> The value of an NFT is in having the right to insert yourself into that story, as the owner of that work, and with the ability to transfer that right to another person (i.e. selling the work).
This is a false statement. The NFT doesn’t make you the owner of ‘the work’. It makes you the owner of the NFT.
> The same way purchasing a painting gives you the right to resell that painting and prove to others that you are the owner, but does not necessarily convey copyright or other rights (unless worked out separately via a contract), purchasing an NFT gives you the right to resell that NFT and prove to others that you are the owner.
I.e, In the same way that if you own a paining, the painting is yours and not the copyright. If you own an NFT, only the NFT is yours and not the artwork.
> Just like a deed conveys ownership of a house at some address, the token conveys ownership of that media.
No it doesn’t.
If you own a house, there are many things you can do with the house that others are legally prohibited from doing.
If you own an NFT, you have no more rights over the media than someone who doesn’t own an NFT.
> Just like you can invite a neighbor over to visit your house, and a car driving by can take a photo of your house, anybody can view the media associated with your NFT.
This is obviously absurd.
If you own a house, it’s illegal for people to visit without being invited. If you own an NFT, an infinite number of people can I air the media without you even knowing, let alone inviting them.
Also, a person driving by your house with a car can’t legally park in your driveway or come in and sleep in your bed, whereas someone with a copy of the media can do anything the owner of the NFT can do, including invite others to look at it.
Society has agreed that a contract written in a certain form, with the requisite signatures and registrations, conveys ownership of land. Subject, of course, to caveats and rules and fine print about what "ownership" of the land really means. The government can sieze it, for example. It's called a deed.
Similarly, this community has agreed that a contract written in a certain form, with the requisite signatures and registrations, conveys ownership of a piece of art. Subject, again, to caveats and rules and fine print.
If at this point you are trying to argue semantics when most of the community has a pretty intuitive sense of what exactly "owning an NFT" means, it seems a bit pointless.
> Similarly, this community has agreed that a contract written in a certain form, with the requisite signatures and registrations, conveys ownership of a piece of art.
Except that they simply haven’t.
Try taking someone’s house from them. You’ll find that it’s not just semantics that defines ownership.
Try copying the artwork pointed to by an NFT. You’ll find the NFT doesn’t stop you.
> If at this point you are trying to argue semantics when most of the community has a pretty intuitive sense of what exactly "owning an NFT" means, it seems a bit pointless.
I agree that it’s pointless to argue with people who think “owning an NFT” has any relationship to owning the artwork itself. It’s ok if people want to be part of a community who believe that together.
If you feel secure as a member of that community, don’t let the rest of us perturb you.
Have you considered that most people are not in fact part of that community, and that discussion of this point is quite relevant to anyone who hasn’t already committed themself to this belief?
If you have finished reading the post by now (seems you are commenting and editing as you go along), I think I make it pretty clear when it gets to more detail that the NFT is the thing you own, the right to transfer that NFT is the thing of value, and what gives it value is the person and context around who made it in the first place. Further, I make it clear exactly what rights you and others have over the media, which is basically none. Let me know when you make it all the way through, happy to continue the conversation.
> If you have finished reading the post by now (seems you are commenting and editing as you go along),
Wrong.
> I think I make it pretty clear when it gets to more detail that the NFT is the thing you own.
Yes, you contradict yourself.
> Further, I make it clear exactly what rights you and others have over the media, which is basically none.
Yes, which is not what you say in the parts I quoted - let’s remind ourselves:
> Just like a deed conveys ownership of a house at some address, the token conveys ownership of that media.
This is a common pattern in writing about this subject, which is why I point this out. It’s a standard Motte and Bailey technique, which is a dishonest form of persuasive writing.
For real estate lawyers, a full understanding of all the laws is important. For someone who might want to buy a house, a rough understanding is sufficient. That's why I provide both. Not everybody needs to know or care about the exact details in order to decide it is worth owning a house. But if they are interested, they can learn. I hope providing both sides of it is seen as useful in that light - it is not self-contradictory to make broad analogies that are useful, then explain exactly in detail where those analogies break down.
> This is just a lie. The token doesn’t convey ownership of then media. There is no rough understanding by which this is true.
The debate around this is pretty somewhat tiresome. Yes, you have to buy into the believe that the token represents the media, but it's as good a definition as any because all ways we talk colloquially about "owning" a JPEG are simply not the same as owning a chair.
- Copyright is just a set of limited legal rights granted to someone temporarily by certain jurisdictions. It's not the same thing as owning something, which is why we were laughing at the "you wouldn't steal a car" ads in the 2000s.
- Actual ownership means having access to a copy of the bytes, which is not perceived as meaningful, and only valuable to the extend that access is otherwise arbitrarily restricted.
- You can choose to believe in the artificial scarcity of a certificate of ownership.
Thing is actually assigning IP rights to the owner of the NFT should be trivial as some projects have done. That it’s not done or the IP rights granted are explicitly limited suggests people get that and want to retain ownership of the rights whilst selling the token.
Please, explain to me what legal rights an NFT-holder asserts over someone that claims ownership of your token. Do any countries respect the blockchain enough to take you seriously?
“(b) Ownership. (i) When you purchase a Meebit, you own only the NFT, not any associated Art. Each Meebit is associated with a non-fungible token (an “NFT”) on the Ethereum blockchain. When you acquire a Meebit, you own the NFT, not the associated Art, or any other Meebits Materials (as that term is defined below), or any Third Party IP.”
Not really sure what point you are trying to make. With Meebits, you don’t own anything other than the token itself.
State employed officials with guns will show up and remove you from a house if you are living in it without permission from the person who owns the deed. That is ownership.
There is no thing that another person can do regarding a piece of art backed by an NFT that you own that will cause state employees with guns to show up to stop them.
But owning the NFT is not 1-to-1 with having the right to redistribute or having the right to transfer the right to redistribute. Are you keeping track of which NFTs confer copyright with the purchase? Or are you leaving it to the honor system? In which case, what is the NFT providing?
What makes you think the parking lot is important? It seems like an entirely incidental detail in your example.
There are paving stones on which a million people walk each year. They are of no more importance than a parking lot in which a particular trade promotion takes place.
Don’t shoot the messenger - usually stuff like this starts out being dismissed and laughed at. I don’t own any art NFTs buts not hard to grok the thesis of those who do. It’s not about tulips, just like Bitcoin wasn’t.
This comment adds no additional justification for then claims. A lot of people think it’s exactly about tulips, and nobody is making a good argument why it isn’t.
> what gives it value is the person and context around who made it in the first place
BS. That’s the marketing excuse. The real value is only in the fact that you can potentially sell it to a greater fool who will buy for more so you won’t be the one holding the bag. It’s the new tulip mania!
I make it clear what that "ownership" means - the right to control that token on the blockchain. I make it clear that it is not enforced by any legal framework, just the blockchain. What is your issue?
Again, if you don't like specific wording, I invite you to write a better explanation for regular folks which is simultaneously perfectly accurate in every sense in every phrase and word you use.
In a 1700+ word article, you found two words which were part of an analogy you disagreed with, and admit that the article clarifies in detail all of your concerns. I changed these two words from "just like" to "similar to", which solves your "problem", and you still aren't happy because it was "an outright lie". It was not a lie, only deliberate misinterpretation could possibly frame it that way, so I guess I can't make you happy. Wish you the best though!
At the beginning of an article you told an outright lie. Later you equivocate.
The idea that a lie stops being a lie because of the number of words you say later is obviously absurd.
As I have pointed out this is a motte and Bailey fallacy.
Also, it’s still a completely misleading statement. The change to ‘similar to’ doesn’t make it true. It still isn’t true, only now you have some wiggle room to claim it’s not a lie.
You are still trying to misleading people into thinking that NFTs confer ownership of the media.
You’re presuming ownership universally means copyright. It doesn’t. Ownership is as much a cultural norm as a legal one. Owning the NFT, in certain circles, allows you to participate in an alternative cultural norm of ownership, decoupled from copyright ownership.
I tried to understand what you said but it ends up indecipherable like a koan. In this case, this koan confers a monetary benefit to the self-appointed Zen Masters of crypto. For only a few dollars the followers get a little sticker that says "Enlightened".
If you presume that we will in large part be continually living in a video game of varying levels of immersion relatively soon then this becomes something fairly significant.
Zuckerberg's moves make sense in this context. NFT's make sense in it as well.
I don't feel compelled to play video games, and I don't feel interested in joining an AR metaverse. That might just be personal shortcoming clouding my expectations of Web3...
I partially agree with this. But then why all the bullshit? Why don’t people just come out and say that it’s all about in-game items for the metaverse rather than all the talk about owning media?
Nothing suggests that existing NFTs will be relevant in that world even if the technology is.
It’s also not obvious that a distributed ledger has an advantage over a centralized one.
I think whenever you see someone say "owning media" you should re-write it in your brain as "owning the only author-signed copy of media" - that's probably the most effective rewrite that maximizes the utility of analogy.
The value of the distributed ledger is rooted in a theory: that it will be, in the long term, the most durable and agreed upon place to look to for arbitrary third parties to decide whose artist's signature is legitimate.
The thing that suggests the NFTs of the world today will be relevant in that future world is pretty simple: take any piece of art where the artist involved has publicly sanctioned an NFT for it, and ask the question if the signature of that artist on that work will theoretically be something valued by society in the future. (Grounded by the well placed assumption that this is truly non-fungible - the artist can't even reneg on this, since history will record this was the original.) The number of times you can affirm this as a "yes" should increase the weight you put on the hypothesis today's NFTs will be valuable in the future.
It's worth noting: these two hypotheses are decoupled. The blockchain has already been written. So even if the idea of an NFT burns out so much that future artists do not make them anymore, this doesn't necessarily mean the NFTs that exist today will not be valuable or recognized. They are in the public record, and those who control the wallets they are assigned to will always be able to prove they are the owners of them, even if the chains they are on stop adding new blocks in the future.
NFTs are not signatures on works of art. The media is not signed by the NFT.
A signed artwork is more valuable than an unsigned artwork.
However NFTs do not create signed artworks. The artwork remains the same.
The NFT is just a receipt for someone paying money to someone else, who in some cases is linked to the an artist.
Is that valuable? Maybe. I concede that a bill of sale from some point along the chain of ownership of ‘the last supper’ might have value to some kind of collector.
But, an NFT is not equivalent even to the bill of sale.
If you have the bill of sale, you have a unique historical item, whereas the NFT is on the public blockchain where everyone can see it and copy of it, so even that doesn’t have any scarcity.
Both the media and the NFT are infinitely copyable.
You seem determined to think with analogies. If my attempt above didn’t help you understand why people are paying tons of money for these things, I’m afraid I’ve run out of ways to help.
What would stop someone from spawning a slightly modified (imperceptible to human eye) Brooklyn Bridge?
The idea of artificial scarcity seems central to NFT, but it is unclear if this is really a moat or desirable. Does it really convey exclusivity over a "unique" set of bits?
No, an NFT is not a pair but a tuple. The third part of the tuple is the third party who issued the NFT. In the case of the Brooklyn Bridge, the NFTs I expect that would confer social status in the metaverse regarding the bridge would be ones issued by the City of New York or perhaps the descendants of the original architects. This will probably actually happen in some form but it will be a while. If you’re talking about a specific work of art depicting the bridge, the only NFT of value is the one sanctioned by the original artist.
That NFT is scarce. Too many people do not understand what an NFT represents and what it’s short and longer term expected conferred benefits are, and are hung up on trying to create analogies to existing forms of ownership like physical property rights or copyright.
It’s reasonable to assert that NFT’s are about conferring social status in the metaverse.
I.e. they are in-game currency.
People are ‘hung up’ on analogies to physical ownership, because proponents of NFT’s keep claiming they are like deeds of ownership, which is what the linked article strongly asserted before it was amended.
If NFT advocates stopped calling it ownership, I don’t think anyone would be hung up about it.
This isn’t correct. People outside the ‘community’ are using a long established meaning.
People within the community are using a meaning that has essentially none of the attributes of the conventional definition while claiming that the meaning is the same.
