined with the mainstream knowledge of an artists name to create that value.
The problem with NFTs is, now that the media channels that create "star" artists are getting more and more decentralized, the chances your friend will know the names of the same artists as you is diminished.
Everybody's instagram feed is different, so there isn't the same shared language that existed in the past to attach value to these scarce objects.
That, combined with the fact that you can't hang it on your wall as a signaling device to show off to your friends or prospective mating partners...is the reason why NFTs will never be as valuable as pre-internet art.
> Mostly media and public relations originally, and if an artist gets attention for long enough, government, non-profit and educational institutions will legitimize that media coverage and write an artist into the mainstream "lexicon" for history going forward.
I think a big part of it is that once an artist has this status, it becomes part of the industry that tracks provenance and detects forgeries. If your cousin's painting was valuable without being part of this system, you could crank out 100 of them and no one would know which one was the original, or whether your cousin actually painted the other 99.
So in this way you're begging the question a little bit. If scarcity alone doesn't bring value, provable scarcity might.
> Now imagine if an artist makes a digital painting. Is that work of art any less meaningful or valuable? Of course not. But there's been no way to define an "original" in the digital art form, and so there's been no way to assign collectability to digital works of art. NFTs seem to provide a way for an artist and fans to collectively agree that some digital object is the original, and to treat it as such.
Sometimes ownership of a thing doesn't matter if there is a psychological barrier to the product itself and its relationship to the owner.
If we are talking about the ownership of an item in the traditional sense a painting then NFT's need to fall into two categories:
Vanity: Private ownership for personal enjoyment. Here I find NFT's silly. People will duplicate the work if they have access to a digital file and run wild with it for the sake of personal enjoyment. This is where I think most NFT hate comes from and its not without merit.
Investment: NFTs could indeed be used for issuing ownership, or even fractional ownership, where a work is displayed at its maximum potential (resolution/medium) and access to the display is owned and profit is split among owners. This is really the remarkable aspect of NFTs and I am not even sure you have to limit digital goods either.
If we are talking about ownership of an item in the commissioned sense then NFT's make copyright and trademark infringement easier to litigate ownership if the work is used by someone who isn't an owner.
It is hasty to hate NFTs. But it is ok to question their relevance in certain regards.
Because it was always an obvious scam. A few early crypto adopters with zillions of coins passing them back and forth to create enough hype to convince a bunch of bandwagon jumpers to give away their money for nothing more than having their name carved into a tree.
I'd be less skeptical if these werent introduced at the same time rampant speculation on valueless currencies or tokens became profitable. It's kind of obvious the real impetus is to capture the need of investors to get constantly increasing returns from speculation, and that new agreed upon stores of values of required to be created as old ones get too expensive to enter.
> It seemed like the logic translation of collectibles from the physical world into the digital world.
Is it? I thought the value of a collectible was having it, not that other people don't have it. I don't think it's worth throwing away abundance for the sake of the satisfaction of having something scarce.
Artificial scarcity works pretty well in the physical world. See limited edition products: cars, sneakers, books, collectable card games like Pokemon, Magic, Yugioh, limited print runs of art pieces…
I would argue that value is based on some sort of emotional measurement. The idea that a mass produced good, that is a physical item.. is only valuable because of the ability to hold it and the emotion behind it.
whether or not digital good carry that same weight, is left to be seen.
What's weirder is that this sort of implies DRM while not even providing it, even though we all know DRM doesn't work.
The scarcity is having a spot in a ledger between other entries in one lineage by a (supposed, but rarely purely) distributed non-cooperative consensus of ledger entries.
Anything other than that is imagined and probably done through other means just as well. I'm not sure why someone couldn't just periodically tweet pictures of note cards with a list of who owns what because that'd be just as effective.
Not really, because the value of non-scare digital goods can be effectively zero. Look at public domain content for example; you can go to amazon and buy collections of 100 classic novels for two bucks, and that is just if you want the convenience of buying them at one stop as opposed from getting them for free from project gutenberg.
Eventually we might see values trend so low that it may not make sense to make digital goods at all; i think video games in particular will be vulnerable to this soon.
As someone who doesn't collect anything, NFT for collectibles doesn't interest me personally. But I still think NFTs have a future as digitally signed proof of ownership of media assets.
Long ago, back in my web designer days, I bought a CD from CompUSA full of clip arts and stock photos and used them on my clients' websites. I moved on to web development and out of nowhere 5 years later I got a panicked call from an old client who said Getty is threatening to sue them for using copyrighted images on the website I made for them. Try as I might, I could not convince either my ex-client or Getty reps that I legally (and most likely naively) bought a stock photo CD but did not have that in my possession any longer. Cost me a month's rent out of pocket to get the matter resolved as I did not have the resources to fight either of them.
I can imagine a (non-physical-media) future where all commercial stock media is signed upon download, with the NFT signature embedded in the file itself like EXIF data. Editors can be made to respect the source file NFTs and include them in the exported files. YouTube could easily identify the NFT for the audio track you used in your video and if you had licensed it legally, it would not even run the fingerprint algo on it. Now it doesn't matter if the original seller or vendor goes out of business. The history is in the blockchain forever (or as long as the license permits).
I'm not saying I support going all NFT for ownership/copyright. I'm saying I can imagine it happening as a valid use-case for NFT/blockchain.
For what it's worth, there's no way you can force every image manipulation tool and library to respect the NFTs, and the NFT can't necessarily point to a specific item itself (since the location it points to could move), so there's no permanent effective way to actually make those two connect.
As far as I can tell, the only thing that NFTs might be useful for is uniquely identifiable assets whose unique identification can be embedded in the NFT itself; for example, a car's VIN number or a property's address or lot number. Unfortunately, we already have much more effective and well-regulated systems to handle both of those situations, and I'm at a loss for any circumstance in which an NFT would be better and also guaranteed effective.
The NFT could always be self-referential and point to the hash of the image itself which would be accessible on IPFS or another content-addressed network.
>"I legally (and most likely naively) bought a stock photo CD but did not have that in my possession any longer"
Explain exactly how pissing away all that electricity by burning all that coal and generating all that carcinogenic pollution and greenhouse gas would have caused him to not lose the entire original image just like he lost the original stock photo CD?
> For what it's worth, there's no way you can force every image manipulation tool and library to respect the NFTs,
Correct. But the license owner can require the license buyer to use editors that preserve NFTs or be subject to automated DMCA notices. Once Adobe and Apple start respecting the NFT-copyright-format in their tools, other commercial vendors will be forced by the market to support it too.
Again, I'm not in favor of any of this. Just admitting that I am pessimistic enough to see where all of this could end up eventually.
That already exists with physical money. There are a lot of printers and scanners and software that will not copy 20 dollar bills.
In theory you could add all of NFT Images into the software but what happens when someone creates an NFT of a basket ball. Are you going to stop people from printing any picture with a basketball in it?
It doesn't need to be, but it could turn out that way. Perhaps someone convinces the masses that a distributed blockchain is preferable and then it gets built and persists on first-mover advantage.
You could one way hash the asset, along with the initial resolution and other characteristics, and lock that data in the NFT. As long as you have the NFT, and the original digital work stores somewhere to rehash, you could prove ownership.
Automated signatures work decently when the process is smooth. XCode integrates with your Apple ID to sign apps. Letsencrypt works for signing TLS certificates. HDCP works silently even for typical users.
I don't support HDCP or DVD-region-lock but they worked for the copyright owners without inconveniencing the users enough to affect the bottom-line. It's the technical users and hackers among us who have a problem with these.
I'm not looking forward to NFT everywhere for creatives, I'm saying I can see it happen. I don't want to sign every JPEG I edit but if the tools preserve the source signatures, it wouldn't really affect me.
Photoshop has had counterfeit detection system for over a decade. I'm sure Adobe would love to offer Getty + CS Cloud NFT-copyright integration if they can make it work. I'm sure they can come up with a catchy marketing name for it and build an ecosystem to license, edit, and distribute media with detailed tracking of every asset.
