Plot twist: it actually was a real Banksy NFT which the artist's PR team is now denying as a way to create a bizarre piece of performance art. The actual artwork is the press cycle that follows this, which is supposed to make you think about what authenticity really means in artwork and what gives a piece of art value.
Your point is based on the false premise that literally no one is supposed to know his identity. In reality, the claim is not that literally no one knows his identity, but rather that his identity has not been publicly confirmed. Most likely there are quite a few people who know his identity, like his art agents, financial and legal representation, friends, etc.
I don't think anybody has ever suggested that literally nobody except Banksy knows who Banksy is. It's pretty obvious there would need to be at least a handful of people who know, since almost the beginning.
Yeah, what I don't like is the hypocrisy of that and the authorities who play along. (S)he plays the "oh but you can't find me ;)" card every time it needs to escape prosecution ... yet makes use of the same legal system when it goes on its favor. (i.e. tries to trademark its art, sues others who reproduce it [1]). Good thing the EU doesn't play along.
As for me, I just dislike charlatans, disregarding of how famous they may be.
> Only a numbnut would believe those things can happen "anonymously".
I think you might be taking it too literally... Obviously some people know who he is... It's within the general public and media that he has remained anonymous...
It's weird insulting people when you're not correct about what they believe.
First thought I had as well. Ironically selling an NFT with a faked provenance as a statement on the essential meaningless of NFT's sounds like a quintessentially Banksy type of statement piece
I still think Banksy is not a real "person". It's just a team of marketers who started a prank or dare and it turned into this internationally beloved money printing scam. Because, you know, a thumbs up and spray painting a wall equals feeding a poor kid a bowl of rice everyday. "We're so anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalism, now give us money for this art".
Before Banksy became incredibly popular he made a name for himself in the graf scene. I remember Banksy from the mid 2000s and he was just another cool artist doing interesting things with stencils. For me he was in the same category as France's space invaders, or the guys in Spain (gemeos?) making giant paintings of odd-looking humans. Sometime in the early 2010s Banksy ramped up publicity stunts, and at that point I think Banksy became a collective of artists. Long story short I think Banksy was a person, but probably not anymore.
Why do you think Banksy is not an individual anymore? Many top artists run workshops, in which other people physically fabricate their works. Take Jeff Koons, for example. But few would claim that Jeff Koons is no longer an individual.
I mean even if the art is one person the numerous legally registered companies such as, BANKSY LIMITED, THE ART OF BANKSY LONDON LIMITED, etc. are corporations with directors that you can easily look up. The listed directors almost certainly aren't Banksy.
Banksy is literally a company with marketing, accounts, PR, and management. They are constantly looking for the next viral opportunity and they are big on branding.
For what it's worth i don't even mind that Banksy is literally a corporation. I just wish we were all honest about that. If there's some aspiring artist out there that wants to be the next Banksy our advice should be
"Ok go and register a new company. You'll also need some inner city office space, a management team, marketing and PR. As for the art? Let the data analysts take a look at opportunities to get the most views."
> I still think Banksy is not a real "person". It's just a team
I wouldn’t be surprised if this were true
> of marketers who started a prank or dare and it turned into this internationally beloved money printing scam.
He/she/they do produce art, so it’s definitely not a scam.
> Because, you know, a thumbs up and spray painting a wall equals feeding a poor kid a bowl of rice everyday. "We're so anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalism, now give us money for this art".
I can criticise whatever I want however I want, let it be a pamphlet or a painting, without having to give money to the poor or feeding random children.
Speaking of artists who are suspected of being a collective team, the identity and back story of "Netochka Nezvanova" aka "integer" aka "antiorp" was finally revealed.
Netochka Nezvanova is a name of a character from a Fyodor Dostoyevsky novel, and translates as "nameless nobody".
Her real name is Rebekah Wilson, and she was teamed up with another women who she never met in person, but she kind of fell in love with, but who actually turned out to be a man.
>Netochka Nezvanova has been described by cultural critics as "an elusive online identity" and "a collective international project". In 2020, art critic Amber Husain describes NN as an "avatar of avant-garde internet performance" that "became as known for her abstract and usable software artworks as she did for aggressive displays of anonymous cyber-domination".
portrait #02 Rebekah Wilson aka Netochka Nezvanova
>Bravo! If you enjoyed that anti-Max performance art trolling, but thought it wasn't spectacularly hyperbolic and sociopathic enough, I recommend looking up some of the classic flames on the nettime mailing list by Netochka Nezvanova aka "NN" aka "=cw4t7abs", "punktprotokol", "0f0003", "maschinenkunst" (preferably spelled "m2zk!n3nkunzt"), "integer", and "antiorp"!
>Nato.0+55+3d (released in 1999) was an amazing but notorious extension for Max that enabled live programming of real time video manipulation, networking and display.
>Netochka Nezvanova is a software programmer, radical artist and online troublemaker. But is she for real?
>[...] Netochka's medium is the online mailing list. Posting as "antiorp" and, more recently, "integer," she capriciously takes over technical and artistic discussions in forums such as the European Net arts list Syndicate, says Steev Hise, a Bay Area electronic artist. "Nobody really knows how many real people are involved with this," he says.
>[...] "As a community destroyer, she's fantastic," says Bernstein, the Brooklyn artist. "She's perhaps one of the Internet's first professional demolition experts. She's a real talent."
>[...] Bernstein says his own license for the NATO.0+55 software was revoked after he critiqued the software publicly in a paper published on his Web site. "Netochka, whoever she and they ar...
Take the Mona Lisa for example: if the Louvre were ever to make their own NFT (perhaps with some embedded proof it was them creating it), wouldn't the "stolen" one suddenly lose all value?