This isn’t a question of two sides disagreeing over meanings. It’s a question of a deceptive use of a very well established pre-existing term.
No, there are already a variety of uses of the term ownership. For example, copyright ownership, license ownership, or physical ownership. There isn’t a single definition, and the definitions of ownership have always been contextual and evolve based on things like norms and technological changes.
The ownership of NFTs is the ability to assert you control the keys of a wallet pointing to a tuple that pairs, for example, a URL to a smart contract. Both of these elements in the tuple then confer certain things by proxy: the URL a proxy to the work, and the smart contract a proxy to an authority. Once that linkage is accepted by a third party, then it serves as a form of semantic ownership with contextual benefits (there are several contemporary realized and theoretical future ones.)
For $6,500 USD I will create a GitHub repo called “A Bridge in Brooklyn” containing your name in the readme. You may consider the commit ID your non-fungible token. If you wish to sell it I will add another commit with the new owner’s name after I receive a $500 “gas fee”.
I will have my kid draw a picture of a bridge and send you a JPG of it; you can put that on Meta Horizon as many times as you want.
Naturally like all NFT wallets I fully reserve the right to delete the repo at any time for any reason with no warning.
No, that doesn’t meet my requirement above. Nothing does, because Meta doesn’t impose the constraint I am talking about: it was a hypothetical example to try to convey to you the dynamics going on regarding NFTs that you seem to think you fully understand.
Isn't that the point though? Every time I try to figure out the value of this thing called an "NFT" I can find plenty of hypotheticals, but I've yet to encounter anything concrete. Using your example you want to be the only one who can use this "thing" in Meta Horizon. Cool, but that's something Meta Horizon has to implement, and they don't need some weird blockchain thingy to do it.
If someone buys an NFT what good is it today, or what problem can it solve in future that can't more simply be solved by something that already exists?
I used meta because I assumed you’d be aware of what I was referring to instead of cryptovoxels, sommium space, or webaverse. If you grant that the meta example would be useful if it exists, then we’d just be haggling over if eg cryptovoxels has enough analogous utility to pull it into the set of things you consider worthy.
I'm not familiar with any of these, but then I'm not familiar with Meta Horizon either. I'll be the first to admit I'm not up on what the "cool kids" are doing. If it helps feel free to imagine your explaining this to your culturally clueless but technically savvy grandpa.
But looking at these, I'm just not seeing the value that NFTs have provided vs already existing methods. For example I'm looking at https://somniumspace.com/parcel/3402?elv=-0.68. I assume the art on the walls here are NFTs no? And I'd have to be the owner of the NFT if I wanted to take it to my own "parcel"? But what prevents me from simply taking the source image and simply minting my own NFT and displaying it? And why would I want to use a space like this instead of something like Second Life or VR Chat where I can go the much more direct route of simply uploading a PNG?
That's the piece that I have yet to see answered clearly. I certainly get it's technically possible to build something based around NFTs, and given that they are currently trending I'm not in the least bit surprised someone has. I just can't see how it's superior either via ease of use or in technical capability to something that already exists.
> But what prevents me from simply taking the source image and simply minting my own NFT and displaying it?
Because the NFT isn't just a pointer to an image, it's a tuple that also includes which wallet address is granting you that NFT. So, the "real" NFT for a work is the one granted by the original artist or other authority people culturally agree upon as the one that has real social and economic value. (For example, the artist may post the public key somewhere authoritatively that conveys it is the one they've sanctioned.)
It effectively acts as a fully-provable (and scarce) signature by the artist, and eventually if it isn't already, will be displayed visually on the work in these apps to confer legitimacy. Putting up an image that isn't signed by the original artist will be possible, but it won't confer the same status to a person the genuine NFT would, since observers will be able to know it is not the genuine NFT.
And of course, the reason you'd want to use this kind of environment is self-referential: you want to use it because you want the status or other benefits that come from being able to put your genuine NFTs on display. For example, it can show how wealthy you are, show that you are willing to patronize artists, cause the original artist to come visit your showroom, etc.
> For example, it can show how wealthy you are, show that you are willing to patronize artists, cause the original artist to come visit your showroom, etc.
Many different kinds of publicity stunt can achieve these things. NFTs offer no unique benefits.
The thing about cultural norms is that they're only meaningful if they're accepted by the prevailing culture.
Based on this thread, I would say NFTs are not.
So what exactly is the point of an "alternative form of ownership" that is only considered valid by a small subculture and not society at large? Is it really ownership in any meaningful sense?
NFTs are considered ownership in nascent online societies. There is no “at large” society. Even nation state recognized ownership in terms of copyright has its limits.
Huh? I own my home in the eyes of most people I care about (for example, most citizens and authorities of the United States.) But even within the US there are for example socialists who reject the idea
I own my home. They just don’t have the means to overturn this particular norm within the sovereignty of my country - but in some circles like that insofar as “being a homeowner” confers privileges such privileges would not exist.
When it comes to physical land and real estate then I agree there is a pretty natural definition of “at large” - the sovereignties the land is located within.
For other things like copyright and other extra-physical forms of ownership that span society at large, there is no macro set of laws governing these things universally so context matters.
There are in fact laws governing copyright, and international agreements.
Using the words macro and universally allow your statement to be true in the most literal sense that there are no universal laws, but otherwise, copyright is just as universal as land ownership. I.e. most places have a version of it, but there are many local variations.
Arguably, copyright is probably more universal than land ownership since it is a newer concept and there is less local divergence.
They exist in nearly everywhere on the planet are in fact a great candidate for the most universal laws that exist, and are objectively far more universal than land ownership laws.
“Copyright laws are standardized somewhat through these international conventions such as the Berne Convention and Universal Copyright Convention. These multilateral treaties have been ratified by nearly all countries, and international organizations such as the European Union or World Trade Organization require their member states to comply with them.”
NFTs are like those old "star registry" scams. For $20 (or whatever), we'll write your name alongside this star in our registry book, and send you a certificate!
Not sure how that's related to art though. Of course a self-referential system is good for internal consistency. The issue comes with trying to use it for anything outside the system, such as monkey jpegs.
Not at all. It clearly works just fine as the marketplace volume suggests. Go right click save a CryptoPunk and try and sell it. Go make a BAYC clone and try and sell it. Try it out on chain, deploy your own copy of the smart contract. Or go and create a website and set up a Paypal account and try to sell some JPEGs. Let me know how that works out. Even if you succeed in making money, like selling a fake Gucci purse, you'd only succeed in increasing the clout of the original.
Most rational people argue that NFTs are a bubble/mania. Your argument that it's not because people are throwing wild amounts of money at them does nothing to convince us otherwise.
That's a loaded opinion. A lot of people said the same about Bitcoin, the internet, social media, electric cars, and mobile apps.
My argument is that the system works just fine as a plausibly neutral ledger of account and for establishing provenance of ownership through reputation and convention.
And in fact I very much prefer it to the legions of corporate lawyers enforcing man-made copyright laws and enriching monopolistic centrally distributed platforms such as app stores. I consider it much more sustainable, universal, accessible, and respectful of human rights and expression than the current systems in place.
I think we're talking past one another. I'm sure there's plenty of ways to make money by flipping various crypto assets.
Where we disagree is our value judgement of that. I just don't see that as being useful per se, imo there's enough ways to move numbers around using computers already, a novel one can't really get me all that excited, especially considering its resource cost.
I have yet to see a good argument for crypto that doesn't boil down to that.
I think it's one of those "when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" scenarios. Marketplace volume isn't a good in itself if the markets don't do anything useful and waste a bunch of energy, but to people bought into crypto and capitalism really deeply it seems to be enough to get excited.
Right, and the entry in any particular star register's registry is the same thing. They have provenance over their registry, nothing more, nothing less.
Clearly not. If an artist with an on-chain reputation such as Beeple creates a digital artwork and mints it on-chain and continues to do so over time and that artist's work becomes sought after, the reputation and history and story of that work being created and minted and transferred is as good as any other form of provenance.
What makes the iTunes MP3 marketplace valuable? What makes the Amazon Kindle text file marketplace valuable? Is there something about the virtual nature of NFTs that gets to you in a way that these intangible marketplaces don't? Why does itunes and Kindle not bother you? Because they have an army of lawyers to enforce copyrights and license agreements behind them? Does the convention and reputation-based open source nature of Web3 disturb you?
The music is good, and it’s harder to get them elsewhere.
> What makes the Amazon Kindle text file marketplace valuable?
The books are good, and it’s harder to get them elsewhere.
> Does the convention and reputation-based open source nature of Web3 disturb you?
Why would anyone be disturbed by this? I see nothing wrong with people trading tokens. What is disturbing are claims that trading these tokens is equivalent to trading in the associated goods.
> What makes the iTunes MP3 marketplace valuable? What makes the Amazon Kindle text file marketplace valuable?
The law. Copyright law makes acquiring these works via other means slightly more difficult. Like NFTs they are just a failed attempt to force artificial scarcity into a post-scarcity space.
> Why does itunes and Kindle not bother you?
They do, but they don't have scammers constantly trying to sell their shit as some kind of revolutionary new future you have to get in on before you get left behind!!1!
> Does the convention and reputation-based open source nature of Web3 disturb you?
What disturbs me is the shift from people viewing artificial scarcity as a desperate grasping at straws from people who can't deal with information post-scarcity to people touting artificial scarcity as the glorious technological future.
> The law. Copyright law makes acquiring these works via other means slightly more difficult. Like NFTs they are just a failed attempt to force artificial scarcity into a post-scarcity space.
Copyright law does not exclude someone from releasing on an open source blockchain as opposed to a monopoly app store.
The only reason these marketplaces exist as monopolies is because direct distribution of creative content for profit has traditionally been difficult to manage. That's all.
> They do, but they don't have scammers constantly trying to sell their shit as some kind of revolutionary new future you have to get in on before you get left behind!!1!
Only because the dust has already settled from the same thing that happened during the dot com boom and the consumer electronics boom and the mobile app store boom.
> What disturbs me is the shift from people viewing artificial scarcity as a desperate grasping at straws from people who can't deal with information post-scarcity to people touting artificial scarcity as the glorious technological future.
Copyright enforcement over monopolistic marketplaces is a form of artificial scarcity. Come on, you know this. Napster was leaps and bounds ahead of any distribution method for music back in the 90s. Cost of music redistribution has been near zero for over 20 years. It doesn't cost the band anything to have their music copy pasted on a torrent site. The entire scheme of copyright protection is an archaic method of introducing artificial scarcity for items that are cheap to reproduce (yet sometimes capital intensive to produce). NFTs are no different.
> Only because the dust has already settled from the same thing that happened during the dot com boom and the consumer electronics boom and the mobile app store boom.
Yes, there were scams at the beginning of those booms, but at the same time, there were obvious real world applications that end users benefited from right from the start, and absolutely no sense of doubt that there was value in them.
>The entire scheme of copyright protection is an archaic method of introducing artificial scarcity for items that are cheap to reproduce (yet sometimes capital intensive to produce).
True.
> NFTs are no different.
Obviously false. NFTs don’t have the law preventing you from ignoring them.
Yes, but you cannot act within their registry as a independent actor, transferring and receiving items in the registry on your and others will. They own that registry, and they chose to give you access. That's the difference between a centralized registry like that star registry, and a blockchain where every actor has equal access to the "registry". No one can stop you from transferring your NFT to someone else, while in a centralized registry, they could.
That's besides the point. Why anything? I'm not gonna pretend to understand high-art, because I don't, but apparently some people see value in it, so who am I to question what they value?
To be honest, I don't see much value in the current Images-as-NFTs hype either, but again, who am I to judge what people spend their money on? I also thought the same about Bitcoin initially, but after a while saw value in it myself too.
When it comes to NFTs as a concept though, I think they can be applied better than what people are currently doing. SaaS licenses that can be resold for example is one interesting use case.