I think it's pretty clear from the proposal that the only relevant NFT for some piece of digital media would be the NFT created by the original copyright holder of that piece of digital media. For example, Getty could issue NFTs for a particular stock photograph.
Obviously any random person could create an NFT and claim that it represents ownership of a particular stock photograph, but that's not really relevant or problematic. You could also create a traditional paper certificate of title for your neighbor's car too, but obviously no one would respect it (unless they were tricked, but that's against the law and the legal system would tend to respect that genuine certificate of title).
Brilliant! So what you are saying is that NFT’s are a good documentation of ownership… if we assume some other system takes care of documenting that the NFT was in fact created by the owner. So you know if we have some other system to track ownership.
For a lot of stuff that's really not a hard problem. You just create the NFT of the hash before publicly releasing the item, it's only for stuff that exists out there in the world already that's a problem. Doesn't mean it's not a good way to resolve stuff going forward. Biggest problem with NFTs are how they integrate with the existing legal frameworks of copyright, etc.
If Getty signs an asset saying chime bought it at 'getty.com', that's proof enough. If I buy it at totally-legit-stock-photos.example.com, then it's on me to resolve the matter with Getty when they say my NFT is invalid. Getty's crawlers can still go around the web looking for stolen images. But if the images have a signature from a different vendor, then instead of just going after the gullible users, they can go after the signers. And if the images do not have any signatures, they keep doing what they've been doing already.
Copyright is big business and big business is copyright. Disney could absolutely start signing all of their media with NFT and every license holder would have X years to implement it properly. After that they can automate takedown notices for any commercial site/platform that uses their non-NFT'd images. Right now they need to manually verify if the Hulk coffee mug on Overstock.com is using licensed images or not.
Both of those theoretical problems exist for physical paintings as well. You don't know that Salvator Mundi was actually painted by Leonardo da Vinci (maybe his gardener painted it and he lied to everyone saying it was him), or maybe he actually painted it several times. Perhaps one day we'll find evidence that the gardener actually painted it, or we'll find additional "original" copies, and suddenly the value of our current "original" will be reduced.
We were talking about ownership, not authorship. In the real world titles of ownership are issued by a trusted third party. They're not issued by the same party who claims ownership. But in the NFT world they are, and this means these titles of ownership can't be trusted. There's no way of assessing whether they're valid or not.
Why not just sign the assets with a private key and verify its authenticity with the public key? What is the purpose of bolting a blockchain onto this idea?
> If Getty signs an asset saying chime bought it at 'getty.com', that's proof enough.
Great! We agree! People have been signing digital assets for thirty years now, and it clearly works well.
So why use the NFT?
> Disney could absolutely start signing all of their media with NFT and every license holder would have X years to implement it properly.
Or Disney could just start signing all their works _today_ without an NFT or blockchain of any type, using proven, decades-old, open source technology.
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The blockchain is amazing because it solves a very difficult problem - the consensus problem. Yes, blockchains are very expensive, but that's because they need to solve that hard problem. If you have a consensus problem, the blockchain is the only known solution to it.
Signing assets is NOT a consensus problem, because the origin of the idea of ownership comes from the real world.
When Disney signs their assets, it makes no difference what order they sign them in, or whether they sign them before or after someone else does.
For example, suppose Disney decides to sign everything, and then someone else "signs" Mary Poppins before Disney gets to it. Nothing happens! This signature has no legal, moral, or practical value to anyone: Disney _legally_ owns Mary Poppins and will continue to do so.
Or suppose a hacker breaks into the network and "signs" ownership of Poppins to Elon Musk. Again, this has no legal, moral or practical value.
There is no hint of a consensus issue, and therefore the incredible cost of a blockchain is completely wasted here.
No. If you are able to attribute identity in some way to the address that created the NFT then you can reasonably assume the NFT is legitimate. There are ways to do this. One can publicly declare (and prove) they control the address through a 3rd party system (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or some decentralized method). You can also determine based off the activity of the address itself (what and when it created nfts in the past) and make certain assumptions about the validity of a self-proclaimed identity. The address becomes the identity in a way.
You just repeated the same thing. That 3rd-party centralized system that's used for "identity" can just handle the ownership too. A decentralized NFT layer adds nothing when the ownership is still dependant on something else.
But ownership of anything is always dependent on something else. People can steal physical items from you. You can tell the police and maybe they'll return the item to you. But what if the police steal the item from you? These scenarios do not demonstrate that the notion of ownership is absurd.
You're conflating vastly different things. You still own something even if you don't physically have it. The concept of ownership is granted by the by the laws we are governed by.
Everything else is just recording those facts and transactions. That's why you can transfer ownership by writing it down on paper. NFTs are just fancy electronic documents. It's just paperwork.
I’m not really interested in devolving the conversation into an argument over what it means to “need” something. We obviously don’t need NFTs in the same way we need breathable air and water, but this just isn’t an interesting discussion.
The point is that it adds no value over existing systems. You're all over the place here with your replies and it seems like it's disingenuous so I'll end it here.
Since you finally concede the obvious and undeniable fact that we need breathable air, then why are you disingenuously arguing for NFTs instead of against them?
What is the point of wasting so much energy, burning so much coal, and belching so much carcinogenic smoke and greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, if we can simply solve the problem much more efficiently and easily without wasting energy and destroying the environment and giving people cancer and heart disease?
And for what? I think the human race deserve fair use of the atmosphere, as well as pictures of Mickey Mouse.
The point is we don't want to have a centralized authority determining and controlling ownership. The validation of the identity is at most what is desired, but really there needs to be a better way to do that as well.
> if we assume some other system takes care of documenting that the NFT was in fact created by the owner
What other system are you talking about? I could determine that you control the NFT of a digital work by observing the artist's statement of issuance and your message demonstrating control of the NFT on the blockchain. Determining the validity of the artist's statement of issuance could be done using public-key cryptography. I fail to see what additional system is necessary.
The "additional system" would be your first qualifier for ownership
> observing the artist's statement of issuance
eg: having an authority affirm your ownership of something.
The secondary system of using ownership of some piece of a blockchain is superfluous considering the first system is all you would need to prove ownership.
I repeat: "the trusted authority is required to certify that the issuer is who they say they are and that they own the thing." If you don't agree, please explain how a stranger's identity and ownership rights can be established using technologies like public-key cryptography without a trusted authority.
No, these would probably not be considered or valued as originals when the deception was revealed. No method of verification is perfect. You could also physically coerce the artist to issue an NFT. But this is not a unique “flaw” of NFTs. Art forgeries can also fool experts. People can steal physical items.
I've been saying this for a while: in the absence of reproduction rights or some other thing of value attached to them, NFTs are a fancy system of provenance.
Precisely. When you license a digital asset, it has licensing terms associated with it - single entity use, multiple entity use, allowed form of media etc. Getty would sell me a new NFT for any asset I want to license and embed that signature in the asset I download.
Even if current NFTs don't support everything, the blockchain algo could be extended incorporate the needs of the parties involved.
And how do you associate a given NFT as being issued by the true owner of a real-world asset? The answer: by trusting a centralized external authority to verify the association. And if you're already trusting that centralized authority, what's even the point of the NFT?
Of course it's problematic. That's why most countries have land and vehicle registries managed by a trusted authority. If people had to rely on titles of ownership issued by random strangers it'd be chaos.
Contracts only hold power because of the government which can adjudicate and enforce the laws.
How those contracts are written, whether it's on paper or on the blockchain, is the least interesting part of it all. NFTs add no value that existing recordkeeping cant already do (usually much better and faster).
> I think it's pretty clear from the proposal that the only relevant NFT for some piece of digital media would be the NFT created by the original copyright holder of that piece of digital media.
So in order for the NFT to work, you need some sort of way to identify the copyright holder before the NFT even exists. Don't see you the issue?
If you can identify the copyright holder of a work without an NFT, what's the point of the NFT?