I get NFTs from the perspective of "proof that you were first person able to claim a thing because you made it," and that having value. But claiming other peoples stuff seems like it's just going to correct itself.
NFTs can't embed proof that they were created by anyone.
That's the core problem with all crypto: it can prove on-chain, digital events, but it can't prove anything in the real world.
I can prove you owned an NFT and that I own it now, but I can't prove anything about that NFT's connection to the real, human world.
Similarly, I can make a smart contract that says you have to give me 50% of your income, but I can't enforce it outside of the chain that the contract was deployed on. If someone pays you with a different currency, the contract immediately fails to enforce itself.
>That's the core problem with all crypto: it can prove on-chain, digital events, but it can't prove anything in the real world.
This is really the core problem with the cryptocurrency space. The whole "iT'S tRUSsLeSs" claim is complete nonsense as soon as you try to attach it to any meatspace system. And you need that bridge to the offline world to solve interesting problems.
> NFTs can't embed proof that they were created by anyone
NFT's aren inherent proof, but they can embed proof (if it exists).
If I took a photo of an idable, signed and noterized document stating that "the owner of X NFT is the owner of Y real item," then made that photo into an NFT, that would be embedding proof.
> If I took a photo of an idable, signed and noterized document stating that "the owner of X NFT is the owner of Y real item," then made that photo into an NFT, that would be embedding proof.
First of all, you're essentially talking about DRM. The signed and notarized contract is what determines ownership, not the NFT. It's centralized in (and can be modified by) the legal system.
For example, that contract could be nullified or invalidated by a court opinion, and the NFT becomes meaningless. It's just a digital document with a paper trail.
Think of it like this: does a Google Photo become more useful if A) it can only be on one computer at a time, and B) I have a log of every computer it's ever been on?
I could also copy the embedded digital asset and put it into a different NFT. Then there would be two NFTs with the exact same "proof" in them. Which is the real one? The document can't specify which NFT it applies to because the NFT is minted after the document is signed.
> Then there would be two NFTs with the exact same "proof" in them. Which is the real one?
The one that came first. Are you really that invested in claiming knowledge on this subject? If so, how could you not immediately grok that this would be the answer?
> For example, that contract could be nullified or invalidated by a court opinion
Or it could be not. In which case, it would be embedding proof. Your argument hinges on the idea that something is impossible yet requires special circumstances to make it so, while my argument is that something is possible and gives an imaginable scenario for it.
> The one that came first. Are you really that invested in claiming knowledge on this subject? If so, how could you not immediately grok that this would be the answer?
Sorry, you're right. I was talking about something theoretical instead of something practical.
In real life, it would make more sense for a fraudster to sell NFTs with their own forged contracts, e.g.: a photo of a signed, notarized paper document saying that the owner of the NFT owns ____ artwork.
In that case, they could either sell their forged NFTs without waiting for the artwork's owner to create their own, or they could only forge NFTs of famous pieces and hope that they become NFTs.
If, for example, you know that a certain painter's work is being sold as NFTs, one by one, then you could reasonably expect to create a confusing enough (though not identical) NFT with an earlier timestamp.
The point, though, is that the NFT is a photo of a contract, not a contract.
> Or it could be not. In which case, it would be embedding proof.
Yes, but as a buyer, how do I know the difference?
After the contract is nullified, the NFT could still be transacted. The NFT is unreliable, so, again, it's absolutely meaningless in terms of ownership.
> you could reasonably expect to create a confusing enough (though not identical) NFT with an earlier timestamp
The timestamp is the block-chain, not what's written on the document.
> Yes, but as a buyer, how do I know the difference?
As it stands, you'd have to know who you were buying from fairly well. Just as you would with a physical art piece (which could be also be a fraud).
Personally, I'd make sure that the image being hashed was also hosted somewhere only accessible through official means.
For instance, I'd have the louvre host the image denoting the NFT as ownership on their official website, then tweet them to make sure they weren't just hacked, and wait a few days to confirm.
But all of these issues are more related to what NFT's are now, vs what they may become. There are definitely ways of solving these issues.
Though I still don't see why any non-official NFT would ever be of any value.
NFTs are simply part of the high-end art market getting rid of the art, as it is an unnecessary distraction from what's actually going on in that part of the market.
> In this case, the authenticity seems to be tied to whether the artist said this is real or not.
It's the case for a lot of collectible objects. They need to be authenticated in some way. NFTs are mostly the same thing. An item that some people are willing to pay money for (either for speculation or emotional attachement) but otherwise worthless.
> The irony is that there's no actual difference between a fake NFT (token pointed to a URL) and a real one (token pointed to the same URL).
I'm not sure what you mean. The difference is precisely the same as the difference between a real Picasso painting and a skilled counterfeit of a Picasso painting.
I don't think so because you don't buy the painting but just the token that points to the painting.
Everybody could sell it without having the picture or the rights.
It could even be the correct URL.
It's like selling the real world address of the Mona Lisa.
The question is whether the claim "this NFT was issued by Bob" is true. There could be other NFTs issued by Bob, or other NFTs issued by other people, but those are other questions that aren't relevant to this question. This is simply a factual claim that is either true or false.
I think what both your replies are trying to point out is that
"X conceived, produced, and realized Y" where Y is something of innate value is a vastly more interesting, useful, and value-holding relation than "X gave approval to the creation of Y" where Y is something that is the mere result of a technical process that can be recreated easily by anyone.
The reason that the talented art counterfeiter doesn't bear that same relation is that they are not the person we have immense respect for the artistic talents of. True artists gain notoriety precisely by the fact that they first conceive of their works, because they are original. That is (in part, in addition to the inherent artistic value) what gives works by these artists such value. A counterfeiter only produces copies (by definition), not originals, and so what you are seeing is not the output of the strikingly creative mind that we cherish as human beings.