I mean, ok, if we're going to engage in some form of economic nihilism then I guess we can say anything is valuable. Q-Ray Bracelets, faith healing, and star registries included. Tulip bulbs really can be "worth" a fortune. But that's not a very useful premise for discussion. What people are arguing over is whether or not there is any non-woo value to be associated with these things.
> When it comes to NFTs as a concept though, I think they can be applied better than what people are currently doing.
I'm not convinced. I keep hearing people say this but I have yet to hear even one idea that can't be done better by other, older, non-hyped technologies.
> SaaS licenses that can be resold for example is one interesting use case.
Case in point: we can do this just fine today, but we don't because there's no reason for an SaaS provider to want to do that.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> If you own an NFT, you have no more rights over the media than someone who doesn’t own an NFT.
False. Just like open source software, the devil is in the details (usually the LICENSE.md file). NFT projects vary dramatically in the rights they convey to holders. To the extent that these meatspace rights are enforceable, some convey commercial use, some convey personal use, some are published as creative commons, and some are ambiguous.
The NFT space is rather immature compared to open source software, however. The ambiguity is a real problem. The space would do well to standardize on licenses and stamp that on the NFT's metadata.
But in the meantime, by convention in Web3, the apps and websites that integrate NFTs respect the ownership and provide verification of ownership for integrations, such as virtual art galleries, exclusive events or areas in Decentraland, profile pic verification on ENS, wallet gallery on OpenSea, avatars in Sandbox, etc.
By convention, web3 marketplaces also respect royalties with original artists on resales.
NFTs are tokens that can be used
and verified as arbitrary authentication tokens for anything, whether it be a real life event or product or access to some software or other virtual benefit.
From a recent conversation with a (soon to be) lawyer [as I understand it] software typically uses what's called a "shrink wrap contract" [1] wherein the _usage_ of the product implicitly accepts a license. As far as I can tell, nothing in the ERC721 standard (for example) has any provision for such a legal instrument to be included.
As such, I don't see how NFT "ownership" can (currently) be construed to possess any legal rights whatsoever unless agreed upon externally to the NFT in which case... what value is the NFT adding?
Would love to get a proper legal teardown of this space.
[2] All this said, I could see a world where an NFT smart contract requires a cryptographically signed _legal_ contract to be hashed into the transfer as a form of legal consent. But for some reason this isn't yet reality.
Similar to buying a signed print from an artist—no contract involved, no legal transfer of copyright or intellectual property, no claim to anything except ownership of the artist-signed artefact. In the case of NFT it is mostly equivalent: claim of ownership over the artist-signed artefact (the token).
Most collectors aren't claiming to own the media (because anybody can right-click save it, and because it is usually hosted on IPFS, the very purpose of which is to allow the media to be copied & distributed across many nodes). But they may claim to own "the artwork," referring to the artist-signed artefact. Much like how a museum may choose to acquire & build provenance around a signed photographic print, despite the availability of unsigned prints that depict the same exact media (see Ansel Adams signed vs unsigned prints, for example).
imo anyone claiming to "own the artwork" when talking about widely available digital media is talking about copyright, and if they're talking about something else, they're high
NFT would be better explained if they used the older word: certificate.
But if we called NFT's 'certificates,' then less would buy into the Tulip mania.
NFT's are just a digest of certificates, public/private key pairs, and a chain of hashes.
If Lebron James put out a limited run digital model of himself, a set of hashes and schema describing the signatures, and released the certificates for purchase on Nike.com,then all the legal, authorized implementers, such as Fortnite, CS:Go, Roblox, and Halo:Infinite could all render the model, respect the ownership (or lack therof) by validating the account and object's cryptographic digest (comparing against a global ownership ledger), and allow free, unrestricted, cross-domain/platform/Intellectual property boundary transfership and use, aligning with meatspace laws...
Let's just say that this wave of NFTs (in images, videos, audio) are going to die out in favour of the discovery of 'useful' NFTs.
The future will probably begin to expand to more than just 'images, audio and video', which those specific NFTs in those categories are absolutely useless.
We've been hearing the same thing about cryptocurrency and blockchains for literally over a decade now. We always seem to be just a year or two away from real, useful applications of blockchains, or truely useful cryptocurrencies. Now we're we're apparently just a few years away from some nebulous "useful NFTs".
I very much doubt this for a simple reason: information is a post-scarcity space. Things like NFTs exist solely to try and shackle that space with concepts from scarcity-based economics. They will never have inherent value because they do not create or enable anything other than a delusion of scarcity.
What does "ownership" of an NFT even mean? Can you even repudiate ownership later if you so chose? Can you remove the record of your ownership of the NFT? Can you transfer that ownership outside of the blockchain?
NFTs seem like blockchain graffiti. You've purchased the right to tag a passing train car, that's all.
It means that the shared ledger (also called blockchain) has a record of that specific NFT belonging to your address.
> Can you even repudiate ownership later if you so chose?
Yes, you send it to a "burn address" which is a address no one has access to.
> Can you remove the record of your ownership of the NFT?
Like remove the history? If so, no, blockchains are (usually) immutable ledgers, it's actually one of the core value propositions for blockchains. You can send the NFT to a "burn address" if you don't want it anymore.
> Can you transfer that ownership outside of the blockchain?
Well, kind of but not really. You question is a bit like if you can transfer the ownership of a .com domain to outside the internet. I guess you could, in some way, but in most practical ways, no.
> NFTs seem like blockchain graffiti. You've purchased the right to tag a passing train car, that's all.
I don't know what to make of this, how is it related to graffiti and tagging trains?
A NFT is a really simple concept if you stop thinking about pictures and other media (since that doesn't really have anything to do with NFTs): A NFT is a cryptocurrency which only has a single token of itself. Like there only was one Bitcoin that was indivisible. You can transfer it to other addresses, but there can only be one at a time. That's all there is to it.
> Like there only was one Bitcoin that was indivisible. You can transfer it to other addresses, but there can only be one at a time. That's all there is to it.
Such a token is inherently worthless. The only value comes from rights that token can confer.
That’s why people are trying to associate them with objects of real-world value.
Do you see data as being inherently worthless as well? Because that's all there is, data. And according to the current market, it's not worthless, just like even if some people consider Bitcoin to be inherently worthless, there is a market that says it isn't.
What's that worth? Data by itself is inherently worthless. It's only worth something if it represents something we care about. This could be something fictional (e.x. a video game world), or real (a warehouse inventory), but on it's own? Worthless.
You say an NFT is a cryptocurrency with a single individual token and... what? It's a piece of data, but what can I do with it or what can I get out of it? I can send it to someone else? Cool, what can they do with it? What benefit is there? That's the big question I've at least yet to seen answered satisfactorily.
I get there's a market for this currently, but once upon a time there was a market for pet rocks (which unlike NFTs can at least be pleasing to look at). Markets can be irrational, and the fact that there is a market price for something does not inherently mean that something has value.
> This is a false statement. The NFT doesn’t make you the owner of ‘the work’. It makes you the owner of the NFT.
That depends on the conditions attached to the NFT. For example, the Bored Ape Yacht Club gives full commercial ownership to the owner of each ape for the particular ape they own.
I don't know the name in english, in german they are called "Optionsscheine" they are like options, but they also get taken down, disabled etc if the stock moved too much.
An option can have rules that cause it to expire. That doesn’t make it anything like an NFT, because an unexpired option is still a right to buy the media, whereas an NFT never gives you any rights to anything except itself.
>This is a false statement. The NFT doesn’t make you the owner of ‘the work’. It makes you the owner of the NFT.
Doesn't the same logic apply to paintings/prints? If you buy a painting from an artist, is there anything preventing the artist from making a copy/replica? As for as I know, selling a painting does not constitute a transfer/assignment of copyright. The only difference here seems to be that paintings are analog, and take more effort to duplicate than right-clicking.
While I agree with your comment, new tokenization laws, like the one in Switzerland, make it possible to create tokens and NFTs that transfer legally binding rights. E.g., you can go to a judge, prove that you own the private key to a wallet owning assets, and they will enforce the contract behind a said assets.
Your points about the media may be the case but there's a lot of other reasons to use NFTs.
Let's rephrase to 'perks'.
The owner of a house now has access to the perks of owning a house:
E.g Noone can enter property without permission, can't park on your driveway, can act how you want in your own home etc
People without a house do not have this ability.
The owner of an NFT now has access to the perks of owning that NFT:
Access to exlusive discord (training and information, etc), early access to new projects, job opportunities etc
An NFT can offer a lot of different utility which are only received by proving their ownership of the cryptographic token.
> The owner of an NFT now has access to the perks of owning that NFT: Access to exlusive discord (training and information, etc), early access to new projects, job opportunities etc
> An NFT can offer a lot of different utility which are only received by proving their ownership of the cryptographic token.
The NFT isn’t offering anything. The business that offers the perks is. If the business changes or goes out of business, the perks disappear.
It seems to me lots of people who are buying NFTs were never that into graphic art in the first place, but they all of a sudden became graphic art aficionados because it's the only type of art that can be distributed via this NFT mechanism that they deem as socially fair because it has a generic "sticking it to the man" vibe.
Yep - a side effect of this is that NFT art has a distinct aesthetic which is different from prior digital art. I am hoping that as the space settles down, less "lazy" art and more thoughtful art can rise to the forefront again.
NFTs are a useful mechanism for the digital art medium, I hope they come to be seen in that light a bit more and a bit less as valuable in and of themselves because of the mechanism.
The problem is that the mechanisms that regulate real art are clear.
Take a painting. You have to stand in front of it to truly appreciate it. A pic won't do it.
So the buyer of the painting has an exclusive asset which produces returns in terms of appreciation but also periodic fees when they lend it to museums.
NFTs have nothing of the sort because the enjoyment is essentially the same between owning it and right clicking it. In order to mimic the real world enjoyment you'd have to find a way to immerse the asset in a virtual world in which avatars pay for the privilege of seeing/using that art content.
The NFT maybe here, but the virtual world , not yet.
You technically can do it in the real world! It's called stealing the painting lol.
When buying an NFT you are essentially betting that society would come around to equate "right-clicking" with stealing.
And that would employ the same social and technological resources to prevent right-clickers to do their bidding as it does today to prevent thief from stealing paintings from museums.
I mean technically speaking IP laws mean that the image is protected and improper use of it can be challenged. It’s just the ownership on the blockchain doesn’t confer that usually.
> I mean technically speaking IP laws mean that the image is protected and improper use of it can be challenged
Let's be real. AP, AFP, Reuters and Getty try to protect their images by charging for the full resolution pics .
People will gladly use the 580x830 instead of the pricy 5800x8300.
Brands which have been fighting this fight since the 90s such as Ray-Ban, LVMH, Gucci...they all fail to block counterfit physical products from being shipped from China.
What chances does one have to have IP laws be enforced on the internet....
Try playing music you don’t own a license to on YouTube or Twitch. IP enforcement on the Internet is having a Renaissance to the point of spuriously punishing people who aren’t violating anything.
Fraudulently minted NFTs have been taken down (at least from marketplaces) as well.
> Taking a picture of the painting = right clicking
Absolutely not.
A pic won't ever provide you the same satisfaction as standing in front of a painting, that's an innate characteristic of paintings.
Right clicking a JPG , saving it on your laptop and looking at whenever you want gives you the exact same satisfaction as paying 100k USD for the work of art.
Matter of fact it gives you way more satisfaction, because you got for free what a fool paid 100K to obtain.
The real world equivalent would be finding a perfectly conserved Banksy in an abandoned barn, keeping it for a while and then selling it.
You get to enjoy it for free and the buyer has to pay you 6 figures.
Thing is you don't have to be extremely lucky to right click, you only have to know how to use your thumb.
In conclusion I'd point out that even without NFTs , there is no market for JPG pictures, exactly because they can be replicated very easily and potentially an infinite amount of times.
The most famous JPG ever is "the Afghan girl" by McCurry. The original sold for 62,000 EUR.
>A pic won't ever provide you the same satisfaction as standing in front of a painting, that's an innate characteristic of paintings.