Seconded. I see no point in "buying" media from stores where my account can be terminated immediately. If I bought an NFT token that encodes the right to use some copyrighted work, this issue doesn't exist.
Imagine a future where you can engage in completely legal torrenting of copyrighted works, where all sides have NFT proofs of ownership. Owning an NFT would mean you own the notarized right to download a copy as well as to seed it to other torrenters who can cryptographically prove they own the same NFT.
> Imagine a future where you can engage in completely legal torrenting of copyrighted works, where all sides have NFT proofs of ownership. Owning an NFT would mean you own the notarized right to download a copy as well as to seed it to other torrenters who can cryptographically prove they own the same NFT.
Thank you! You get what I'm talking about. Many folks here are replying to me as if I'm saying NFTs can prevent copyright infringements. That's not possible and not the goal. The goal would be to track ownership and handle violations more reliably than mass DMCA-notices that plague YouTube.
> Seconded. I see no point in "buying" media from stores where my account can be terminated immediately. If I bought an NFT token that encodes the right to use some copyrighted work, this issue doesn't exist.
As usual, you don't need a blockchain to do either of the two things you're talking about. For the copyright case, what matters is that you have a legal authorization which will be recognized by a court. An NFT can do that but so can an email or anything else — and the problem you're trying to avoid is a concern either way because the same people who require terms of use for their content aren't going to reverse course due to magical thinking advised by blockchain salespeople.
The secondary problem of unreliable cloud storage is similarly very expensively not solved by an NFT. Due to the inherent inefficiency of blockchains almost all NFTs point to a URL for the actual payload. If that hosting provider shuts down or restricts access, you have the same problem as you do now. Now, some people will say that IPFS solves this but if you've thought about the problem at all that is only a solution for content which is very popular and released under an open license: someone has to pay for the storage, even the few people willing to provide storage unpaid aren't going to do so for encrypted content which they can't access, and nobody who cares about access restriction is going to put it in a public blockchain anyway since they'd be one key leak away from the content being available without payment.
> As usual, you don't need a blockchain to do either of the two things you're talking about. For the copyright case, what matters is that you have a legal authorization which will be recognized by a court. An NFT can do that but so can an email or anything else
An email or anything else creates legal gray area. What if the email is from 20 years ago and the company that sent you the email doesn't exist any more? Do we know the email was authentic? Emails don't have cryptographic signatures. And even if, maybe their PGP key leaked. With an NFT, even if someone hacks the wallet of a creator and releases fradulent tokens, they are still trackable. The second advantage is the ability to sell the token. In NFTs, this is a builtin first-party feature, similar to your ability to sell DVDs. But how do you sell an email? How do you ensure that people didn't clone give the email to multiple people? If this problem sounds familiar, it is, it's the double spend problem, which various blockchains have found solutions for.
As for the cloud storage, I think it should be separated. NFTs can be set up in multiple ways. I propose to set them up as follows: a) you can prove cryptographically to others that your wallet contains an NFT and b) the legal framework of the NFT gives everyone the permission to give copies of the work to anyone who has given them a proof after a).
This move would create an entirely separate market for obtaining the work you have gotten an ownership title for. The barrier of entry for these services would be low, and some services can specialize for niche content, others can specialize for speedy delivery, etc. As the cost per work is quite low, I'd imagine a quite low price for these services. The most important advantage: one service going bankrupt wouldn't mean the loss of some people's collections. Especially, anyone would be allowed to host the content.
The single key leak issue is non-existent, because each single download is end-to-end encrypted via say TLS, but the download is only offered to accounts which have proven they own an NFT. Similar requirements are on torrenters, they too have to verify cryptographically that someone owns some content before they send it to them with a end to end encrypted ephemeral key. Maybe, for abuse prevention, there needs to be a record of the verification/download in the ledger as well, so that one can find people who lend out their wallets or something.
Can these issues be solved by a government run centralized registry instead? Absolutely, they can. In many countries, the govenrment runs a land registry already. Land registries share in fact many of the advantages of NFTs. The main issue I have though is centralization.
Absolutely, what I imagine are NFTs surrounded by a legal framework that ensures that the NFT actually contains a legal right. The NFT is mainly just the decentralized technical solution that can be used to prove you own this right. It's way more tamper proof than alternatives, like e-mail. And tamper-proof-ness works in your favour here in the case of a dispute, because if you then use it as evidence, it's very certain that you actually own the title.
> But I still think NFTs have a future as digitally signed proof of ownership of media assets.
The NFT is only a proof of ownership of the NFT. You don’t own the artwork. If you want to buy the artwork you need an old fashioned signed contract documenting transfer of ownership.
They only function as proof of ownership if there is no dispute. Basically, it just confirms provenance. If an NFT is stolen, or a more original author/owner emerges, that will take precedence over the NFT in question at which point it will have to be reissued.
The immutable nature of NFTs and crypto in general doesn’t really work well in the real world where we rely on the ability to change things.
The problem with the whole Blockchain business is what happens when a court declares something with violates the chain? You need to start keeping a user maintained list of patches, at which point why bother with a Blockchain instead of just having a trusted website?
I'm a big proponent of blockchain. But technically blockchain is overkill for this application. At least for non-exclusive perpetual licenses, like the stock photo example.
Blockchain gives you three things. 1) Censorship resistance (no one can "lose" or forget about the license). 2) Protections against mis-spend (no one without the private keys can grant the license). And 3) Protection against double-spend (in the case of two grants, we have a universally agreed upon history of which came first).
A non-exclusive license only requires the first two. You can satisfy the problem with digital signatures and a censorship-resistant P2P file share like IPFS. Comparatively putting data on the blockchain is fairly expensive. Even with sharding O(log(n)) nodes have to store the data, whereas with IPFS only O(1) do. On Ethereum, every kB of storage costs around $5. If you don't need canonical sequencing of history, then blockchain is probably overkill.
Transferring ownership of an NFT would not work just with digital signatures and IPFS, though. I could sign a transaction saying "I transfer this NFT to you", but unless you trust me or some authority, you have no guarantee than I don't just resign it and transfer to someone else as well.
I think the reason they seem silly to a lot of people is because when you buy an NFT there's nothing extra you can do that other people can't when you hold the NFT.
I can have the exact same experience as the NFT holder for free with no effort.
Sure technically you can also make copies of physical collectibles but its not (trivial + free) like copying and pasting an image.
Sure, but that's like saying I can use my home printer to create a certificate of title for someone else's car. Obviously I can, but that doesn't mean that certificates of title for cars are pointless.
Titles are physical objects and backed by laws and the state and a centralized database available to all of government.
Many of the NFTs are not distributed even though they claim to be, so while they have the same kind of centralization, they have no such authority. If we were to grant them such authority, we'd want it to be a normal centralized database and the benefits of decentralization would not be needed. There would be no need for non-cooperative consensus either.
I don't understand your point. Someone could physically coerce you to transfer ownership of an NFT to them, just like they could with any physical item you own. You could try to use the legal system to get your item back, regardless of whether it's an NFT or a physical item. There's no centralized database for a lot of physical property that you own, and yet the legal system can still determine ownership. What is unique about NFTs here?
No, we are talking about copying the underlying asset, not the NFT. If you could 3-D print any physical object perfectly down to the atom, the collectibility of the original item would be hurt a lot. If there were potentially infinite perfect copies of a Ferrari GTO, the prices would crash. Having a document that says "this Ferrari GTO is the original" would be what NFTs are today
> If you could 3-D print any physical object perfectly down to the atom, the collectibility of the original item would be hurt a lot.
This is an important thought experiment that I brought up in another comment, but my conclusion is the opposite: I think that efforts would still be made to determine which physical painting was the original one painted by the artist, and that one would still retain the value as long as the determination of originality remained well-respected. This already happens with paintings: there are extremely skilled forgeries that have fooled experts.
I think you're reading some meaning into my comment that isn't there. My point is simply that a NFT doesn't make a guarantee of uniqueness. A token can reference a file by its URL, but that file can also exist at other URLs, or (AFAIK?) other tokens can reference the same URL.