With an NFT you don't get any of that. The work has no inherent beauty (it's a piece of data), so the only thing that could give it value is the fact that its creation had the approval of creator X. But this fact is uninteresting precisely because there's no artistic value in the creation of meaningless interchangeable bits of technical data (there is no "conceiving" step to distinguish between original and counterfeit). At best it ought to have the value of an autograph, which most celebrities already give away for free.
> "X conceived, produced, and realized Y" where Y is something of innate value is a vastly more interesting, useful, and value-holding relation than "X gave approval to the creation of Y" where Y is something that is the mere result of a technical process that can be recreated easily by anyone.
I'm not making any points about "value" and certainly not about "innate value." I'm only talking about whether basic claims about the origin of a thing are true or false. It's up to everyone to determine how much they value the thing. I am trying to make precise points without devolving into "well I don't think NFTs have any value at all." That's a perfectly fine opinion, but it's totally independent from claims about the origin of something.
> With an NFT you don't get any of that. The work has no inherent beauty (it's a piece of data), so the only thing that could give it value is the fact that its creation had the approval of creator X.
Okay, since you do seem very interested in theories of why people value certain things, I'll address this. I think that the vast majority of the value of very expensive paintings by famous painters has very little to do with the "inherent" beauty of the work, and almost everything to do with facts about the actual origin of the object. I think that very skilled counterfeits deliver the overwhelming majority of aesthetic value, and I would argue this is provably the case for anyone except the very tiny group of people who are skilled enough to determine the authenticity of the painting.
> I think that the vast majority of the value of very expensive paintings by famous painters has very little to do with the "inherent" beauty of the work, and almost everything to do with facts about the actual origin of the object.
I agree! In fact, let's take as an example a perfectly executed counterfeit, in fact one executed so well that it matches the original on the atomic level. The equivalent of a perfect digital copy in the analog world. I'm fully willing to admit that it is intelligible that this copy does not have the same value as the original work of art.
The question, though, is why it doesn't have this value. The reason, I claim, is that the significant thing we humans value when we value art is the expression of an original act of creation, comprised by individual acts of conception, production, and realization accomplished by some ingenious mind. The reason we do not value counterfeits, even perfect ones, is that they are mere technical marvels. If they have any value at all it is due to their innate artistic merit, and not the fact that they are the expression of an act of creation.
For this reason, I claim, NFTs do not possess any of this "originality" value. There is no act of artistic creation as I defined it above. For this reason it becomes very difficult to distinguish between a "real" NFT and a counterfeit one, or say why we should value one more than another. At best, it becomes akin to an autograph or some ephemera that retains value only because of its connection to a celebrity.
> It's up to everyone to determine how much they value the thing.
What you are pointing out, of course, is that NFTs demonstrably do have exchange value. This is something that indeed demands an explanation, if I'm going to reject the view that they have value in the same way that an original work of art has value (and I do).
My view is simple: the vast majority of the exchange value of NFTs comes from a combination of their value as (a) novelty, (b) supposed investment vehicles, and (c) currency. I believe (b) deserves the most credit; most of the value in the NFT market comes from people convinced that the NFTs they buy will increase in value in the future. Any of these is very different than valuing the physical expression of the creativity of an artistic genius, however.
> The reason, I claim, is that the significant thing we humans value when we value art is the expression of an original act of creation, comprised by individual acts of conception, production, and realization accomplished by some ingenious mind.
I completely agree with this, and I think the experiment with NFTs is that perhaps a significant portion of humans will come to consider an NFT issued by an artist as an expression of the the original act of creation of a work, particularly for works that are not inherently instantiated in a unique physical object the way a painting is. It really is that simple: just like monetary valuations of famous paintings, there's no "inherent" correct answer to whether a particular NFT "counts" as a unique representation of the original act of creation of a work. It's just up to people. Remember, even copies of physical works (like lithographs) can command high valuations based on their perceived originality, despite everyone agreeing that they are copies.
Not really. Creating an NFT is a mundane administrative task, not a creative one. I’m sure most big name NFT “creators” have their assistant contract out the work in literally the exact same way as a “counterfeit”.
Every NFT is at best like a work from Andy Warhol’s Factory, but in my view, is substantially inferior even to that. “Warhol’s” Factory output has value in the art world of course.
No, it's more the difference between a fake certificate of authenticity for a real Picasso, and a real certificate of authenticity for a real Picasso. An NFT is no more an artwork than a certificate of authenticity is an artwork. The artwork in this case isn't what got sold, the NFT (certificate of authenticity) is. The artwork isn't fake, the NFT is, though since it's of a real artwork the distinction between a "fake" NFT and a "real" NFT is pretty much meaningless.
Although NFT buyers can be unbelievably gullible, I don't think it applies to all circumstances, including this one. I would say the NFT creators are more gullible, as its actually quite crowded at the bottom with the majority of works ignored, and they are the ones paying hundreds of dollars in transaction fees to release their NFTs, after spending time on it.
Basically, for this, the artist's words are just icing on the cake. The story is good enough, and it also inherits a provenance that is lightyears beyond anything outside of the NFT space, which alone has value, simply because it was first and predates anything Banksy subsequently releases.
What is actually happening in the NFT space is community building. Where certain NFTs convey a belonging to a community. If you had transparent information from other surrogates for the same thing, you would see similar or greater values of transactions over the last 30 years. How many people spent time and energy evolving a Charizard? How many communities were made around that? What if the Charizard had global-state enforced scarcity? Are they gullible? Replace with any other coveted item. For now, these are the kinds of NFTs actually making the headlines.