That seems a bit handwavy to me. Apparently some museums don't even put originals on display, only a replica (due to conservation/vandalism concerns). Maybe that means that the "satisfaction" you get is purely placebo? In other words, it's the same painting for all intents and purposes (to your amateur eye), and the "satisfaction" you're getting is some vague notion that this particular painting is the original. Does this start sounding like NFTs to you?
A painting is different than a picture, also the volume of copies matter.
Say a museum has one original and 4 copies of a painting. That's 1:4.
With JPG it can potentially be 1:∞
In other words you have to go to that particular museum to see the painting , and everybody knows that you have to go there, there is a bottleneck in the both the quantity and quality of copies of the original, and it's very tight, matter of fact social, logistical and common sense factors limit the capability of copying the painting in 1:1 fashion just to the museum . That's in order to protect from vandalism and theft.
And the beauty of the physical world is that the copy is never 1:1
It's 1:0,9999999999999 and maybe cannot be picked up, but again: common sense.
As a matter of common sense everybody knows that the physical world can NEVER be exactly replicated in a 1:1 fashion.
With JPG pictures instead everybody knows that they can be copied at will, there is no bottleneck and also for pics (unlike painting) it makes no difference if they are visualized on screens or printed.
Finally everybody can make their 1:1 copy and it's identical . And the whole process can be repeated an infinite amount of times and it will ALWAYS be exactly as the original.
>In other words you have to go to that particular museum to see the painting , and everybody knows that you have to go there, there is a bottleneck in the both the quantity and quality of copies of the original, and it's very tight, matter of fact social, logistical and common sense factors limit the capability of copying the painting in 1:1 fashion just to the museum .
That sounds like a lot of words to justify why viewing that particular painting has value, even though you can see a replica and probably wouldn't notice the difference. All the value of viewing the original in the museum comes from the social clout that you get from being a cultured person that can afford an european vacation to visit the louvre. That sounds a lot like NFTs. Here's a quote from another NFT article:
>“This is a great example of right-clicker mentality,” Midwit Milhouse said on Twitter. “Sure, you can make your own gold-coated steak for 65GBP, but then you don’t have the satisfaction, flex, clout that comes from having eaten at Salt Bae’s restaurant. The value is not in the cost of the steak. Go ahead, make yourself a gold-coated steak at home. Post a picture of it on Instagram. See how much clout it gets you. Salt Bae’s dish costs around 1500GBP because people want to pay 1500 GBP to show off that they can afford to pay that much. It’s all about the flex.”
>It's 1:0,9999999999999 and maybe cannot be picked up, but again: common sense.
>As a matter of common sense everybody knows that the physical world can NEVER be exactly replicated in a 1:1 fashion.
Sounds like you're trying to hide behind the 0.00000000001%. In other words, the replica might be 0.99999999999% similar, but people are apparently willing to pay millions for the remaining 0.00000000001%. To me, that's as irrational as placing value in the remaining 0% that NFTs represent.
> In other words, the replica might be 0.99999999999% similar, but people are apparently willing to pay millions for the remaining 0.00000000001%
This is wrong. People (as in regular people) aren't willing to pay millions, they are willing however to spend 20/50/100 dollars to go an see it in person at the museum vs. googling an image of it. All for that 0.0000000000001%
Consumers decided that for some pieces of art it is worth to spend some amount of dollars to go and see it once, in person and get that final 10th decimal place.
This is what in turn gives the painting value , and then wealthy individuals and institutions are willing to pay millions, because the painting produces revenues for the museum.
Sometimes it's owned directly by the museum, while sometimes it has a private owner who lends it to the museum and takes a cut.
>This is wrong. People (as in regular people) aren't willing to pay millions
"regular people" aren't paying hundreds of thousands for NFTs either.
>they are willing however to spend 20/50/100 dollars to go an see it in person at the museum vs. googling an image of it. All for that 0.0000000000001%
>Consumers decided that for some pieces of art it is worth to spend some amount of dollars to go and see it once, in person and get that final 10th decimal place.
Are they really ascribing value to the remaining 0.0000000000001%, or just to the vague notion that the painting in the museum is the original? I alluded to this before, but the alternate explanation is that they're not going to the museum because it offers the best fidelity, they're doing so for other reasons (eg. social clout). See also: people going to concerts, even though listening at home has superior fidelity (for one, there aren't hundreds of people screaming in the crowd).
>This is what in turn gives the painting value , and then wealthy individuals and institutions are willing to pay millions, because the painting produces revenues for the museum.
This totally fails to explain paintings that are in private collections. Why do rich people pay millions for original paintings, just to hang inside their house?
> I alluded to this before, but the alternate explanation is that they're not going to the museum because it offers the best fidelity, they're doing so for other reasons (eg. social clout)
What % of social media posts are museum oriented? We are talking 0 percent.... it's only a matter of seeing what's the first decimal point.
Regardless, it seems to me that there is a lack of common sense among the NFT crowd, and you seem to be somehow on the same wavelenght.
The vast majority of people who right-click an NFT image have subsequently no desire to acquire said NFT. And if a museum were to start charging for an NFT collections, people would not pay to get in.
The vast majority of people who right-click an image of the Mona Lisa do have a desire to one day go out and see the painting in person as they think it would be a cool thing to do and would pay for it.
There is a clear difference, at least for people who have common sense.
Given that museums have existed for hundreds of years and have generated trillions of dollars in revenues, the burden of the proof is on NFTs, not the other way around.
When NFTs museums (either virtual or real) will open up then it will be possible to make a comparison.
>What % of social media posts are museum oriented? We are talking 0 percent.... it's only a matter of seeing what's the first decimal point.
I don't go on social media so I can't really comment on that. That said, I do see a lot of people taking pictures of paintings (mostly famous ones) at museums. What gives? If they wanted the best fidelity recreation of the picture, they'd be better off going to wikimedia commons and getting something that a professional photographer took. Maybe they're after the sentimental value, in both the case of going to the museum in person, and taking the picture. It's definitely not for the remaining 0.0000000000001%, especially when you consider that you need x-rays or radiocarbon dating to tell a fake from the original.
>Regardless, it seems to me that there is a lack of common sense among the NFT crowd, and you seem to be somehow on the same wavelenght.
What's your point? That because I'm "somehow on the same wavelenght" as "the NFT crowd", that I have "lack of common sense" by association?
>The vast majority of people who right-click an image of the Mona Lisa do have a desire to one day go out and see the painting in person as they think it would be a cool thing to do and would pay for it.
>There is a clear difference, at least for people who have common sense.
>Given that museums have existed for hundreds of years and have generated trillions of dollars in revenues, the burden of the proof is on NFTs, not the other way around.
So your point is... that NFTs are a bad investment if you plan to start a museum and charge patrons? I don't think that's really controversial, or anywhere close to what we were discussing. Are you trying to use "can charge people to see it" as a proxy for "has value"? While I do agree that's one way to objectively value works of art, it isn't hard to see that's not the only source of value. Like I mentioned before, private collections goes totally against this.
> What's your point? That because I'm "somehow on the same wavelenght" as "the NFT crowd", that I have "lack of common sense" by association?
No. I said "wavelenght", not "same as".
It seems to me you are looking at the price action of some NFTs, the price action of the ETH token and the volumes on the auctions houses built on top of Ethereum, plus the social hype being generated. And using those as your starting point you are trying to walk your way backwards towards pointing at some sort of underlying value.
I honestly don't think you'd be trying to find value in NFTs if not for the price action and volumes going amber red to bring the phenomenon to your attention.
It's FOMO-lite, the same that had Stanley Druckenmiller buy the very top of the Nasdaq in 1999, back when he was running Soros' Quantum Fund.
Sometimes no matter how hard you look there is no underlying value beneath the price action, there is no reason or rhyme as to why people become maniac about stuff, and feel like they MUST have it.
Tulips, beanie babies, NASDAQ in 1999, NIKKEI in 1997, Real Estate in 2007...
>Sometimes no matter how hard you look there is no underlying value beneath the price action, there is no reason or rhyme as to why people become maniac about stuff, and feel like they MUST have it.
...like people paying millions for an original painting rather than getting a replica made for $100k (or whatever) for their private collection? My point isn't that NFTs have underlying value (whatever that means), just that they're valuable in approximately the same way that original paintings have value over replicas. I'll quote an earlier comment here:
>But you still paid a few million more for the original painting, even though it's virtually indistinguishable from a replica. It's more helpful to think of an original painting as a bundle of two things:
>Original painting = thing that looks like a painting + bragging rights
>An NFT is just the "bragging rights" part of the original painting, and the JPG that anyone can access is the "thing that looks like a painting ".
> like people paying millions for an original painting rather than getting a replica made for $100k (or whatever) for their private collection?
The official art market action amounts to 50B/yr. Of the aforementioned figure the vast majority of that is then sent on loan to museums and thus produces revenues for the museum and passive income for the owner.
Let's say 5B is the amount that people pay yearly for paintings they intend to keep in their private collection.
Let's further say the average amount that a collector spends in a year to enrich their private collection is 5M.
5B/5M = 1000 individuals.
Of course we are 8 billion humans, you'll always find 1000 individuals who behave in a way that you cannot explain logically or whose actions leave you scratching your head.
> Original painting = thing that looks like a painting + bragging rights
> An NFT is just the "bragging rights" part of the original painting, and the JPG that anyone can access is the "thing that looks like a painting "
A person with common sense would not even think about splitting the experience and the bragging rights, or even re-arrange something as self evident and self-explanatory as watching a painting in a museum.
You are trying to come up with this explanation in order to justify NFTs and their price action, pretending to know what goes on in the minds of people who buy them, to further reverse-engineer the value that they see in them.
NFTs buyers not only aren't doing all the above reasoning, but they hardly know why they buy them.
In conclusion, there are some things that are just self evident, and need not to be explained. Even in the case of a person spending millions for paintings which will never be sent to museums.
If a common sense person is invited to some rich person mansion and are shown a private collection of real paintings worth millions the thought that come up is inevitably: "A hard working rich person who likes expensive stuff and is not afraid to spend to enjoy life"
If on the other hand a common sense person is invited to some crypto-rich person mansion and are shown a collection of hashes and blockchain transactions pointing to a JPG on twitter or imgur....the thought that comes up is inevitably: "A stoner cryptobro who won the lottery and now is wasting away their money paying 6 figures for some monkeys JPGs"
>Of the aforementioned figure the vast majority of that is then sent on loan to museums and thus produces revenues for the museum and passive income for the owner.
Source? Moreover, considering that museums need donations/government subsidies to stay afloat, I doubt "making money" is the primary reason people/institutions buy art.
>5B/5M = 1000 individuals.
>Of course we are 8 billion humans, you'll always find 1000 individuals who behave in a way that you cannot explain logically or whose actions leave you scratching your head.
So your point of contention is that NFTs have too many people relative to the amount of people buying expensive original art?
>A person with common sense would not even think about splitting the experience and the bragging rights, or even re-arrange something as self evident and self-explanatory as watching a painting in a museum.
I'm seeing a lot of words devoted to dismissing my comment, but many words being devoted to explaining why my comment is incorrect. Declaring "self evident and self-explanatory" does not make for an argument. I don't see how "a person with common sense" would buy your explanation of people paying millions for the imperceptible 0.000000001%, so they can enjoy it more.
>In conclusion, there are some things that are just self evident, and need not to be explained. Even in the case of a person spending millions for paintings which will never be sent to museums.
>If a common sense person is invited to some rich person mansion and are shown a private collection of real paintings worth millions the thought that come up is inevitably: "A hard working rich person who likes expensive stuff and is not afraid to spend to enjoy life"
>If on the other hand a common sense person is invited to some crypto-rich person mansion and are shown a collection of hashes and blockchain transactions pointing to a JPG on twitter or imgur....the thought that comes up is inevitably: "A stoner cryptobro who won the lottery and now is wasting away their money paying 6 figures for some monkeys JPGs"
The thing that ties both of them is spending money on a non-productive asset, which serves as a costly signal[1] of your wealth. Old paintings definitely have more awareness than NFTs, I'm not going to dispute that. However, all that means is that old paintings are more mature than NFTs, not that paintings are valuable and NFTs are completely worthless. Before archeology was a thing, ancient artifacts probably had zero value beyond scrap, but nowadays there's a thriving market for it. Maybe NFTs will turn out to be like beanie babies, but maybe they'll turn out to be like artifacts?