You do realize that the NFT markets are fuelled by controversy, right? Stop giving the NFT concept more attention if you truly want it to fail. Nobody is forcing you to buy an NFT, you have nothing to complain about.
A Modigliani recently sold for $162 mil at auction, more than twice the beeple NFT price. Guess how many news stories there were for this sale, compared to the beeple. What else would you attribute this difference to, other than controversy? Do you think the beeple stories had no impact on the prices of follow-up nfts?
>"On May 24, Guggenheim cofounder Todd Morley told Bloomberg TV in New York that he is building a "blockchain tower" that will give anyone in the city access to wireless trading, provide a way to announce and showcase new technological advances, and house the world's largest collection of NFTs."
How can hype like that not set off everyone's bullshit detections, I can not understand. Todd Morley sounds like a complete charlatan.
It's downright embarrassing how hard people are pushing blockchain technology onto every damn thing they can, even when it makes zero sense. NFTs? Just a massive unnecessary overhead to a concept of ownership well grounded in every country's laws. Cryptocurrency? Outside of very niche applications (including and mostly for the black market), it's dramatically slower, more expensive, and higher risk than a slew of existing payment options. Now this bullshit about a blockchain tower to provide free wireless access for blockchain networks? All marketing nonsense, since every company in these skyscrapers already has access to high speed internet, and every person in the area already has access to high speed mobile data. It's all bullshit.
It just sounds so childish. "Blockchain Tower". Woo! Woo! Pff... Just like a South Park or Rick and Morty parody of blockchain charlatan shills, but it's actually bona-fid blockchain charlatan shills performing a spot-on parody of themselves, without one iota of irony or self awareness.
>The term comes from "woo-woo", an epithet used in the 1990s by science and skeptical writers to ridicule people who believe or promote such things. This is in turn believed to have come from the onomatopoeia "woooooo!" as a reaction to dimmed lights or magic tricks. The term implies a lack of either intelligence or sincerity on the part of the person or concepts so described.
>As a coincidence, the Chinese word 巫 (pronounced in the Mandarin dialect as Wū) means a shaman, usually with magic powers. Also coincidentally, the Chinese word 無/无 (pronounced Wú in Mandarin) means "nothing," "lacking," or "negation." Another Chinese word 误 (pronounced in the Mandarin dialect as Wù) means "mistake" or "incorrect". There is also the English verb "woo", which means to seek someone's love, especially with false promises; it can also be considered appropriate, because woo-meisters seek people's admiration, falsely promising them miraculous and easily understandable knowledge.
Because we're inured to hype, and to constant 'get rich quick' messaging, either overt or covert. Everything has to be bigger and more world-changing than before, and it has to happen overnight. And you have to participate in this madness NOW, before all the gains are gone.
Just look at the ridiculous hype around NFTs. Who actually believes that $69 million was paid in auction, against presumably other 8 figure bids? For a bunch of useless pixels designed by an unknown in the art world?
Meanwhile hicetnunc.xyz is killing it. So maybe the big high profile transactions are down, but a more approachable and independent community is quietly flourishing and taking over the NFT world for artists and collectors.
I think of NFTs as analogous to signed copies of a limited run of prints of an original work. And they have some interesting financial characteristics.
1. Their value can be a proxy to the underlying art
2. The NFT contract can give the artist some of the appreciation upside of the NFT
My opinion is that NFTs will come to be part of many artists toolkit.
Just because people aren't buying cat memes for millions of dollars every single day doesn't mean NFT sales aren't going strong... they are. A sotheby's auction just went live today for a curated collection of NFTs. The auction closes in a week and some of the lots are already in the five figures.
You're right about that for the most part, but my point is that NFTs are still being bought and sold on a daily basis. Just because there's not an over-hyped multi-million dollar sale every day, doesn't mean "the bubble has popped".
Under the context of a quantity of transactions and the normal person having access to art sales, I'd say that bubble has popped. That also may imply the total market size has popped. But you're right to say that the transaction size perhaps hasn't popped.
Oh no, it’s almost like people started to realize that the entire system was built from bullshit marketing and hype from stupidly executed multi-million dollar sales.
I mean, who didn't see that coming. NFTs, IMHO, have been money grabbing jokes, dumping on those naively looking for the next hot thing. Or rich people with money to blow...and since it's money to blow, who cares if it's now worthless?
Could you please stop posting comments that are on the snarky/flamey/unsubstantive/denunciatory side of the equation? You've done that quite a bit, and we're trying for a different spirit of conversation here: thoughtful and curious. Fortunately you've done that quite a bit as well, so this should be easy to fix. If you'd tend more in the intended direction, we'd appreciate it. The issue isn't your opinions, it's comment quality.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] thread(I am super curious as to what percentage of NFT purchases were existing crypt-millionaires vs. collectors or even independent investors)
Poor 8 year old me really thought that Brendan Shanahan rookie card would mean something someday.
Are there also digital versions available?
I'd be surprised if a noticeable percentage of the value of your comic books is that you can read them. It seems like it's essentially 0% to me -- almost as baseless as an NFT, and makes me think some sort of functionality isn't actually needed for lots of people to agree that something is valuable for a long time.
Value in whose eyes, though? The commenter seemed to be stating that the utility provided by being able to read the comics is valuable _to them_. There are also a number of other uses for a physical comic book that provide "value": you could frame individual pages, use the book as kindling, etc. You can't do any of those things with a NFT.
Some quick googling, apologies if I'm wrong, says this comic book is worth 3.2 million dollars: https://viewcomics.me/action-comics-1938/issue-1/full
And yet it would seem I can read it right there on the internet for free, and can surely get framed prints of individual pages much cheaper than 3.2 million dollars, and I can get kindling much cheaper than 3.2 million dollars. You can point at those things as properties it has that an NFT doesn't. But those things aren't what's making it worth 3.2 million dollars
It's worth 3.2 million dollars because someone trusts that it's worth 3.2 million dollars to other people. Value like this is an exercise in group trust that has had to build up over time. It's not actually a property of the functionality of the object
Like for example, something like First Comics's Warp is incredibly valuable to me, because it's a comics adaptation/spin-off of an old science fiction stage play that doesn't seem to even exist any more. (By Stuart Gordon of Re-animator fame, no less.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp!
It's not the popular first appearance of a Marvel character we've seen for 50 years, but it's much more of a historical rarity imo. There's a lot of things which are of value to collectors less than speculators; something like trying to collect a lot of Carl Banks's Disney books simply because of the sheer quality of them for example. Or loving independent comics of the 90s and trying to track down the beginnings of the furry movement; Albedo, Hepcats, Omaha the Cat Dancer, etc. There are whole teams that are just ignored by the speculators; Wally Wood's DNagents for example.
It's just the speculators market is just actually trying to flip really common comics that are evergreen. Those really have little value to them; stuff like Spiderman's first symbiote costume appearance wasn't really that earth shattering a story. Secret Wars was kind of a lame crossover for its time and i doubt would even be considered one of the great crossovers. That's why its main interests are mostly forgotten, like the Beyonder or Molecule Man.
So yes, some of the value is in reading the comic itself. It's just the market is weird and never reflects it. Did you know the first video game tie in comic dates back to the Atari age, with DC's release of Atari Force? And it actually was a serious, decent SF comic? Yet you could probably find it in a store's dollar bins, while a spiderman or punisher apperance that was really common at the time is considered valuable even if all the story does is introduce something kind of commonplace or unspectacular.
Sorry this is one of my passion things, I'll get back to my usual growly self soon.
I'm not trying to categorically throw shade at comic books, and I appreciate you citing a whole bunch of comics that are ignored by speculators but which have a lot of value to you. But that seems like it's exactly in line with my point, that NFTs aren't that new and different from other stuff we've seen before, which is comparably absurd; they're 100% speculation, but we've seen assets that are 99% speculation and manage to hang on for quite a while
The NFT cards with fake / digital signatures are particularly pathetic.