NFTs are trash. I get a feeling that a lot of people are falling for the same clonecoin scam we saw the early days of Bitcoin. You are a complete sucker if you buy into this. I say this as a deep Bitcoiner who believes that all value on the planet will eventually be measured in BTC. I've seen a thousand chains launched and fail, taking everyones stored value with them.
Digital things like coins are not valuable because its on a blockchain. They are not valuable because custody can be traced. Anyone can publish NFTs, and anyone can publish EVM tokens. There is no scarcity, there is no legal binding, there is only grift and scams.
Bitcoin derives its value from the difficulty in producing new coins, and the fixed emission. Are we at peak stupid?
Well, when one does have skin in the game, it is easy to believe (and want to convince).
I would argue that there is something very special about Bitcoin. https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate
The problem is that everyone is always looking for the next get rich quick scheme. Bitcoin was never this, it is a not get poor slowly scheme.
The problem I have with the hash rate as an indicator of anything long-term is that it's artificially subsidized in the present from a diminishing pool of reserve Bitcoin (or inflation, if you prefer to think of it that way). Currently to the tune of about 98-99% of the total block reward[1].
For all the talk of Bitcoin being a long-term asset, there's little evidence that the incentive system can work (i.e. fend off a 51% attack) in its terminal state, or even a couple decades from now when the block reward is ~97% lower than today.
That is a fair statement, and I guess we don't know. I suspect a future contentious blocksize change should take care of the fee rewards at the tail end. We are currently about 6sat/byte ($0.40/std tx) for a low priority tx today.
Satoshi himself said "I'm sure that in 20 years there will either be very large transaction volume or no volume."
That being said, there are plenty of older protocols without financial incentives that operate as expected, like Tor.
I'm curious what you would make of something like Jonathan Manns NFTs (the song-a-day guy). There is a known difficulty to the production of assets, a known stable emission rate. He makes one song a day for the rest of his life, he has produced over 4000 days of songs now. Would you see this as something that could have value like bitcoin?
Where are the boundaries of scarcity, effort, and value? why is bitcoin on one side of this threshold and everything else on the other side? At what point did bitcoin cross that line into legitimacy for you, and what would everything else need to do to get there?
or is it only bitcoin for eternity? wouldnt that be a strangly dogmatic, arbitrary line to be drawn forever and ever?
Not really. Because his art is not the token. The NFT is a representation of his art, but it is not unique or unclonable. There is nothing that prevents this token from being copied -- this is by design.
There is nothing to stop anyone from releasing an NFT with someone elses work. It is not binding.
Bitcoin just is.
What about nft that represents a digital right?
I think gaming NFTs are really nice. The blockchain with POW is not needed for this usecase, because I think the better usecase for blockchain here is having a common interface for different project to build on and be interopable, this itself is valuable, of course not on same level as Bitcoin but still valuable
What are "digital rights"? Is it something that requires enforcement by a meatspace court???
There is only one known real world meatspace -> blockchainspace binding that can be enforced without the courts. Energy and work. Anything else is just tradfi with extra steps.
It has to be. I've seen so many people making huge sums of money selling NFTs for machine-generated "art". What value does this provide to anyone? Who is buying this? What are they getting out of it? This entire thing feels like a practical joke to me.
Nobody is paying millions for hashes of JSON files of URLs of cliparts of pet rocks. You've seen money laundering and grifters "selling" NFTs to themselves to pump yet another crypto pump and dump.
Even highly technical people promoting NFTs don’t seem to understand what they really are (or decide to lie or obfuscate the truth) and seem to attribute them some mythical properties that makes no sense. I’m personally convinced it’s mostly used to launder money.
One of my old gamedev buddies is a crypto millionaire nowadays who mostly rants about Bitcoin vs ETH (to my dismay). One day he asked "Okay, can someone spend some time explaining what an NFT is?" and I practically jumped out of my chair with glee. I said "I've prepared this educational video for you" and linked him to that.
I feel like I can't possibly know what it actually is, simply because it can't be as dumb as I understand it. But then every time I try to learn more about, it feels even dumber and dumber.
NFTs are certainly what I would use to pay for a shipment of cocaine.
The real business is being the technical middle man for creating and auctioning NFTs. I assume the cartel would just call you up, and you'd come up with an image concept, start press releasing about it, you'd either manufacture or hire an artist to take credit for it, and afterwards take 20% off the top for costs and profit.
Reminds me of when torrent sites used to sell desktop wallpapers.
-----
edit: That may be the advantage of NFTs as compared to physical art. To launder money with art, you need to create an entire literature, get galleries to buy into it, and run a few fixed auctions on other pieces by an artist in order to make the price seem plausible. With NFTs you can just claim that whoever is questioning them doesn't understand them, and vaguely point at past NFT auctions in general as a proof.
I think a huge portion of these are opportunistic and semi-fraudulent (in concept, if not in law).
Person A and B are friends. A makes a bunch of NFTs. Person B agrees to buy NFT_1 for BIG_SUM. They settle "off books" for the payment... really what happens is Person A agrees NFT_2 is worth BIG_SUM and swap.
Person A now sells NFT_3 to public, and tries to convince public its worth BIG_SUM++ since other pieces sold for BIG_SUM in past.
Person A: Profit off NFT_3 sale
Person B: Profit by selling NFT_1 in open market for BIG_SUM++.
My problem with this idea is that inside of the crypto space there is just no distinction between good and bad source money.