> The thing that ties both of them is spending money on a non-productive asset, which serves as a costly signal of your wealth
For a common sense person only an expensive painting serves as tool to signal one's wealth.
An expensive NFT is a tool to signal one's foolishness. For all practical purposes it's like paying 6 figures for some bottled air sampled in Times Square and trying to use it as a way to impress people.
You'd get a huge minus both in your wallet as well as your social status. You could be living in Versailles but if you get to the last room and show people your collection of hashes....then you throw all the other 1000 gold plated rooms straight into the bin and your guests will laugh at you.
That is of course unless you preselect people who hang out in /r/NFTs and only ever invite them over. There's only 237k of them.
Let's say 25% would endorse spending 6 figures for an NFT and still think highly of you. So that's 60k people.
You have to preselect among 60k people on the planet, whereas the expensive paintings would get you the admiration of each and every of the 8.2 billion people. No preselection needed.
Listen, I despise NFTs as much as the next guy but this is a pretty gross mischaracterization of what these people are buying into. You're not buying a raster graphic, you're buying a hash that points to your wallet on the blockchain. Yes, both are equally as asinine in the grand scheme of things, but conflating them is just outright wrong. Paintings are trivial to replicate, people don't buy them though because it's not "the original". With NFTs, that concept of having the "master copy" is what drives their entire economy.
I someday hope that people realize what you can do with single issue tokens beyond simply having a link to cloud storage. You can create products that utilize this same behavior, but also leverage proof of ownership to create actual unique applications. With even just an ounce of developer ingenuity, you can use NFTs as an access token to whatever service you wish to provide.
I put together a collection that is both art + access to an interactive service that relies on ownership of a token. The right-click download picture is completely meaningless as the true power is simply proof of ownership of the piece, having a copy of the image means nothing if you don't own the token and you will be denied access to the service. I guess it's a completely new concept in a lot of ways and not many people have yet implemented this to scale but it's a fascinating concept to me personally.
In my case, if arweave allows for digital pieces to disappear from the web, then that means they've likely failed as a project considering they've positioned themselves to be a permaweb.
However, interestingly if you leverage the token ownership for access, in my collection's case, even if the static image is wiped for whatever reason, they could still access the interactive service and see their art, and interact with it.
This of course has the assumption that I'm continuing to host my service indefinitely, which I know is a problem with my current implementation. I am planning to recreate my APIs as onchain programs, and migrate my app to be hosted on arweave. If it works the way I think it does and arweave doesn't fail as a project (which I don't think they will), then I'm hoping that I can have a service that is permanently accessible. I have yet to test that hypothesis of course.
That's a fair question, and really I think it comes down to degrees of trust. As you say, ultimately I as the creator of the tokens could possibly utilize my update authority to change some of the underlying metadata for the token. The only real reason I can think of that I'd do it for this project is bugfixes if there is something botched in the metadata for specific tokens.
I don't quite know the extent of power that I could leverage as a creator over data on arweave. It's not ever crossed my mind as to why I'd possibly want to alter that.
At the end of the day you have to have some degree of trust with most services you interact with, and I think this would be no different. Maybe I as a creator could eliminate this ability to update anything on arweave after the initial upload by changing the update authority to a wallet that is programmatically created from an onchain program, and off of the Ed25519 curve. If I am able to do something like that, then it would be impossible to access the wallet since it doesn't have a valid private key, and maybe then it's truly immutable?
It's a problem I actually haven't thought of until now. But there's probably something I could do along those lines.
Honestly if something like that works then it might be a generalizable solution to the problem you're suggesting.
But trust is currently easy online. I can initiate a chargeback through traditional currencies.
Bought source is available for download as soon as I buy something. So i have it in my possession on my drive when eg. Envato deletes the assets because of copyright infringement.
Also, i frequently visit https://rekt.news/ and trust seems to be far-fetched. Even the auditors sometimes keep the 0-days to themselves.
Yeah, it's true that chargeback is not possible in the same way in cryptocurrencies, so there is just an inherent risk vector there.
I think it would be possible, and likely, that there could be a marketplace / service specifically for high-end art, that could have built in functionality that explicitly makes their pieces immutable.
But really I do think it kind of comes with the territory in some ways, when it comes to refunds. I think for instance I could create a service that allows for refunds on the initial sale from me as a provider, however if you buy something from the secondhand market, you wouldn't be able to receive a refund from me as a producer, you'd have to work with the secondhand market / user you bought it from personally.
It's possible to create trustworthy products and platforms I think. But yeah, right now there exists no easy mechanism to get a chargeback, nor do I think there likely will ever be such a thing on most chains, as chargebacks rely on centralization (banks) to transfer funds to your account.
Also thanks for sharing that link, I've never heard of the site and it's pretty interesting.
Not quite. It acts as an access token, in about the purest sense, kind of like an auth token in traditional webapps. I could revoke access by blacklisting the NFT if I really, really wanted to I suppose, but I don't in this specific service I've built, as there would be no reason whatsoever for me to revoke access to the interactive capabilities of my art from someone that purchased it, and never would implement such a thing.
Edit - For the other cases you added to your original post, I've thought about the subscription problem some and have ideas but it's outside of the scope of my current project, but I think it is a solvable problem with some underlying changes to token mechanics.
Sounds more like the NFT is a ticket for entry to an experience.
How does this work if a person makes a unique wallet for this NFT and then shares the private key? Does that essentially break the exclusivity mechanics?
Yeah, that is how I am envisioning it as well. It is a ticket to services I've already created, and services I intend to create in the future.
And sure, a user could create a shared wallet and let others see the interactive capabilities of the art in that wallet. Personally I wouldn't mind if someone wanted to do this, my collection will have X number of unique pieces, each of them are a completely different generative piece. So, yeah, you could buy a piece, put it in a shared wallet, and share it with your friends. Up to the purchasers of the piece to do what they want with it :)
> The right-click download picture is completely meaningless as the true power is simply proof of ownership of the piece, having a copy of the image means nothing if you don't own the token and you will be denied access to the service.
Sure, fine. Why do I care? I can use said copy on any other service I want. If your argument is "ah yes, but someone out there believes that's not as valuable because it ignores their 'ownership'", and you can't see why that isn't persuasive, then I really am not sure we share enough of the same reality to discuss this rationally.
I don't think you are understanding at all what I am saying lol.
I have a program, think of it as a traditional web app, that has a backend that validates whether you own the asset prior to granting access.
You can't use any copy of the png to interact with other services, since there is only *one* service that allows for the interactive capabilities, and it requires ownership of the token to access. Hell, you could even take it a step further, take the png and make a forge of a token from my collection. You still won't be able to access the service with a forged token with the exact same metadata and image, because it will easily be able to detect it is not part of my collection.
All you would have is a PNG. Not access to the actual services that are only possible via ownership. I could extend my project and create a plethora of services that are only accessible to people who own one of the NFTs from my collection, and that is what I intend to do.
> You can't use any copy of the png to interact with other services, since there is only one service that allows for the interactive capabilities, and it requires ownership of the token to access.
This makes no sense. Given any possible interaction you could have with a PNG some other service can replicate it. They could choose to do so with alternative NFTs pointing to the same PNGs, or just let you use any PNG at your leisure.
Let's give the benefit of the doubt and say your service is utterly unique. That you have somehow invented some kind of super-magic software that does something super incredible with PNGs that no one else can manage, and you've decided that NFTs are the way to determine who can and cannot use the service. What exactly is your reasoning to use NFTs in this way instead of traditional authentication mechanisms? Because the only one I can think of is capitalizing off the NFT hype.
Please, convince me that NFTs as a technology have some inherent value instead of all their value being derived from a collective delusion and FOMO. I'm aching to hear a good, concrete usecase for the technology that simply cannot be done better without it.
It's pretty simple really. You just seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what an NFT actually is. It is simply a single issue token. The current implementation is nearly 100% for art purposes, in that they are tokens that point to cloud storage. As a developer I can create whatever services I want, based off of a determined, finite collection of single issue tokens. The token can do whatever the developer of the token wants it to do, and grant access to whatever services they want it to have access.
If I was to implement this with traditional web infrastructure, it would increase the scope of my project by likely 2-3 times. I am a single developer, and yeah I may have like a decade of experience at this point, but utilizing this instead of integrating traditional payment and authentication services, as well as traditional database services, dramatically decreases the scope of my project. Seriously, it would probably not be a feasible project for me alone if I stuck to traditional infra. It is empowering me, as a solo developer, to create something unique that I hope people find some enjoyment out of.
Let me be very straightforward here - I have spent the past 4 months working full time creating interactive generative art, that I 100% absolutely never would do so, unless there are economic incentives. This is an independent venture, I'm running it as my first business venture outside of the traditional corporate world, and I want to create something unique. I am planning on charging a very fair price for mint, basically only enough that if my full collection is minted and I do nothing else, then I would extend the amount of time I have until I have to go back to the corporate grind from about 6 months from now to about a year. I'm not creating a collection and charging like $500 per piece, I am targetting like $20.
Just because there is a ton of hype in the technology and people are making get quick rich schemes left and right with really low effort collections, please don't rule out the tech entirely.
> It's pretty simple really. You just seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what an NFT actually is.
People keep saying this, but I'm pretty sure I know what it is. But what I'm asking is: what in god's name is it actually good for, other than scams?
> Just because there is a ton of hype in the technology and people are making get quick rich schemes left and right with really low effort collections, please don't rule out the tech entirely.
But this is precisely what you're doing with it too! Your service is just creating generative art and minting an NFT for it, from what I can tell, with the sole intention of convincing people to pay for the NFT so you can make money. From the sounds of it, the NFT is just the authentication token, perhaps signing some set of parameters that determine the "unique" generative algorithm that the user "bought". Sure, fine, whatever, but you could have done that with boring old certificates and a database. What value, other than NFT hype, did putting it on a decentralized trustless blockchain do for you?
People keep trying to sell this as some revolutionary technology and I just don't see it.
The best way I can describe my project to you is the difference between owning a room and owning a picture of a room. You cannot enter the room, only see it from a static angle based on the picture.
This is the fundamental difference between what my project can do and what a static image does. My service does not interact with the PNG, it interacts with the space that my program generated, and took a picture of. The user can connect their wallet, select their art, and explore the "room" generated with it.
To do this in web2 infra, like I said, is a much more complicated problem and would involve probably non-user friendly DRM. It's simply a different technology, and really if you don't understand it I hope there are more projects out there that come out in the next year that change your mind.
You can write off my project as a get rich quick scheme, but that is from a point of ignorance from someone that probably hasn't tried to create something on their own and market it. I'm creating a project, charging a very reasonable price, for interactive art. I don't really care about your opinion on if you think I'm trying to make money for providing a product.
> The best way I can describe my project to you is the difference between owning a room and owning a picture of a room. You cannot enter the room, only see it from a static angle based on the picture.
You already said this, and as I mentioned you do not need, nor can I see why anyone would want, a decentralized trustless blockchain-backed token for this.
> To do this in web2 infra, like I said, is a much more complicated problem and would involve probably non-user friendly DRM.
No it wouldn't, it just requires certificates and maybe accounts if you want a backup in case people lose their certificates. Or you could use the accounts without the certificates. Millions and millions of services provide "access to a virtual room" or the equivalent already today without ever touching a blockchain.
Besides which, what are you describing if not Digital Rights Management? Don't pretend that NFTs aren't the same damn artificial scarcity nonsense in a hip new garb.
> You can write off my project as a get rich quick scheme, but that is from a point of ignorance from someone that probably hasn't tried to create something on their own and market it.
I have, and I wasn't any good at it, but that's irrelevant. The point is that the only reason you seem to want to use an NFT is so you can get paid for it, presumably because NFTs are hip and sexy and traditional infrastructure doing the same thing for millions of online services isn't. You're praying on people falling for the hype.