Or the way a physical card is designed, the way it looks in real lighting, the way its material properties exist and interact in physical space. There are qualities to that, and the manufacturing process involved, that you can never replicate with NFT collectibles. The same is true with physical vs digital art. Art hanging on the wall can have a majestic quality when it dances with lighting; digital art is flat garbage by comparison in that respect (even when it's really good digital art; it's bound to a screen in most cases). Manufacturing a nice physical collectible card to a high quality specification is dramatically more difficult than spitting out NFT cards by the zillions; quality control is a huge challenge in collectible cards. There's a scarcity effect generated in physical collectibles like cards, in regards to quality of manufacturing (damage, corners, centering, errors, etc), that doesn't exist in NFTs (unless you intentionally fake that, which would be something beyond stupid).
There are many aspects of physical vs NFT collectibles, where the NFTs will never be able to compete, not under any circumstances. And there are almost no benefits that an NFT has over a physical collectible, with the supposed simplicity of digital storage & transacting being the primary (which also has an obvious, huge risk / downside associated with it simultaneously).
For all the physical properties of a material thing we might admire, someone else might admire an NFT for the lack of those properties and inclusion of others.
There might be no more further reconciling than that. People will like what they like, they’ll pursue what they pursue, and sometimes they will enjoy their share of delusions. At least it keeps life interesting.
Who knows. Maybe they will. Maybe not. But at least I’ve tried to remind my friend that it is a highly speculative asset. And that she should not put in more money than she is ready to lose. All or most of it.
It's only logical that the second NFT from the New York Times (or whomever) is going to be worth only 10% as much as the first one.
BREAKING NEWS: Superman Comic #2 is worth only 10% as much as Superman Comic #1.
How is this at all like NFTs again?
Collectibility needs a few things in the equation: rarity and here is the _big_ component, some shared nostalgia or cultural history. NFTs don't have that really any of these things.
Taking the example of fine art, there is a clear reason that an original piece is unique. When artists release numbered prints, the buyers are aware that the numbering could have continued but the print run was stopped at an arbitrary point. For this reason, they are rarely anywhere near as valuable.
These days “chase” sports cards are often given extremely low print runs of just a few or even one copy. But in my view they will never have the collector appeal of older cards that are rare in large part because few of them happened to survive.
Creating artificial scarcity is an obvious way to manipulate collectors, and NFTs are completely built around that practice.
There are other examples where you are right though. Comics in general with variant or the dreaded hologram colors were an attempt to do so, and it's kind of rare to see them valued today.
Unless, people were buying hype and nothing more, and NFTs are indeed are a ridiculous fad with no intrinsic value.
The questions are:
How were the the "dumb money" NFT buyers ever going to liquidate their "investments" on the other side?
Did they ever intend to cash-out or just show-off how much money they can burn?
Or is it 95% blackmarket money (i.e., drugs, sex slavery, worker slavery) that had nowhere to go except buried in the ground or in the walls of houses?
I've always said the best money-laundering / money-stashing instrument are paintings in a rugged floating tube that can be stashed in a yacht equipped with salt plugs in-case it ever went down.
People have this idea that because NFTs are selling for $10M some moron must think that particular NFT is worth $10M and have spent $10M to buy it - presumably thinking it will be worth even more in the future and s/he can sell for a profit.
What an idiot, most people think...
However, it could just be that people are buying NFTs from themselves (like CryptoKitties) for massive sums, to attract the interest of get-rich-quick retail investors to spend ~$100 dollars on NFTs - just in case they're suddenly worth $10M a piece in a month. FOMO.
It's not like retail investors investing millions of dollars into NFTs. They don't have millions of dollars in the first place!
Details here: https://www.ledgerinsights.com/christies-beeple-69-million-n...
I'm not aware of any crazy NFT auctions that have been purchased by "normal middle class" people. They've all been people heavily involved in crypto.
That goes for the losing bidders also. The person who was the second highest bidder in that auction is also heavily involved in the crypto space.
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/12/976513031/the-69-million-jpeg
I should bring crime and decay to the neighborhood, buy my neighbors' houses out, and then sell my own house to myself for $10 million. Who wants to invest? Now offering NFTs as stock. :B
So NFT markets don't crash, they stall. As I mentioned previously, this works just like Beanie Babies on eBay. High asking prices, no bids.
If an artist makes a painting, that original painting has collectible value. If the same artist makes copies of it, those copies have less value. That seems to make sense to most people.
Now imagine if an artist makes a digital painting. Is that work of art any less meaningful or valuable? Of course not. But there's been no way to define an "original" in the digital art form, and so there's been no way to assign collectability to digital works of art. NFTs seem to provide a way for an artist and fans to collectively agree that some digital object is the original, and to treat it as such.
The bonus is that it provides another avenue for digital artists to make money, which to my mind is always a good thing.
I get that the concept is hard to wrap our brains around, because at the end of the day it's a collective delusion. Everyone just agrees to say that some arbitrary string of bytes is the "original" and anything that comes after it isn't. But ultimately how is that different from the arbitrary rules we use to define which physical object is the "original" and why those arbitrary rules define value.
That said, I haven't looked too deeply into the technical side of NFTs, so this is more my take on the concept than the application. I'm sure there's slews of caveats, like how most NFTs only store a hash, the importance of exchanges, etc. And I totally agree that the market was in a huge bubble, so that's definitely worth criticizing (to an extent; I mean people can do whatever the hell they want with their money ultimately.)
Is there a flaw in my take here? Are NFTs somehow more arbitrary and asinine than other collectible markets simply because they're digital? Or is everyone hating because hating new technology is as cool as it has ever been? I suppose Dropbox did turn out to just be git+rsync, so shrug /s
You have a meme, and someone sells you a little laminated card saying "I own the meme at this URL", and all it costs is $80,000 and you have to burn down an acre of rainforest. It's purely asinine in every respect, and, like a lot of crypto, is basically just a gold rush plus pyramid scheme.
Of course yes it is - its less valuable after it is created because copying it costs nothing.
Valuing a work above the creation cost of the work is what the art world certainly does, but replicas of the art are still valuable for being appealing and taking some work to create - a digital version is appealing but takes so little work to create and store that its hard to justify the rest of the collective delusion.
Adding scarcity to non-scarce things is just stupid.
A marble sculptor shouldn't be valued more than a digital sculptor, its really just about time and effort either way.
That is not the case for digital works. If we get strict about it, everything apart from the original file sitting in the artists' computer disks are copies. The file you downloaded after purchasing your "original" is a copy.
But well, whatever makes people happy.
However, if the molds are still available and another can be cast and finished, then no.
Still a specific instance of an unoriginal item might be special. It could have been painted post-casting by someone famous, or survived a war or shipwreck, and so forth. Originality is now no longer a distinguishing aspect of the sculpture's value.
Yes, and a copy of a digital work still has some value, but there's only one NFT that the artist issued to represent ownership of the digital work. These are precisely identical stories. Even if you could create a physical copy of a physical painting with arbitrarily high fidelity (perhaps at the atomic level), there would still only be one painting that sat in the artist's studio, and I suspect the art world would still only value that one as the original.
In other words, the fidelity with which one can create copies of an original work is irrelevant to the determination and valuation of originality.
This is the best lesson. People who try to add artificial scarcity will eventually be proven wrong (but con men have existed in all eras).
I think you can apply that same argument to something like a normal painting. Sure, the price for making copy isn’t zero, but it’s practically zero when comparing to the millions of dollars that the most expensive paintings are sold for. So why do people pay so much then? Because they want the original. That also applies for wanting to own the original version of a digital painting.
It's different because the artist actually put their brush on the original canvas, but not the copies. I could buy that the emphasis we put on the original having more value is arbitrary, but there's nothing actually arbitrary about selecting which painting is _the original_.
The problem I see with NFTs is that the arbitrariness is shifted from deciding which piece has value (original vs copy) to which one is _the original_ (copy A or copy B). They're both copies.