There are plenty of illicitly acquired funds within the crypto space, that never need to cash out and never need to risk an identity being tied to the holder. The whole decade of crypto-native scams, phishing sites, rug pulls, autonomous fee gathering services that help actual illicit transactions, all of that crypto is still there and fungible and usuable. Most of the money laundering discussion has wrongfully assumed that people care about fiat currency. (This is worth saying again because people weren't ready to hear that 5-8 years ago, it was too abstract of a concept as people had tied their national identity to desire of their national currency, but more people have decoupled those concepts now and understand how crypto can be convenient for general goods and services if desired.) To many people this is just like a high score, they just accumulate the crypto. Hackers were doing more for less for a very long time. Defacing websites for street cred. But make no mistake, its a high score that absolutely can be laundered and converted to fiat at any point, its just it doesn't have to be, and there is no way to distinguish that from the licit transactions. Because what is licit also has no legal consensus. Circumventing one nation's capital controls, doesn't make it an illicit transaction in another nation, for example. A third nation seizing crypto and auctioning it off doesn't magically make the crypto transform from illicit to licit to everyone. Someone just following transactions on a block explorer without knowledge of the news articles from the third nation can just mistakenly believe that the auction winner is still the original hacker, because they didn't even know the seizure and auction occurred and just assumed the hacker was "running" from people watching the blockchain. These misguided detectives will try to alert the first exchange that the funds hit, not even knowing the whole legal issue is over. There is no way to distinguish between licit and illicit funds in a blockchain, many of which either never move or just participate in onchain things because its fun. Those funds have all gained in value too. Playing around with your high score money in fun NFTs is an option, no different than pay to win in video game currency.
And then there is everyone else in the NFT market which outnumber any of the above.
There is just no distinction or intention that you can assume.
We've relied on the state to create these distinctions over the last 60 years - primarily at the border and on the electronic financial system - stigmatizing money and saying some kinds of transactions are approved while others are not, the state has lost that power and thats just a reversion to the mean where the people-run electronic financial system more closely matches the cash financial system that predates the licensed bank-run electronic financial system.
There's really not much to NFTs. Everything is in the name. Non Fungible Token. They can have value because they can be linked to an owner (unlike the air, or the moon) and are non fungible (unlike a grain of sand). Some do have value because people think they can make a profit selling them to someone else.
It's very similar to modern art.
It's just an old idea that blockchain guys have been reusing, for lack of better application for their platforms. To me, the excitment around such a silly concepts says a lot about the state of blockchain applications...
It's disheartening to see so many negatives comments about NFTs in general here but none tackling the real underlying issue with these seemingly "dumb" transactions.
NFTs, as concept or protocol like ERC-721, are not completely useless as many state. They're in fact being used right now, for example, to represent LP positions in the novel uniswap v3.
The seemingly stupidity of news like these is a direct consequence of news market economy and how easy it is to abuse. Take this (probably common) scheme for example:
1)Have a lot of money in crypto
2)Create a NFT or partner with someone
3)Buy your NFT and have news outlets report it
4)Sell the NFT for more than you paid in commissions
It's completely unreasonable to fault the NFT concept for this. It's all about how news outlets are prone to spread information that is completely irrelevant (and arguably misleading) like someone sending money to himself or an accomplice with the goal of making it into the news.
87 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadIt's the kind of thing Banksy would do.
Funny how someone who "no one knows who he is" has a PR team, is able to run auctions, put exhibitions in museums, send and receive money, etc...
Only a numbnut would believe those things could happen "anonymously".
Except that's not been the case. There have always been some people who know who Banksy is.
Isn't having a PR team exactly how he manages that? He has agents to do it for him instead of doing it himself, preserving his anonymity.
As for me, I just dislike charlatans, disregarding of how famous they may be.
1: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/sep/17/banksy-...
I think you might be taking it too literally... Obviously some people know who he is... It's within the general public and media that he has remained anonymous...
It's weird insulting people when you're not correct about what they believe.
It's way off the mark to say he's just "spray painting a wall" though.
Banksy is literally a company with marketing, accounts, PR, and management. They are constantly looking for the next viral opportunity and they are big on branding.
"Ok go and register a new company. You'll also need some inner city office space, a management team, marketing and PR. As for the art? Let the data analysts take a look at opportunities to get the most views."
I wouldn’t be surprised if this were true
> of marketers who started a prank or dare and it turned into this internationally beloved money printing scam.
He/she/they do produce art, so it’s definitely not a scam.
> Because, you know, a thumbs up and spray painting a wall equals feeding a poor kid a bowl of rice everyday. "We're so anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalism, now give us money for this art".
I can criticise whatever I want however I want, let it be a pamphlet or a painting, without having to give money to the poor or feeding random children.
Netochka Nezvanova is a name of a character from a Fyodor Dostoyevsky novel, and translates as "nameless nobody".
Her real name is Rebekah Wilson, and she was teamed up with another women who she never met in person, but she kind of fell in love with, but who actually turned out to be a man.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova_(author)
>Netochka Nezvanova has been described by cultural critics as "an elusive online identity" and "a collective international project". In 2020, art critic Amber Husain describes NN as an "avatar of avant-garde internet performance" that "became as known for her abstract and usable software artworks as she did for aggressive displays of anonymous cyber-domination".
portrait #02 Rebekah Wilson aka Netochka Nezvanova
https://archiv.ima.or.at/imafiction/video-portrait-02-rebeka...