You have not explained specifically in what ways an NFT gives you a better ability to do what you're doing than traditional solutions, other than to simply assert that it does.
> I don't really care about your opinion on if you think I'm trying to make money for providing a product.
I don't bemoan people trying to make money on a product. But I do, in fact, look down on people trying to take advantage of a hype bubble and push FOMO by pretending like it is some kind of revolution.
Really man, if you think that me charging $20 for a unique product that you actually don't know anything about other than the few sentences I've explained here to you is preying on people, I don't care to bother discussing this any further. You're entitled to your opinions of course, but do note that I'm trying to provide a creative art project that would have been much more of a pain in the ass to create in web 2.
Please, just believe me when I say that I'm an engineer that is exploring the space to try and do something independent and something I personally find cool. If I wanted to make money quick, I would have made a shitty PFP apes collection 3 months ago and charged half an ETH per mint. I decided to try and create a unique product, and also explore an emerging space.
Yeah, see, this is why I can't take you seriously. Everything I ask for an explanation on is all "trust me bro, I can't explain because um...". Yeah, that's how scammers talk, buddy. You can't even tell me why and how are NFTs better than the alternatives. That seems like something any engineer should be able to do: explain the merits and reasoning behind their choices. I can only see two possibilities: You don't want to admit the answer, or you don't know the answer. You seem like a reasonably intelligent person, so I can only assume the former.
If you just use an NFT because you think it is cool, fine, whatever. Just don't go pretending it is revolutionary when you can't back up that assertion with any kind of explanation.
It’s weird to keep using the Mona Lisa, when there’s a much more apropos metaphor intimately connected to crypto: NFTs are like naming rights.
Crypto.com did not buy the Staples Center, and doesn’t have the right to charge admission. They bought (leased, really) the right to have their name associated with it. Some of that has the force of law, but a lot of it is social convention too. Here in Chicago, the Willis Group owns the legal naming rights to a large building downtown, the building itself is owned by Blackstone, and locals actually call it the Sears Tower.
It's a fools errand to try to equalize NFTs with anything from the physical reality we live in. NFTs are exclusive to blockchains and have no real-world counter-part, I think that is a part of why people are so confused about them. No analogy is perfect, and makes it hard for people to understand what they really are about. NFTs are not like naming rights, nor domain names, nor is it art, nor is it anything else.
Easiest explanation is that a NFT is like a new cryptocurrency, except it only exists one token of that cryptocurrency, and it's indivisible.
I like to compare it to public art or a public art museum. One entity paid for it but everyone is allowed to look at it and take pictures of it. Not quite the same since public art is typically a physical object and not a digital one.
The best description I've ever read:
NFTs are a postmodern absurdity asset that you buy/sell independent of the underlying art, the NFT is given value by the fact the art was made in a way that anoints the NFT as canonical.
Legally, there’s nothing stopping you. The only thing that would make “A” the canonical NFT for “X” is social convention. I imagine that where the original creator of the artwork is involved in the minting of X that convention can be pretty strong, but I also expect lots of boundary-testing. This is the art world after all, and a particularly weird slice of it at that.
Sure, in the same way that copyright still applies to NES roms. That doesn't really stop anyone from copying them and calling Nintendo sill for asking $40 for one.
> We at ClubNFT fired up a massive AWS instance with 40TB of EBS disk space to attempt to download this, with a cost estimate of $10k-20k over the next month,
Is this for real? Why would they do it this way? I can buy 20TB of storage for less than $1000 (in New Zealand, no doubt far far cheaper in USA). Using one fifth of my residential gigabit bandwidth that would take just over a day to download.
Why on Earth would someone spend $20k and a month to achieve what can be done for one twentieth the cost in one thirtieth the time? Only to have the files on a remote AWS instance where you would still need to download them if you wanted to access them?
Because when we heard about this it was about 2am and we wanted to get it going ASAP to see what was actually in there. It did not actually take a month, since this all happened two days ago. I think if we decided to become a torrent downloading company (is that a thing?) we'd go about it a different way. Anyway total actual cost (wasted, in this case) was a few hundred bucks.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] threadThis is a false statement. The NFT doesn’t make you the owner of ‘the work’. It makes you the owner of the NFT.
> The same way purchasing a painting gives you the right to resell that painting and prove to others that you are the owner, but does not necessarily convey copyright or other rights (unless worked out separately via a contract), purchasing an NFT gives you the right to resell that NFT and prove to others that you are the owner.
I.e, In the same way that if you own a paining, the painting is yours and not the copyright. If you own an NFT, only the NFT is yours and not the artwork.
> Just like a deed conveys ownership of a house at some address, the token conveys ownership of that media.
No it doesn’t.
If you own a house, there are many things you can do with the house that others are legally prohibited from doing.
If you own an NFT, you have no more rights over the media than someone who doesn’t own an NFT.
> Just like you can invite a neighbor over to visit your house, and a car driving by can take a photo of your house, anybody can view the media associated with your NFT.
This is obviously absurd.
If you own a house, it’s illegal for people to visit without being invited. If you own an NFT, an infinite number of people can I air the media without you even knowing, let alone inviting them.
Also, a person driving by your house with a car can’t legally park in your driveway or come in and sleep in your bed, whereas someone with a copy of the media can do anything the owner of the NFT can do, including invite others to look at it.
Similarly, this community has agreed that a contract written in a certain form, with the requisite signatures and registrations, conveys ownership of a piece of art. Subject, again, to caveats and rules and fine print.
If at this point you are trying to argue semantics when most of the community has a pretty intuitive sense of what exactly "owning an NFT" means, it seems a bit pointless.
Except that they simply haven’t.
Try taking someone’s house from them. You’ll find that it’s not just semantics that defines ownership.
Try copying the artwork pointed to by an NFT. You’ll find the NFT doesn’t stop you.
> If at this point you are trying to argue semantics when most of the community has a pretty intuitive sense of what exactly "owning an NFT" means, it seems a bit pointless.
I agree that it’s pointless to argue with people who think “owning an NFT” has any relationship to owning the artwork itself. It’s ok if people want to be part of a community who believe that together.
If you feel secure as a member of that community, don’t let the rest of us perturb you.
Have you considered that most people are not in fact part of that community, and that discussion of this point is quite relevant to anyone who hasn’t already committed themself to this belief?
Wrong.
> I think I make it pretty clear when it gets to more detail that the NFT is the thing you own.
Yes, you contradict yourself.
> Further, I make it clear exactly what rights you and others have over the media, which is basically none.
Yes, which is not what you say in the parts I quoted - let’s remind ourselves:
> Just like a deed conveys ownership of a house at some address, the token conveys ownership of that media.
This is a common pattern in writing about this subject, which is why I point this out. It’s a standard Motte and Bailey technique, which is a dishonest form of persuasive writing.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey
This is just a lie. The token doesn’t convey ownership of then media. There is no rough understanding by which this is true.
> I make it clear exactly what rights you and others have over the media, which is basically none.
Which you acknowledge here.
This isn’t a matter of exact details that aren’t important to a buyer.
If you tell someone that an NFT conveys ownership of the media, you are lying to them and participating in a con.
The fact that you later contradict that statement, doesn’t change the fact that you lied.
The debate around this is pretty somewhat tiresome. Yes, you have to buy into the believe that the token represents the media, but it's as good a definition as any because all ways we talk colloquially about "owning" a JPEG are simply not the same as owning a chair.
- Copyright is just a set of limited legal rights granted to someone temporarily by certain jurisdictions. It's not the same thing as owning something, which is why we were laughing at the "you wouldn't steal a car" ads in the 2000s.
- Actual ownership means having access to a copy of the bytes, which is not perceived as meaningful, and only valuable to the extend that access is otherwise arbitrarily restricted.
- You can choose to believe in the artificial scarcity of a certificate of ownership.
This is fine. There is no problem with a club of people who choose to play a game in which they agree that a token has a particular meaning.
The rest of us can point out that it doesn’t mean the same thing outside that club of believers.
https://meebits.larvalabs.com/meebits/termsandconditions
And note you don’t own the media and that what owning the NFT means can change.
Not really sure what point you are trying to make. With Meebits, you don’t own anything other than the token itself.
There is no thing that another person can do regarding a piece of art backed by an NFT that you own that will cause state employees with guns to show up to stop them.
For example, I can offer a free milkshake to anyone who parks in my parking lot in a yellow car.
Then yellow car isn’t doing anything in this situation, I am, and if I can always change my mind.
Then same is true with cryptovoxels and NFTs.
The point is if 1M people all agreed to give a free milkshake to people who parked in your parking lot, the parking lot is pretty important.
There are paving stones on which a million people walk each year. They are of no more importance than a parking lot in which a particular trade promotion takes place.
BS. That’s the marketing excuse. The real value is only in the fact that you can potentially sell it to a greater fool who will buy for more so you won’t be the one holding the bag. It’s the new tulip mania!
> Just like a deed conveys ownership of a house at some address, the token conveys ownership of that media.
Again, if you don't like specific wording, I invite you to write a better explanation for regular folks which is simultaneously perfectly accurate in every sense in every phrase and word you use.
Not really. The original document contained an outright lie which have now removed because it was exposed.
If you didn’t accept it was a lie, you wouldn’t have removed it.
This has nothing to do with imperfect accuracy. It has to do with you writing an outright falsehood.
The idea that a lie stops being a lie because of the number of words you say later is obviously absurd.
As I have pointed out this is a motte and Bailey fallacy.
Also, it’s still a completely misleading statement. The change to ‘similar to’ doesn’t make it true. It still isn’t true, only now you have some wiggle room to claim it’s not a lie.
You are still trying to misleading people into thinking that NFTs confer ownership of the media.
I don't feel compelled to play video games, and I don't feel interested in joining an AR metaverse. That might just be personal shortcoming clouding my expectations of Web3...
Nothing suggests that existing NFTs will be relevant in that world even if the technology is.
It’s also not obvious that a distributed ledger has an advantage over a centralized one.
The value of the distributed ledger is rooted in a theory: that it will be, in the long term, the most durable and agreed upon place to look to for arbitrary third parties to decide whose artist's signature is legitimate.
The thing that suggests the NFTs of the world today will be relevant in that future world is pretty simple: take any piece of art where the artist involved has publicly sanctioned an NFT for it, and ask the question if the signature of that artist on that work will theoretically be something valued by society in the future. (Grounded by the well placed assumption that this is truly non-fungible - the artist can't even reneg on this, since history will record this was the original.) The number of times you can affirm this as a "yes" should increase the weight you put on the hypothesis today's NFTs will be valuable in the future.
It's worth noting: these two hypotheses are decoupled. The blockchain has already been written. So even if the idea of an NFT burns out so much that future artists do not make them anymore, this doesn't necessarily mean the NFTs that exist today will not be valuable or recognized. They are in the public record, and those who control the wallets they are assigned to will always be able to prove they are the owners of them, even if the chains they are on stop adding new blocks in the future.
A signed artwork is more valuable than an unsigned artwork.
However NFTs do not create signed artworks. The artwork remains the same.
The NFT is just a receipt for someone paying money to someone else, who in some cases is linked to the an artist.
Is that valuable? Maybe. I concede that a bill of sale from some point along the chain of ownership of ‘the last supper’ might have value to some kind of collector.
But, an NFT is not equivalent even to the bill of sale.
If you have the bill of sale, you have a unique historical item, whereas the NFT is on the public blockchain where everyone can see it and copy of it, so even that doesn’t have any scarcity.
Both the media and the NFT are infinitely copyable.
A theory which many people disagree with.
> You seem determined to think with analogies.
So do you.
An NFT is not a signature on a piece of art. You are trying to convince us that an NFT is analogous to a signature on a piece of art.
Whether the analogies of the crypto community hold is what is being debated here.
I assume you are aware that NFTs are not actually signatures on physical artworks.
> If my attempt above didn’t help you understand why people are paying tons of money for these things,
I’m sure you wouldn’t be claiming that people never pay money for things that later turn out not to be valuable.
You just don’t know what’s happening.