And, identically, the NFT of a digital work is different from copies of the digital work because the artist actually issued the NFT.
> I could buy that the emphasis we put on the original having more value is arbitrary, but there's nothing actually arbitrary about selecting which painting is _the original_.
And again, the situation with NFTs is identical. There's nothing arbitrary about determining the NFT issued by the artist and who controls that NFT (assuming the NFT blockchain technology works as intended), in fact it should be much easier than determining the originality of a famous painting.
I don't think it's "hate" for people to marvel at the insanity that are NFTs. You have people literally posting and selling NFTs for other people's creations. And even if those people post NFTs, their NFTs have no additional claim to what they represent than the other people, beyond some social "oh that's the guy who made all of those crummy doodles".
There is a notion of digital ownership, copyright assignment, etc. NFT is an extremely poor proxy for any of those.
Owning a rare gun skin in CS:GO is much more "real" than an NFT is.
Lol “Real”
Exactly the problem. If these were used to prove legal ownership of real assets, whether they be intellectual or physical, they would have value. Selling individually numbered digital pet rocks is not valuable.
Say I own an asset legally, and lose my private key. Or it gets stolen by a malware. I’m still the legal owner.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG0FAKkaisg&ab_channel=DonHo...
In the 1970s, people would buy rocks as pets. Yes really. Manias are real things.
It always links to a wallet and thus proves originality. You're right, anyone can mint a mona lisa and claim it's a van gogh, but if it wasn't minted using van goghs wallet, it's not van gogh.
>It isn't a copyright grant, a contract, legal ownership, or even a binary container
Say i have an octopus NFT. I am the only person who can transfer ownership of my octopus. you don't need 'Legal' ownership, this is real 'ownership' of my keys. You can show that this EXACT Octopus sold for $50m and was previously held by a wallet associated with mark cuban. Yes, some random can make a duplicate octopus but it won't be created by my wallet, mark cuban wouldn't have previously owned it and it wouldn't have previously sold for $50m in the metadata.
>Owning a rare gun skin in CS:GO is much more "real" than an NFT is.
How many people own the 'Rare gun skin in CS:GO? would you trust the company if they said only 5 people owned that rare gun skin? What's stopping them from infinitely minting the rare gun skin and saying there's only 100 of them. Would you be willing to pay more for the CS Skin if only 100 people could have it, than if it was inifinite? If CS:GO was to adopt a standard blockchain for the sale of their NFT's, you could see exactly who had what skins and what the bidding price is for them. Complete transparency in scarcity.
I am Leonardo da Vinci. My wallet is ABC. Would you like to buy the Mona Lisa?
I am NYC. My wallet is CBA. Would you like to buy the Brooklyn Bridge?
The notion that a wallet is authoritative is not grounded in reality. There is no central authority. There is no registry. There is no legal correlation.
And your Octopus NFT isn't an Octopus NFT, it's an NFT with a pointer to a reference that points to an octopus. Great, now I just minted an Octopus NFT with a pointer to a reference that points to the same octopus. Now what?
But you're claiming that we need to backtrace each NFT to some wallet which somehow (even though there is no authority, by design) I guess we'll find a MySpace posting by Mark Cuban saying it was his NFT. It borders on parody.
Could Valve "mint" guns through a blockchain? Sure, they could. There is another game (an F1 game) where they do something similar for tradeables. But that is neither here nor there with the reality that NFTs as currently implemented are effectively equivalent to selling certificates offering people a plot of land on Jupiter.
The point is that it remains to be seen if humans actually care if we declare "ownership" in this way, when as a non-owner I can see and get access to the exact same bits as the "owner".
With physical goods, even though the value assigned to an "original" is arbitrary, it does seem that humans care more about "I know this collection of atoms is the original, and no one else can copy this same collection of atoms" that just the idea that there is a record of ownership on some blockchain.
To contrast, every digital good is exactly the same as the original. Heck, once the computer is turned off the first time, the original is technically gone, and a new copy was made when the computer turned back on.
The concept of originality goes away on a digital world.
Yes, pretty much all of the value in expensive works of art is in the provenance of the artwork, not the actual image. But the fact that that provenance is embodied in a non-copyable physical piece of art, versus a ledger in the literal ether that is just a piece of text that says "Yep, this person bought it", is a critical difference that I think is unbridgeable.
Absolutely, that remains to be seen, and I think we're very clearly in an NFT craze at the moment that is going to result in a lot of people putting money in and losing it. My argument is simply that it is not absurd to use an NFT to represent originality for a digital work and for collectors to value that originality more than digital copies, and in fact it's extremely similar to how the determination and valuation of originality already works for physical paintings. I do think that a lot of the actual financial activity going on with NFTs right now is absurd, but not fundamentally more absurd than much of the financial activity going on with most assets in the world!
> But the fact that that provenance is embodied in a non-copyable physical piece of art, versus a ledger in the literal ether that is just a piece of text that says "Yep, this person bought it", is a critical difference that I think is unbridgeable.
My prediction is that it won't be any less bridgeable than the notion that the amount of money you have in your bank account is actually just a tiny amount of digital information stored on a computer somewhere in your bank's computer closet. The bank isn't actually storing the physical cash that you deposited, and moreover, that physical cash doesn't even represent anything physical!
The real value in having an authentic painting comes from the history of the piece, that it is the same canvas and pigments that were touched by the (famous/reclusive/dead) artist (or at least one of their assistants)
The same could be said of any museum piece. There is a weight and responsibility attached to that physical item that is carried with it.
With an NFT, the digital asset you hold can never convey anything tangible about the creative process and history of the work; it's not like owning that unveils the PSD file and Youtube livestream of the artist at work with their Cintiq. The stream of bits is the stream of bits. Everyone gets access to the same stream of bits, except one person gets to wear a special hat while they look at them.
It's like you started with a print or reproduction of the masterwork, but on a new canvas. Like you're saying this is print #00001, and you get to have that specific one. Sort of.
So really it's not at all the same.
The artist issued the NFT.
What I'm saying is that NFT _itself_ does not embody any aspect of the creative process or context. With the exception of the fact the artists issued an NFT in the first place on such-and-such date, and that might mean something in the future when we look back on this topic.
They're valuable because that meant the autographer had to be present and see and individually touch whatever was being signed. Often times it is a memento of a fan meeting their idol.
NFTs have no such limitations on their issuers.
But the value of a piece of art that is pre-signed by the artist, versus a print that was signed after-the-fact, is not the same.
Some of the value comes from authentication. But if mass produced, this is not really more valuable than the author's printed name on a book.
Some of the value comes from the face-to-face interaction between the artist or famous individual and the signed item. This has no analog in the NFT.
The NFT kind of loses that.
They're precisely as asinine as a certificate of ownership, if a certificate of ownership used a household-month of electricity to produce. And the paper it was made out of attracted assholes.
This all draws pretty reasonable critiques.
I don't think the current model where everyone and their mom doodles something and mints an NFT is sustainable without external anchors of value.
This misunderstands the ultimate reason why art becomes valuable.
It has nothing to do with the scarcity itself. There's a billion works of art out there that are 1/1 originals and yet are worthless.
So scarcity alone doesn't bring the value. What does?
Mostly media and public relations originally, and if an artist gets attention for long enough, government, non-profit and educational institutions will legitimize that media coverage and write an artist into the mainstream "lexicon" for history going forward.
You need both the scarcity combined with the mainstream knowledge of an artists name to create that value.
The problem with NFTs is, now that the media channels that create "star" artists are getting more and more decentralized, the chances your friend will know the names of the same artists as you is diminished.
Everybody's instagram feed is different, so there isn't the same shared language that existed in the past to attach value to these scarce objects.
That, combined with the fact that you can't hang it on your wall as a signaling device to show off to your friends or prospective mating partners...is the reason why NFTs will never be as valuable as pre-internet art.
I think a big part of it is that once an artist has this status, it becomes part of the industry that tracks provenance and detects forgeries. If your cousin's painting was valuable without being part of this system, you could crank out 100 of them and no one would know which one was the original, or whether your cousin actually painted the other 99.