She and her work (like NATO.0+55+3d) been discussed on Hacker News before:
NATO.0+55+3d:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nato.0%2B55%2B3d
Netochka Nezvanova (usemod.com):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=774594
http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/NetochkaNezvanova
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22352276
>Bravo! If you enjoyed that anti-Max performance art trolling, but thought it wasn't spectacularly hyperbolic and sociopathic enough, I recommend looking up some of the classic flames on the nettime mailing list by Netochka Nezvanova aka "NN" aka "=cw4t7abs", "punktprotokol", "0f0003", "maschinenkunst" (preferably spelled "m2zk!n3nkunzt"), "integer", and "antiorp"!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16753758
>Nato.0+55+3d (released in 1999) was an amazing but notorious extension for Max that enabled live programming of real time video manipulation, networking and display.
https://www.salon.com/2002/03/01/netochka/
>The most feared woman on the Internet
>Netochka Nezvanova is a software programmer, radical artist and online troublemaker. But is she for real?
>[...] Netochka's medium is the online mailing list. Posting as "antiorp" and, more recently, "integer," she capriciously takes over technical and artistic discussions in forums such as the European Net arts list Syndicate, says Steev Hise, a Bay Area electronic artist. "Nobody really knows how many real people are involved with this," he says.
>[...] "As a community destroyer, she's fantastic," says Bernstein, the Brooklyn artist. "She's perhaps one of the Internet's first professional demolition experts. She's a real talent."
>[...] Bernstein says his own license for the NATO.0+55 software was revoked after he critiqued the software publicly in a paper published on his Web site. "Netochka, whoever she and they ar...
Take the Mona Lisa for example: if the Louvre were ever to make their own NFT (perhaps with some embedded proof it was them creating it), wouldn't the "stolen" one suddenly lose all value?
I get NFTs from the perspective of "proof that you were first person able to claim a thing because you made it," and that having value. But claiming other peoples stuff seems like it's just going to correct itself.
That's the core problem with all crypto: it can prove on-chain, digital events, but it can't prove anything in the real world.
I can prove you owned an NFT and that I own it now, but I can't prove anything about that NFT's connection to the real, human world.
Similarly, I can make a smart contract that says you have to give me 50% of your income, but I can't enforce it outside of the chain that the contract was deployed on. If someone pays you with a different currency, the contract immediately fails to enforce itself.
This is really the core problem with the cryptocurrency space. The whole "iT'S tRUSsLeSs" claim is complete nonsense as soon as you try to attach it to any meatspace system. And you need that bridge to the offline world to solve interesting problems.
NFT's aren inherent proof, but they can embed proof (if it exists).
If I took a photo of an idable, signed and noterized document stating that "the owner of X NFT is the owner of Y real item," then made that photo into an NFT, that would be embedding proof.
First of all, you're essentially talking about DRM. The signed and notarized contract is what determines ownership, not the NFT. It's centralized in (and can be modified by) the legal system.
For example, that contract could be nullified or invalidated by a court opinion, and the NFT becomes meaningless. It's just a digital document with a paper trail.
Think of it like this: does a Google Photo become more useful if A) it can only be on one computer at a time, and B) I have a log of every computer it's ever been on?
I could also copy the embedded digital asset and put it into a different NFT. Then there would be two NFTs with the exact same "proof" in them. Which is the real one? The document can't specify which NFT it applies to because the NFT is minted after the document is signed.
The one that came first. Are you really that invested in claiming knowledge on this subject? If so, how could you not immediately grok that this would be the answer?
> For example, that contract could be nullified or invalidated by a court opinion
Or it could be not. In which case, it would be embedding proof. Your argument hinges on the idea that something is impossible yet requires special circumstances to make it so, while my argument is that something is possible and gives an imaginable scenario for it.
Sorry, you're right. I was talking about something theoretical instead of something practical.
In real life, it would make more sense for a fraudster to sell NFTs with their own forged contracts, e.g.: a photo of a signed, notarized paper document saying that the owner of the NFT owns ____ artwork.
In that case, they could either sell their forged NFTs without waiting for the artwork's owner to create their own, or they could only forge NFTs of famous pieces and hope that they become NFTs.
If, for example, you know that a certain painter's work is being sold as NFTs, one by one, then you could reasonably expect to create a confusing enough (though not identical) NFT with an earlier timestamp.
The point, though, is that the NFT is a photo of a contract, not a contract.
> Or it could be not. In which case, it would be embedding proof.
Yes, but as a buyer, how do I know the difference?
After the contract is nullified, the NFT could still be transacted. The NFT is unreliable, so, again, it's absolutely meaningless in terms of ownership.
The timestamp is the block-chain, not what's written on the document.
> Yes, but as a buyer, how do I know the difference?
As it stands, you'd have to know who you were buying from fairly well. Just as you would with a physical art piece (which could be also be a fraud).
Personally, I'd make sure that the image being hashed was also hosted somewhere only accessible through official means.
For instance, I'd have the louvre host the image denoting the NFT as ownership on their official website, then tweet them to make sure they weren't just hacked, and wait a few days to confirm.
But all of these issues are more related to what NFT's are now, vs what they may become. There are definitely ways of solving these issues.
Though I still don't see why any non-official NFT would ever be of any value.
It's like that, except nobody wants it.
In this case, the authenticity seems to be tied to whether the artist said this is real or not.
I wouldn't be surprised if this were a performance art stunt designed to show how unbelievably gullible NFT buyers are.
It's the case for a lot of collectible objects. They need to be authenticated in some way. NFTs are mostly the same thing. An item that some people are willing to pay money for (either for speculation or emotional attachement) but otherwise worthless.
I'm not sure what you mean. The difference is precisely the same as the difference between a real Picasso painting and a skilled counterfeit of a Picasso painting.
"X conceived, produced, and realized Y" where Y is something of innate value is a vastly more interesting, useful, and value-holding relation than "X gave approval to the creation of Y" where Y is something that is the mere result of a technical process that can be recreated easily by anyone.