You mean NFTs as an in-game currency for Facebook’s VR?
Yes, that’s a reasonable account of what they are good for.
The idea of artificial scarcity seems central to NFT, but it is unclear if this is really a moat or desirable. Does it really convey exclusivity over a "unique" set of bits?
That NFT is scarce. Too many people do not understand what an NFT represents and what it’s short and longer term expected conferred benefits are, and are hung up on trying to create analogies to existing forms of ownership like physical property rights or copyright.
I.e. they are in-game currency.
People are ‘hung up’ on analogies to physical ownership, because proponents of NFT’s keep claiming they are like deeds of ownership, which is what the linked article strongly asserted before it was amended.
If NFT advocates stopped calling it ownership, I don’t think anyone would be hung up about it.
People within the community are using a meaning that has essentially none of the attributes of the conventional definition while claiming that the meaning is the same.
This isn’t a question of two sides disagreeing over meanings. It’s a question of a deceptive use of a very well established pre-existing term.
The ownership of NFTs is the ability to assert you control the keys of a wallet pointing to a tuple that pairs, for example, a URL to a smart contract. Both of these elements in the tuple then confer certain things by proxy: the URL a proxy to the work, and the smart contract a proxy to an authority. Once that linkage is accepted by a third party, then it serves as a form of semantic ownership with contextual benefits (there are several contemporary realized and theoretical future ones.)
True but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a commonality to the meaning.
We don’t use the term ‘ownership’ to refer to preparing food, or driving a car for example.
And as I have pointed out. The lie is not that people don’t own NFTs. They do.
The lie is that NFTs confer ownership of the media that point to.
> Once that linkage is accepted by a third party, then it serves as a form of semantic ownership with contextual benefits
Only in the sense that owning a movie ticket provides benefits at a particular theater.
You can also keep the ticket stub as a memento or sell it if you like.
NFTs are no different.
I will have my kid draw a picture of a bridge and send you a JPG of it; you can put that on Meta Horizon as many times as you want.
Naturally like all NFT wallets I fully reserve the right to delete the repo at any time for any reason with no warning.
Lmk what you think and I’ll get you my Venmo.
If someone buys an NFT what good is it today, or what problem can it solve in future that can't more simply be solved by something that already exists?
But looking at these, I'm just not seeing the value that NFTs have provided vs already existing methods. For example I'm looking at https://somniumspace.com/parcel/3402?elv=-0.68. I assume the art on the walls here are NFTs no? And I'd have to be the owner of the NFT if I wanted to take it to my own "parcel"? But what prevents me from simply taking the source image and simply minting my own NFT and displaying it? And why would I want to use a space like this instead of something like Second Life or VR Chat where I can go the much more direct route of simply uploading a PNG?
That's the piece that I have yet to see answered clearly. I certainly get it's technically possible to build something based around NFTs, and given that they are currently trending I'm not in the least bit surprised someone has. I just can't see how it's superior either via ease of use or in technical capability to something that already exists.
Because the NFT isn't just a pointer to an image, it's a tuple that also includes which wallet address is granting you that NFT. So, the "real" NFT for a work is the one granted by the original artist or other authority people culturally agree upon as the one that has real social and economic value. (For example, the artist may post the public key somewhere authoritatively that conveys it is the one they've sanctioned.)
It effectively acts as a fully-provable (and scarce) signature by the artist, and eventually if it isn't already, will be displayed visually on the work in these apps to confer legitimacy. Putting up an image that isn't signed by the original artist will be possible, but it won't confer the same status to a person the genuine NFT would, since observers will be able to know it is not the genuine NFT.
And of course, the reason you'd want to use this kind of environment is self-referential: you want to use it because you want the status or other benefits that come from being able to put your genuine NFTs on display. For example, it can show how wealthy you are, show that you are willing to patronize artists, cause the original artist to come visit your showroom, etc.
Many different kinds of publicity stunt can achieve these things. NFTs offer no unique benefits.
Based on this thread, I would say NFTs are not.
So what exactly is the point of an "alternative form of ownership" that is only considered valid by a small subculture and not society at large? Is it really ownership in any meaningful sense?
The fact that there are a few socialists tho object is irrelevant.
For other things like copyright and other extra-physical forms of ownership that span society at large, there is no macro set of laws governing these things universally so context matters.
Using the words macro and universally allow your statement to be true in the most literal sense that there are no universal laws, but otherwise, copyright is just as universal as land ownership. I.e. most places have a version of it, but there are many local variations.
Arguably, copyright is probably more universal than land ownership since it is a newer concept and there is less local divergence.
“Copyright laws are standardized somewhat through these international conventions such as the Berne Convention and Universal Copyright Convention. These multilateral treaties have been ratified by nearly all countries, and international organizations such as the European Union or World Trade Organization require their member states to comply with them.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright#International_copyri...
iow: "small subcultures".
> There is no “at large” society.
Of course there is. Do you really think USD for example isn't accepted by society at large?
My argument is that the system works just fine as a plausibly neutral ledger of account and for establishing provenance of ownership through reputation and convention.
And in fact I very much prefer it to the legions of corporate lawyers enforcing man-made copyright laws and enriching monopolistic centrally distributed platforms such as app stores. I consider it much more sustainable, universal, accessible, and respectful of human rights and expression than the current systems in place.
Where we disagree is our value judgement of that. I just don't see that as being useful per se, imo there's enough ways to move numbers around using computers already, a novel one can't really get me all that excited, especially considering its resource cost.
I have yet to see a good argument for crypto that doesn't boil down to that.
I think it's one of those "when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" scenarios. Marketplace volume isn't a good in itself if the markets don't do anything useful and waste a bunch of energy, but to people bought into crypto and capitalism really deeply it seems to be enough to get excited.
What makes the iTunes MP3 marketplace valuable? What makes the Amazon Kindle text file marketplace valuable? Is there something about the virtual nature of NFTs that gets to you in a way that these intangible marketplaces don't? Why does itunes and Kindle not bother you? Because they have an army of lawyers to enforce copyrights and license agreements behind them? Does the convention and reputation-based open source nature of Web3 disturb you?
The music is good, and it’s harder to get them elsewhere.
> What makes the Amazon Kindle text file marketplace valuable?
The books are good, and it’s harder to get them elsewhere.
> Does the convention and reputation-based open source nature of Web3 disturb you?
Why would anyone be disturbed by this? I see nothing wrong with people trading tokens. What is disturbing are claims that trading these tokens is equivalent to trading in the associated goods.
The law. Copyright law makes acquiring these works via other means slightly more difficult. Like NFTs they are just a failed attempt to force artificial scarcity into a post-scarcity space.
> Why does itunes and Kindle not bother you?
They do, but they don't have scammers constantly trying to sell their shit as some kind of revolutionary new future you have to get in on before you get left behind!!1!
> Does the convention and reputation-based open source nature of Web3 disturb you?
What disturbs me is the shift from people viewing artificial scarcity as a desperate grasping at straws from people who can't deal with information post-scarcity to people touting artificial scarcity as the glorious technological future.
Copyright law does not exclude someone from releasing on an open source blockchain as opposed to a monopoly app store.
The only reason these marketplaces exist as monopolies is because direct distribution of creative content for profit has traditionally been difficult to manage. That's all.
> They do, but they don't have scammers constantly trying to sell their shit as some kind of revolutionary new future you have to get in on before you get left behind!!1!
Only because the dust has already settled from the same thing that happened during the dot com boom and the consumer electronics boom and the mobile app store boom.
> What disturbs me is the shift from people viewing artificial scarcity as a desperate grasping at straws from people who can't deal with information post-scarcity to people touting artificial scarcity as the glorious technological future.
Copyright enforcement over monopolistic marketplaces is a form of artificial scarcity. Come on, you know this. Napster was leaps and bounds ahead of any distribution method for music back in the 90s. Cost of music redistribution has been near zero for over 20 years. It doesn't cost the band anything to have their music copy pasted on a torrent site. The entire scheme of copyright protection is an archaic method of introducing artificial scarcity for items that are cheap to reproduce (yet sometimes capital intensive to produce). NFTs are no different.
Yes, there were scams at the beginning of those booms, but at the same time, there were obvious real world applications that end users benefited from right from the start, and absolutely no sense of doubt that there was value in them.
>The entire scheme of copyright protection is an archaic method of introducing artificial scarcity for items that are cheap to reproduce (yet sometimes capital intensive to produce).
True.
> NFTs are no different.
Obviously false. NFTs don’t have the law preventing you from ignoring them.
To be honest, I don't see much value in the current Images-as-NFTs hype either, but again, who am I to judge what people spend their money on? I also thought the same about Bitcoin initially, but after a while saw value in it myself too.
When it comes to NFTs as a concept though, I think they can be applied better than what people are currently doing. SaaS licenses that can be resold for example is one interesting use case.
I mean, ok, if we're going to engage in some form of economic nihilism then I guess we can say anything is valuable. Q-Ray Bracelets, faith healing, and star registries included. Tulip bulbs really can be "worth" a fortune. But that's not a very useful premise for discussion. What people are arguing over is whether or not there is any non-woo value to be associated with these things.
> When it comes to NFTs as a concept though, I think they can be applied better than what people are currently doing.
I'm not convinced. I keep hearing people say this but I have yet to hear even one idea that can't be done better by other, older, non-hyped technologies.
> SaaS licenses that can be resold for example is one interesting use case.
Case in point: we can do this just fine today, but we don't because there's no reason for an SaaS provider to want to do that.
Nothing.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
False. Just like open source software, the devil is in the details (usually the LICENSE.md file). NFT projects vary dramatically in the rights they convey to holders. To the extent that these meatspace rights are enforceable, some convey commercial use, some convey personal use, some are published as creative commons, and some are ambiguous.
The NFT space is rather immature compared to open source software, however. The ambiguity is a real problem. The space would do well to standardize on licenses and stamp that on the NFT's metadata.
But in the meantime, by convention in Web3, the apps and websites that integrate NFTs respect the ownership and provide verification of ownership for integrations, such as virtual art galleries, exclusive events or areas in Decentraland, profile pic verification on ENS, wallet gallery on OpenSea, avatars in Sandbox, etc.
By convention, web3 marketplaces also respect royalties with original artists on resales.
NFTs are tokens that can be used and verified as arbitrary authentication tokens for anything, whether it be a real life event or product or access to some software or other virtual benefit.
As such, I don't see how NFT "ownership" can (currently) be construed to possess any legal rights whatsoever unless agreed upon externally to the NFT in which case... what value is the NFT adding?
Would love to get a proper legal teardown of this space.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrink_wrap_contract
[2] All this said, I could see a world where an NFT smart contract requires a cryptographically signed _legal_ contract to be hashed into the transfer as a form of legal consent. But for some reason this isn't yet reality.
But if we called NFT's 'certificates,' then less would buy into the Tulip mania.
NFT's are just a digest of certificates, public/private key pairs, and a chain of hashes.
If Lebron James put out a limited run digital model of himself, a set of hashes and schema describing the signatures, and released the certificates for purchase on Nike.com,then all the legal, authorized implementers, such as Fortnite, CS:Go, Roblox, and Halo:Infinite could all render the model, respect the ownership (or lack therof) by validating the account and object's cryptographic digest (comparing against a global ownership ledger), and allow free, unrestricted, cross-domain/platform/Intellectual property boundary transfership and use, aligning with meatspace laws...
...all without calling it an NFT.
> False.
Really? The original poster says:
> Further, I make it clear exactly what rights you and others have over the media, which is basically none.
> NFT projects vary dramatically in the rights they convey to holders. To the extent that these meatspace rights are enforceable
NFT’s don’t convey enforceable meatspace rights.
The future will probably begin to expand to more than just 'images, audio and video', which those specific NFTs in those categories are absolutely useless.
NFTs seem like blockchain graffiti. You've purchased the right to tag a passing train car, that's all.
It means that the shared ledger (also called blockchain) has a record of that specific NFT belonging to your address.
> Can you even repudiate ownership later if you so chose?
Yes, you send it to a "burn address" which is a address no one has access to.