So in this way you're begging the question a little bit. If scarcity alone doesn't bring value, provable scarcity might.
Sometimes ownership of a thing doesn't matter if there is a psychological barrier to the product itself and its relationship to the owner.
If we are talking about the ownership of an item in the traditional sense a painting then NFT's need to fall into two categories:
Vanity: Private ownership for personal enjoyment. Here I find NFT's silly. People will duplicate the work if they have access to a digital file and run wild with it for the sake of personal enjoyment. This is where I think most NFT hate comes from and its not without merit.
Investment: NFTs could indeed be used for issuing ownership, or even fractional ownership, where a work is displayed at its maximum potential (resolution/medium) and access to the display is owned and profit is split among owners. This is really the remarkable aspect of NFTs and I am not even sure you have to limit digital goods either.
If we are talking about ownership of an item in the commissioned sense then NFT's make copyright and trademark infringement easier to litigate ownership if the work is used by someone who isn't an owner.
It is hasty to hate NFTs. But it is ok to question their relevance in certain regards.
Is it? I thought the value of a collectible was having it, not that other people don't have it. I don't think it's worth throwing away abundance for the sake of the satisfaction of having something scarce.
Maybe I don't understand NFTs
Value is the scarcity not the physical support.
edit: pressed publish too quickly
whether or not digital good carry that same weight, is left to be seen.
The scarcity is having a spot in a ledger between other entries in one lineage by a (supposed, but rarely purely) distributed non-cooperative consensus of ledger entries.
Anything other than that is imagined and probably done through other means just as well. I'm not sure why someone couldn't just periodically tweet pictures of note cards with a list of who owns what because that'd be just as effective.
Eventually we might see values trend so low that it may not make sense to make digital goods at all; i think video games in particular will be vulnerable to this soon.
Long ago, back in my web designer days, I bought a CD from CompUSA full of clip arts and stock photos and used them on my clients' websites. I moved on to web development and out of nowhere 5 years later I got a panicked call from an old client who said Getty is threatening to sue them for using copyrighted images on the website I made for them. Try as I might, I could not convince either my ex-client or Getty reps that I legally (and most likely naively) bought a stock photo CD but did not have that in my possession any longer. Cost me a month's rent out of pocket to get the matter resolved as I did not have the resources to fight either of them.
I can imagine a (non-physical-media) future where all commercial stock media is signed upon download, with the NFT signature embedded in the file itself like EXIF data. Editors can be made to respect the source file NFTs and include them in the exported files. YouTube could easily identify the NFT for the audio track you used in your video and if you had licensed it legally, it would not even run the fingerprint algo on it. Now it doesn't matter if the original seller or vendor goes out of business. The history is in the blockchain forever (or as long as the license permits).
I'm not saying I support going all NFT for ownership/copyright. I'm saying I can imagine it happening as a valid use-case for NFT/blockchain.
As far as I can tell, the only thing that NFTs might be useful for is uniquely identifiable assets whose unique identification can be embedded in the NFT itself; for example, a car's VIN number or a property's address or lot number. Unfortunately, we already have much more effective and well-regulated systems to handle both of those situations, and I'm at a loss for any circumstance in which an NFT would be better and also guaranteed effective.
If github wants to add NFT to support its users to monetize the users generated contents, how would github do that?
Or how might a special NFT/PDF reader sw enables the PDF creators to monetized their creations?
Explain exactly how pissing away all that electricity by burning all that coal and generating all that carcinogenic pollution and greenhouse gas would have caused him to not lose the entire original image just like he lost the original stock photo CD?
Correct. But the license owner can require the license buyer to use editors that preserve NFTs or be subject to automated DMCA notices. Once Adobe and Apple start respecting the NFT-copyright-format in their tools, other commercial vendors will be forced by the market to support it too.
Again, I'm not in favor of any of this. Just admitting that I am pessimistic enough to see where all of this could end up eventually.
In theory you could add all of NFT Images into the software but what happens when someone creates an NFT of a basket ball. Are you going to stop people from printing any picture with a basketball in it?
the license holder could require license buyers to use editors the preserve the claim via that centralized application?
Why do you think handwritten signatures have gotten us so far?
Because the literal act of signing something is the lease important part of contracts and trust relationships.
I don't support HDCP or DVD-region-lock but they worked for the copyright owners without inconveniencing the users enough to affect the bottom-line. It's the technical users and hackers among us who have a problem with these.
I'm not looking forward to NFT everywhere for creatives, I'm saying I can see it happen. I don't want to sign every JPEG I edit but if the tools preserve the source signatures, it wouldn't really affect me.
Photoshop has had counterfeit detection system for over a decade. I'm sure Adobe would love to offer Getty + CS Cloud NFT-copyright integration if they can make it work. I'm sure they can come up with a catchy marketing name for it and build an ecosystem to license, edit, and distribute media with detailed tracking of every asset.
NFTs are not proof of ownership, because anyone can create an NFT of anything. I can create an NFT of my neighbour's car.
Obviously any random person could create an NFT and claim that it represents ownership of a particular stock photograph, but that's not really relevant or problematic. You could also create a traditional paper certificate of title for your neighbor's car too, but obviously no one would respect it (unless they were tricked, but that's against the law and the legal system would tend to respect that genuine certificate of title).
Copyright is big business and big business is copyright. Disney could absolutely start signing all of their media with NFT and every license holder would have X years to implement it properly. After that they can automate takedown notices for any commercial site/platform that uses their non-NFT'd images. Right now they need to manually verify if the Hulk coffee mug on Overstock.com is using licensed images or not.
This is not proof enough. You don't know that getty 1) owns the asset 2) hasn't sold other "proofs of ownership" of the same asset to other people.
If I want to buy licensed Hulk coffee mugs from any source, and resell them, Disney doesn't have any rights.
Great! We agree! People have been signing digital assets for thirty years now, and it clearly works well.
So why use the NFT?
> Disney could absolutely start signing all of their media with NFT and every license holder would have X years to implement it properly.
Or Disney could just start signing all their works _today_ without an NFT or blockchain of any type, using proven, decades-old, open source technology.
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The blockchain is amazing because it solves a very difficult problem - the consensus problem. Yes, blockchains are very expensive, but that's because they need to solve that hard problem. If you have a consensus problem, the blockchain is the only known solution to it.
Signing assets is NOT a consensus problem, because the origin of the idea of ownership comes from the real world.
When Disney signs their assets, it makes no difference what order they sign them in, or whether they sign them before or after someone else does.
For example, suppose Disney decides to sign everything, and then someone else "signs" Mary Poppins before Disney gets to it. Nothing happens! This signature has no legal, moral, or practical value to anyone: Disney _legally_ owns Mary Poppins and will continue to do so.
Or suppose a hacker breaks into the network and "signs" ownership of Poppins to Elon Musk. Again, this has no legal, moral or practical value.
There is no hint of a consensus issue, and therefore the incredible cost of a blockchain is completely wasted here.
Everything else is just recording those facts and transactions. That's why you can transfer ownership by writing it down on paper. NFTs are just fancy electronic documents. It's just paperwork.
Yes, of course that's what NFTs are. Is someone claiming they are something else?
What is the point of wasting so much energy, burning so much coal, and belching so much carcinogenic smoke and greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, if we can simply solve the problem much more efficiently and easily without wasting energy and destroying the environment and giving people cancer and heart disease?
And for what? I think the human race deserve fair use of the atmosphere, as well as pictures of Mickey Mouse.
What other system are you talking about? I could determine that you control the NFT of a digital work by observing the artist's statement of issuance and your message demonstrating control of the NFT on the blockchain. Determining the validity of the artist's statement of issuance could be done using public-key cryptography. I fail to see what additional system is necessary.
> observing the artist's statement of issuance
eg: having an authority affirm your ownership of something.
The secondary system of using ownership of some piece of a blockchain is superfluous considering the first system is all you would need to prove ownership.