The reason that the talented art counterfeiter doesn't bear that same relation is that they are not the person we have immense respect for the artistic talents of. True artists gain notoriety precisely by the fact that they first conceive of their works, because they are original. That is (in part, in addition to the inherent artistic value) what gives works by these artists such value. A counterfeiter only produces copies (by definition), not originals, and so what you are seeing is not the output of the strikingly creative mind that we cherish as human beings.
With an NFT you don't get any of that. The work has no inherent beauty (it's a piece of data), so the only thing that could give it value is the fact that its creation had the approval of creator X. But this fact is uninteresting precisely because there's no artistic value in the creation of meaningless interchangeable bits of technical data (there is no "conceiving" step to distinguish between original and counterfeit). At best it ought to have the value of an autograph, which most celebrities already give away for free.
I'm not making any points about "value" and certainly not about "innate value." I'm only talking about whether basic claims about the origin of a thing are true or false. It's up to everyone to determine how much they value the thing. I am trying to make precise points without devolving into "well I don't think NFTs have any value at all." That's a perfectly fine opinion, but it's totally independent from claims about the origin of something.
> With an NFT you don't get any of that. The work has no inherent beauty (it's a piece of data), so the only thing that could give it value is the fact that its creation had the approval of creator X.
Okay, since you do seem very interested in theories of why people value certain things, I'll address this. I think that the vast majority of the value of very expensive paintings by famous painters has very little to do with the "inherent" beauty of the work, and almost everything to do with facts about the actual origin of the object. I think that very skilled counterfeits deliver the overwhelming majority of aesthetic value, and I would argue this is provably the case for anyone except the very tiny group of people who are skilled enough to determine the authenticity of the painting.
I agree! In fact, let's take as an example a perfectly executed counterfeit, in fact one executed so well that it matches the original on the atomic level. The equivalent of a perfect digital copy in the analog world. I'm fully willing to admit that it is intelligible that this copy does not have the same value as the original work of art.
The question, though, is why it doesn't have this value. The reason, I claim, is that the significant thing we humans value when we value art is the expression of an original act of creation, comprised by individual acts of conception, production, and realization accomplished by some ingenious mind. The reason we do not value counterfeits, even perfect ones, is that they are mere technical marvels. If they have any value at all it is due to their innate artistic merit, and not the fact that they are the expression of an act of creation.
For this reason, I claim, NFTs do not possess any of this "originality" value. There is no act of artistic creation as I defined it above. For this reason it becomes very difficult to distinguish between a "real" NFT and a counterfeit one, or say why we should value one more than another. At best, it becomes akin to an autograph or some ephemera that retains value only because of its connection to a celebrity.
> It's up to everyone to determine how much they value the thing.
What you are pointing out, of course, is that NFTs demonstrably do have exchange value. This is something that indeed demands an explanation, if I'm going to reject the view that they have value in the same way that an original work of art has value (and I do).
My view is simple: the vast majority of the exchange value of NFTs comes from a combination of their value as (a) novelty, (b) supposed investment vehicles, and (c) currency. I believe (b) deserves the most credit; most of the value in the NFT market comes from people convinced that the NFTs they buy will increase in value in the future. Any of these is very different than valuing the physical expression of the creativity of an artistic genius, however.
I completely agree with this, and I think the experiment with NFTs is that perhaps a significant portion of humans will come to consider an NFT issued by an artist as an expression of the the original act of creation of a work, particularly for works that are not inherently instantiated in a unique physical object the way a painting is. It really is that simple: just like monetary valuations of famous paintings, there's no "inherent" correct answer to whether a particular NFT "counts" as a unique representation of the original act of creation of a work. It's just up to people. Remember, even copies of physical works (like lithographs) can command high valuations based on their perceived originality, despite everyone agreeing that they are copies.
Every NFT is at best like a work from Andy Warhol’s Factory, but in my view, is substantially inferior even to that. “Warhol’s” Factory output has value in the art world of course.
That's true, but I'm certainly not comparing the magnitude of difficulty or creativity involved in the production of the thing.
Basically, for this, the artist's words are just icing on the cake. The story is good enough, and it also inherits a provenance that is lightyears beyond anything outside of the NFT space, which alone has value, simply because it was first and predates anything Banksy subsequently releases.
What is actually happening in the NFT space is community building. Where certain NFTs convey a belonging to a community. If you had transparent information from other surrogates for the same thing, you would see similar or greater values of transactions over the last 30 years. How many people spent time and energy evolving a Charizard? How many communities were made around that? What if the Charizard had global-state enforced scarcity? Are they gullible? Replace with any other coveted item. For now, these are the kinds of NFTs actually making the headlines.
Digital things like coins are not valuable because its on a blockchain. They are not valuable because custody can be traced. Anyone can publish NFTs, and anyone can publish EVM tokens. There is no scarcity, there is no legal binding, there is only grift and scams.
Bitcoin derives its value from the difficulty in producing new coins, and the fixed emission. Are we at peak stupid?
I'm seeing a lot of blind confidence in your comment.
The problem is that everyone is always looking for the next get rich quick scheme. Bitcoin was never this, it is a not get poor slowly scheme.
For all the talk of Bitcoin being a long-term asset, there's little evidence that the incentive system can work (i.e. fend off a 51% attack) in its terminal state, or even a couple decades from now when the block reward is ~97% lower than today.
[1] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.h...
Satoshi himself said "I'm sure that in 20 years there will either be very large transaction volume or no volume."
That being said, there are plenty of older protocols without financial incentives that operate as expected, like Tor.
Where are the boundaries of scarcity, effort, and value? why is bitcoin on one side of this threshold and everything else on the other side? At what point did bitcoin cross that line into legitimacy for you, and what would everything else need to do to get there? or is it only bitcoin for eternity? wouldnt that be a strangly dogmatic, arbitrary line to be drawn forever and ever?