Even if current NFTs don't support everything, the blockchain algo could be extended incorporate the needs of the parties involved.
How those contracts are written, whether it's on paper or on the blockchain, is the least interesting part of it all. NFTs add no value that existing recordkeeping cant already do (usually much better and faster).
So in order for the NFT to work, you need some sort of way to identify the copyright holder before the NFT even exists. Don't see you the issue?
If you can identify the copyright holder of a work without an NFT, what's the point of the NFT?
Imagine a future where you can engage in completely legal torrenting of copyrighted works, where all sides have NFT proofs of ownership. Owning an NFT would mean you own the notarized right to download a copy as well as to seed it to other torrenters who can cryptographically prove they own the same NFT.
Thank you! You get what I'm talking about. Many folks here are replying to me as if I'm saying NFTs can prevent copyright infringements. That's not possible and not the goal. The goal would be to track ownership and handle violations more reliably than mass DMCA-notices that plague YouTube.
As usual, you don't need a blockchain to do either of the two things you're talking about. For the copyright case, what matters is that you have a legal authorization which will be recognized by a court. An NFT can do that but so can an email or anything else — and the problem you're trying to avoid is a concern either way because the same people who require terms of use for their content aren't going to reverse course due to magical thinking advised by blockchain salespeople.
The secondary problem of unreliable cloud storage is similarly very expensively not solved by an NFT. Due to the inherent inefficiency of blockchains almost all NFTs point to a URL for the actual payload. If that hosting provider shuts down or restricts access, you have the same problem as you do now. Now, some people will say that IPFS solves this but if you've thought about the problem at all that is only a solution for content which is very popular and released under an open license: someone has to pay for the storage, even the few people willing to provide storage unpaid aren't going to do so for encrypted content which they can't access, and nobody who cares about access restriction is going to put it in a public blockchain anyway since they'd be one key leak away from the content being available without payment.
An email or anything else creates legal gray area. What if the email is from 20 years ago and the company that sent you the email doesn't exist any more? Do we know the email was authentic? Emails don't have cryptographic signatures. And even if, maybe their PGP key leaked. With an NFT, even if someone hacks the wallet of a creator and releases fradulent tokens, they are still trackable. The second advantage is the ability to sell the token. In NFTs, this is a builtin first-party feature, similar to your ability to sell DVDs. But how do you sell an email? How do you ensure that people didn't clone give the email to multiple people? If this problem sounds familiar, it is, it's the double spend problem, which various blockchains have found solutions for.
As for the cloud storage, I think it should be separated. NFTs can be set up in multiple ways. I propose to set them up as follows: a) you can prove cryptographically to others that your wallet contains an NFT and b) the legal framework of the NFT gives everyone the permission to give copies of the work to anyone who has given them a proof after a).
This move would create an entirely separate market for obtaining the work you have gotten an ownership title for. The barrier of entry for these services would be low, and some services can specialize for niche content, others can specialize for speedy delivery, etc. As the cost per work is quite low, I'd imagine a quite low price for these services. The most important advantage: one service going bankrupt wouldn't mean the loss of some people's collections. Especially, anyone would be allowed to host the content.
The single key leak issue is non-existent, because each single download is end-to-end encrypted via say TLS, but the download is only offered to accounts which have proven they own an NFT. Similar requirements are on torrenters, they too have to verify cryptographically that someone owns some content before they send it to them with a end to end encrypted ephemeral key. Maybe, for abuse prevention, there needs to be a record of the verification/download in the ledger as well, so that one can find people who lend out their wallets or something.
Can these issues be solved by a government run centralized registry instead? Absolutely, they can. In many countries, the govenrment runs a land registry already. Land registries share in fact many of the advantages of NFTs. The main issue I have though is centralization.
This issue doesn't exist, because an NFT gives you absolutely no legal rights whatsoever - only the law does.
The NFT is only a proof of ownership of the NFT. You don’t own the artwork. If you want to buy the artwork you need an old fashioned signed contract documenting transfer of ownership.
The immutable nature of NFTs and crypto in general doesn’t really work well in the real world where we rely on the ability to change things.
You could accomplish the same thing just using signed files, or a hash in the exif.
Blockchain gives you three things. 1) Censorship resistance (no one can "lose" or forget about the license). 2) Protections against mis-spend (no one without the private keys can grant the license). And 3) Protection against double-spend (in the case of two grants, we have a universally agreed upon history of which came first).
A non-exclusive license only requires the first two. You can satisfy the problem with digital signatures and a censorship-resistant P2P file share like IPFS. Comparatively putting data on the blockchain is fairly expensive. Even with sharding O(log(n)) nodes have to store the data, whereas with IPFS only O(1) do. On Ethereum, every kB of storage costs around $5. If you don't need canonical sequencing of history, then blockchain is probably overkill.
Except NFTs don't "prove" anything.
The only form of proof of ownership of media assets is legal.
If I have a legal document proving that I own media asset X and you have an NFT, you will be in the cold.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1372739631846936581
I think the reason they seem silly to a lot of people is because when you buy an NFT there's nothing extra you can do that other people can't when you hold the NFT.
I can have the exact same experience as the NFT holder for free with no effort.
Sure technically you can also make copies of physical collectibles but its not (trivial + free) like copying and pasting an image.
Many of the NFTs are not distributed even though they claim to be, so while they have the same kind of centralization, they have no such authority. If we were to grant them such authority, we'd want it to be a normal centralized database and the benefits of decentralization would not be needed. There would be no need for non-cooperative consensus either.
This is an important thought experiment that I brought up in another comment, but my conclusion is the opposite: I think that efforts would still be made to determine which physical painting was the original one painted by the artist, and that one would still retain the value as long as the determination of originality remained well-respected. This already happens with paintings: there are extremely skilled forgeries that have fooled experts.
Check out Art Blocks
https://artblocks.io
You do realize that the NFT markets are fuelled by controversy, right? Stop giving the NFT concept more attention if you truly want it to fail. Nobody is forcing you to buy an NFT, you have nothing to complain about.
Justification for this claim? This is not at all clear to me!
Ok, it sounds like you are saying that news coverage increases the price. That I can buy.
How can hype like that not set off everyone's bullshit detections, I can not understand. Todd Morley sounds like a complete charlatan.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Woo
>The term comes from "woo-woo", an epithet used in the 1990s by science and skeptical writers to ridicule people who believe or promote such things. This is in turn believed to have come from the onomatopoeia "woooooo!" as a reaction to dimmed lights or magic tricks. The term implies a lack of either intelligence or sincerity on the part of the person or concepts so described.
>As a coincidence, the Chinese word 巫 (pronounced in the Mandarin dialect as Wū) means a shaman, usually with magic powers. Also coincidentally, the Chinese word 無/无 (pronounced Wú in Mandarin) means "nothing," "lacking," or "negation." Another Chinese word 误 (pronounced in the Mandarin dialect as Wù) means "mistake" or "incorrect". There is also the English verb "woo", which means to seek someone's love, especially with false promises; it can also be considered appropriate, because woo-meisters seek people's admiration, falsely promising them miraculous and easily understandable knowledge.
Blockchain charlatans are woowoos.
Quibble - it's _bona fide_, pronounced "bonna feeday", because it's from the Latin literally meaning "good faith".
It sounds Fidé as in "Semper Fidelis", always faithful, or "Adeste Fideles", "Oh, Come All Ye Faithful".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJMKGeICf0Y
Also:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKmLUA2yHFE&ab_channel=Borre...
Just look at the ridiculous hype around NFTs. Who actually believes that $69 million was paid in auction, against presumably other 8 figure bids? For a bunch of useless pixels designed by an unknown in the art world?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212475
Any takers?
NFTs are worthless trash.
I mean, who didn't see that coming. NFTs, IMHO, have been money grabbing jokes, dumping on those naively looking for the next hot thing. Or rich people with money to blow...and since it's money to blow, who cares if it's now worthless?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html