There is nothing to stop anyone from releasing an NFT with someone elses work. It is not binding. Bitcoin just is.
https://www.programmerspoop.com/
There is only one known real world meatspace -> blockchainspace binding that can be enforced without the courts. Energy and work. Anything else is just tradfi with extra steps.
> The man, who describes himself as a professional NFT collector, entered a bid around 90% higher than others.
> The buyer suspects the person who alerted him and others to the Banksy NFT sale may have been the hacker themselves.
His first mistake was considering himself a professional NFT collector.
I feel like this is some bizarro world where this is all code for money laundering or something that I'm not privy to.
Been featured in the mainstream evening TV news, radio news, newspapers where I live.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrNOYudaMAc&ab_channel=Satur...
One of my old gamedev buddies is a crypto millionaire nowadays who mostly rants about Bitcoin vs ETH (to my dismay). One day he asked "Okay, can someone spend some time explaining what an NFT is?" and I practically jumped out of my chair with glee. I said "I've prepared this educational video for you" and linked him to that.
The kinds of people you can expect to see at this juncture:
- The emperor with no clothes
- The conmen who got away with it
- The lackeys who, out of fear or for favor, played along with the lie
- The peasants who laughed at the farce
- The kid who told the truth
- Folks who stayed home, went about their lives, and didn't actually miss anything
The real business is being the technical middle man for creating and auctioning NFTs. I assume the cartel would just call you up, and you'd come up with an image concept, start press releasing about it, you'd either manufacture or hire an artist to take credit for it, and afterwards take 20% off the top for costs and profit.
Reminds me of when torrent sites used to sell desktop wallpapers.
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edit: That may be the advantage of NFTs as compared to physical art. To launder money with art, you need to create an entire literature, get galleries to buy into it, and run a few fixed auctions on other pieces by an artist in order to make the price seem plausible. With NFTs you can just claim that whoever is questioning them doesn't understand them, and vaguely point at past NFT auctions in general as a proof.
Person A and B are friends. A makes a bunch of NFTs. Person B agrees to buy NFT_1 for BIG_SUM. They settle "off books" for the payment... really what happens is Person A agrees NFT_2 is worth BIG_SUM and swap.
Person A now sells NFT_3 to public, and tries to convince public its worth BIG_SUM++ since other pieces sold for BIG_SUM in past.
Person A: Profit off NFT_3 sale
Person B: Profit by selling NFT_1 in open market for BIG_SUM++.
There are plenty of illicitly acquired funds within the crypto space, that never need to cash out and never need to risk an identity being tied to the holder. The whole decade of crypto-native scams, phishing sites, rug pulls, autonomous fee gathering services that help actual illicit transactions, all of that crypto is still there and fungible and usuable. Most of the money laundering discussion has wrongfully assumed that people care about fiat currency. (This is worth saying again because people weren't ready to hear that 5-8 years ago, it was too abstract of a concept as people had tied their national identity to desire of their national currency, but more people have decoupled those concepts now and understand how crypto can be convenient for general goods and services if desired.) To many people this is just like a high score, they just accumulate the crypto. Hackers were doing more for less for a very long time. Defacing websites for street cred. But make no mistake, its a high score that absolutely can be laundered and converted to fiat at any point, its just it doesn't have to be, and there is no way to distinguish that from the licit transactions. Because what is licit also has no legal consensus. Circumventing one nation's capital controls, doesn't make it an illicit transaction in another nation, for example. A third nation seizing crypto and auctioning it off doesn't magically make the crypto transform from illicit to licit to everyone. Someone just following transactions on a block explorer without knowledge of the news articles from the third nation can just mistakenly believe that the auction winner is still the original hacker, because they didn't even know the seizure and auction occurred and just assumed the hacker was "running" from people watching the blockchain. These misguided detectives will try to alert the first exchange that the funds hit, not even knowing the whole legal issue is over. There is no way to distinguish between licit and illicit funds in a blockchain, many of which either never move or just participate in onchain things because its fun. Those funds have all gained in value too. Playing around with your high score money in fun NFTs is an option, no different than pay to win in video game currency.
And then there is everyone else in the NFT market which outnumber any of the above.
There is just no distinction or intention that you can assume.
We've relied on the state to create these distinctions over the last 60 years - primarily at the border and on the electronic financial system - stigmatizing money and saying some kinds of transactions are approved while others are not, the state has lost that power and thats just a reversion to the mean where the people-run electronic financial system more closely matches the cash financial system that predates the licensed bank-run electronic financial system.
There's really not much to NFTs. Everything is in the name. Non Fungible Token. They can have value because they can be linked to an owner (unlike the air, or the moon) and are non fungible (unlike a grain of sand). Some do have value because people think they can make a profit selling them to someone else.
It's very similar to modern art.
It's just an old idea that blockchain guys have been reusing, for lack of better application for their platforms. To me, the excitment around such a silly concepts says a lot about the state of blockchain applications...
NFTs, as concept or protocol like ERC-721, are not completely useless as many state. They're in fact being used right now, for example, to represent LP positions in the novel uniswap v3.
The seemingly stupidity of news like these is a direct consequence of news market economy and how easy it is to abuse. Take this (probably common) scheme for example:
1)Have a lot of money in crypto
2)Create a NFT or partner with someone
3)Buy your NFT and have news outlets report it
4)Sell the NFT for more than you paid in commissions
It's completely unreasonable to fault the NFT concept for this. It's all about how news outlets are prone to spread information that is completely irrelevant (and arguably misleading) like someone sending money to himself or an accomplice with the goal of making it into the news.