> Can you remove the record of your ownership of the NFT?
Like remove the history? If so, no, blockchains are (usually) immutable ledgers, it's actually one of the core value propositions for blockchains. You can send the NFT to a "burn address" if you don't want it anymore.
> Can you transfer that ownership outside of the blockchain?
Well, kind of but not really. You question is a bit like if you can transfer the ownership of a .com domain to outside the internet. I guess you could, in some way, but in most practical ways, no.
> NFTs seem like blockchain graffiti. You've purchased the right to tag a passing train car, that's all.
I don't know what to make of this, how is it related to graffiti and tagging trains?
A NFT is a really simple concept if you stop thinking about pictures and other media (since that doesn't really have anything to do with NFTs): A NFT is a cryptocurrency which only has a single token of itself. Like there only was one Bitcoin that was indivisible. You can transfer it to other addresses, but there can only be one at a time. That's all there is to it.
Such a token is inherently worthless. The only value comes from rights that token can confer.
That’s why people are trying to associate them with objects of real-world value.
Do you see data as being inherently worthless as well? Because that's all there is, data. And according to the current market, it's not worthless, just like even if some people consider Bitcoin to be inherently worthless, there is a market that says it isn't.
What's that worth? Data by itself is inherently worthless. It's only worth something if it represents something we care about. This could be something fictional (e.x. a video game world), or real (a warehouse inventory), but on it's own? Worthless.
You say an NFT is a cryptocurrency with a single individual token and... what? It's a piece of data, but what can I do with it or what can I get out of it? I can send it to someone else? Cool, what can they do with it? What benefit is there? That's the big question I've at least yet to seen answered satisfactorily.
I get there's a market for this currently, but once upon a time there was a market for pet rocks (which unlike NFTs can at least be pleasing to look at). Markets can be irrational, and the fact that there is a market price for something does not inherently mean that something has value.
I said: “The only value comes from rights that token can confer.”
Did you not see that?
That depends on the conditions attached to the NFT. For example, the Bored Ape Yacht Club gives full commercial ownership to the owner of each ape for the particular ape they own.
That is not ownership.
Doesn't the same logic apply to paintings/prints? If you buy a painting from an artist, is there anything preventing the artist from making a copy/replica? As for as I know, selling a painting does not constitute a transfer/assignment of copyright. The only difference here seems to be that paintings are analog, and take more effort to duplicate than right-clicking.
Yes, the fact that fake paintings are detectable. Prints are not which is which they are cheap.
Not sure if this is true. Some NFT's on resale money goes back to the original artist I thought? Which to me means you don't own it outright.
Edit: here is one article describing the Swiss framework: https://thelawreviews.co.uk/title/the-virtual-currency-regul...
Let's rephrase to 'perks'.
The owner of a house now has access to the perks of owning a house: E.g Noone can enter property without permission, can't park on your driveway, can act how you want in your own home etc
People without a house do not have this ability.
The owner of an NFT now has access to the perks of owning that NFT: Access to exlusive discord (training and information, etc), early access to new projects, job opportunities etc
An NFT can offer a lot of different utility which are only received by proving their ownership of the cryptographic token.
> An NFT can offer a lot of different utility which are only received by proving their ownership of the cryptographic token.
The NFT isn’t offering anything. The business that offers the perks is. If the business changes or goes out of business, the perks disappear.
Not so with your ownership of a house.
NFTs are a useful mechanism for the digital art medium, I hope they come to be seen in that light a bit more and a bit less as valuable in and of themselves because of the mechanism.
Take a painting. You have to stand in front of it to truly appreciate it. A pic won't do it.
So the buyer of the painting has an exclusive asset which produces returns in terms of appreciation but also periodic fees when they lend it to museums.
NFTs have nothing of the sort because the enjoyment is essentially the same between owning it and right clicking it. In order to mimic the real world enjoyment you'd have to find a way to immerse the asset in a virtual world in which avatars pay for the privilege of seeing/using that art content.
The NFT maybe here, but the virtual world , not yet.
When buying an NFT you are essentially betting that society would come around to equate "right-clicking" with stealing.
And that would employ the same social and technological resources to prevent right-clickers to do their bidding as it does today to prevent thief from stealing paintings from museums.
Let's be real. AP, AFP, Reuters and Getty try to protect their images by charging for the full resolution pics .
People will gladly use the 580x830 instead of the pricy 5800x8300.
Brands which have been fighting this fight since the 90s such as Ray-Ban, LVMH, Gucci...they all fail to block counterfit physical products from being shipped from China.
What chances does one have to have IP laws be enforced on the internet....
Fraudulently minted NFTs have been taken down (at least from marketplaces) as well.
Stealing the painting = hacking the wallet/private key to transfer the NFT
Taking a picture of the painting = right clicking
Absolutely not.
A pic won't ever provide you the same satisfaction as standing in front of a painting, that's an innate characteristic of paintings.
Right clicking a JPG , saving it on your laptop and looking at whenever you want gives you the exact same satisfaction as paying 100k USD for the work of art.
Matter of fact it gives you way more satisfaction, because you got for free what a fool paid 100K to obtain.
The real world equivalent would be finding a perfectly conserved Banksy in an abandoned barn, keeping it for a while and then selling it.
You get to enjoy it for free and the buyer has to pay you 6 figures.
Thing is you don't have to be extremely lucky to right click, you only have to know how to use your thumb.
In conclusion I'd point out that even without NFTs , there is no market for JPG pictures, exactly because they can be replicated very easily and potentially an infinite amount of times.
The most famous JPG ever is "the Afghan girl" by McCurry. The original sold for 62,000 EUR.
https://tvpworld.com/50367201/iconic-afghan-girl-photo-sold-...
Nobody sane pays for JPGs because they are very easy to replicate.
Paintings , on the other hand are not.
That seems a bit handwavy to me. Apparently some museums don't even put originals on display, only a replica (due to conservation/vandalism concerns). Maybe that means that the "satisfaction" you get is purely placebo? In other words, it's the same painting for all intents and purposes (to your amateur eye), and the "satisfaction" you're getting is some vague notion that this particular painting is the original. Does this start sounding like NFTs to you?
Say a museum has one original and 4 copies of a painting. That's 1:4.
With JPG it can potentially be 1:∞
In other words you have to go to that particular museum to see the painting , and everybody knows that you have to go there, there is a bottleneck in the both the quantity and quality of copies of the original, and it's very tight, matter of fact social, logistical and common sense factors limit the capability of copying the painting in 1:1 fashion just to the museum . That's in order to protect from vandalism and theft.
And the beauty of the physical world is that the copy is never 1:1
It's 1:0,9999999999999 and maybe cannot be picked up, but again: common sense.
As a matter of common sense everybody knows that the physical world can NEVER be exactly replicated in a 1:1 fashion.
With JPG pictures instead everybody knows that they can be copied at will, there is no bottleneck and also for pics (unlike painting) it makes no difference if they are visualized on screens or printed.
Finally everybody can make their 1:1 copy and it's identical . And the whole process can be repeated an infinite amount of times and it will ALWAYS be exactly as the original.
That sounds like a lot of words to justify why viewing that particular painting has value, even though you can see a replica and probably wouldn't notice the difference. All the value of viewing the original in the museum comes from the social clout that you get from being a cultured person that can afford an european vacation to visit the louvre. That sounds a lot like NFTs. Here's a quote from another NFT article:
>“This is a great example of right-clicker mentality,” Midwit Milhouse said on Twitter. “Sure, you can make your own gold-coated steak for 65GBP, but then you don’t have the satisfaction, flex, clout that comes from having eaten at Salt Bae’s restaurant. The value is not in the cost of the steak. Go ahead, make yourself a gold-coated steak at home. Post a picture of it on Instagram. See how much clout it gets you. Salt Bae’s dish costs around 1500GBP because people want to pay 1500 GBP to show off that they can afford to pay that much. It’s all about the flex.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dgzed/what-the-hell-is-righ...
>It's 1:0,9999999999999 and maybe cannot be picked up, but again: common sense.
>As a matter of common sense everybody knows that the physical world can NEVER be exactly replicated in a 1:1 fashion.
Sounds like you're trying to hide behind the 0.00000000001%. In other words, the replica might be 0.99999999999% similar, but people are apparently willing to pay millions for the remaining 0.00000000001%. To me, that's as irrational as placing value in the remaining 0% that NFTs represent.
This is wrong. People (as in regular people) aren't willing to pay millions, they are willing however to spend 20/50/100 dollars to go an see it in person at the museum vs. googling an image of it. All for that 0.0000000000001%
Consumers decided that for some pieces of art it is worth to spend some amount of dollars to go and see it once, in person and get that final 10th decimal place.
This is what in turn gives the painting value , and then wealthy individuals and institutions are willing to pay millions, because the painting produces revenues for the museum.
Sometimes it's owned directly by the museum, while sometimes it has a private owner who lends it to the museum and takes a cut.
"regular people" aren't paying hundreds of thousands for NFTs either.
>they are willing however to spend 20/50/100 dollars to go an see it in person at the museum vs. googling an image of it. All for that 0.0000000000001%
>Consumers decided that for some pieces of art it is worth to spend some amount of dollars to go and see it once, in person and get that final 10th decimal place.
Are they really ascribing value to the remaining 0.0000000000001%, or just to the vague notion that the painting in the museum is the original? I alluded to this before, but the alternate explanation is that they're not going to the museum because it offers the best fidelity, they're doing so for other reasons (eg. social clout). See also: people going to concerts, even though listening at home has superior fidelity (for one, there aren't hundreds of people screaming in the crowd).
>This is what in turn gives the painting value , and then wealthy individuals and institutions are willing to pay millions, because the painting produces revenues for the museum.
This totally fails to explain paintings that are in private collections. Why do rich people pay millions for original paintings, just to hang inside their house?
What % of social media posts are museum oriented? We are talking 0 percent.... it's only a matter of seeing what's the first decimal point.
Regardless, it seems to me that there is a lack of common sense among the NFT crowd, and you seem to be somehow on the same wavelenght.
The vast majority of people who right-click an NFT image have subsequently no desire to acquire said NFT. And if a museum were to start charging for an NFT collections, people would not pay to get in.
The vast majority of people who right-click an image of the Mona Lisa do have a desire to one day go out and see the painting in person as they think it would be a cool thing to do and would pay for it.
There is a clear difference, at least for people who have common sense.
Given that museums have existed for hundreds of years and have generated trillions of dollars in revenues, the burden of the proof is on NFTs, not the other way around.
When NFTs museums (either virtual or real) will open up then it will be possible to make a comparison.
I don't go on social media so I can't really comment on that. That said, I do see a lot of people taking pictures of paintings (mostly famous ones) at museums. What gives? If they wanted the best fidelity recreation of the picture, they'd be better off going to wikimedia commons and getting something that a professional photographer took. Maybe they're after the sentimental value, in both the case of going to the museum in person, and taking the picture. It's definitely not for the remaining 0.0000000000001%, especially when you consider that you need x-rays or radiocarbon dating to tell a fake from the original.
>Regardless, it seems to me that there is a lack of common sense among the NFT crowd, and you seem to be somehow on the same wavelenght.
What's your point? That because I'm "somehow on the same wavelenght" as "the NFT crowd", that I have "lack of common sense" by association?
>The vast majority of people who right-click an image of the Mona Lisa do have a desire to one day go out and see the painting in person as they think it would be a cool thing to do and would pay for it.
>There is a clear difference, at least for people who have common sense.
>Given that museums have existed for hundreds of years and have generated trillions of dollars in revenues, the burden of the proof is on NFTs, not the other way around.
So your point is... that NFTs are a bad investment if you plan to start a museum and charge patrons? I don't think that's really controversial, or anywhere close to what we were discussing. Are you trying to use "can charge people to see it" as a proxy for "has value"? While I do agree that's one way to objectively value works of art, it isn't hard to see that's not the only source of value. Like I mentioned before, private collections goes totally against this.
No. I said "wavelenght", not "same as".
It seems to me you are looking at the price action of some NFTs, the price action of the ETH token and the volumes on the auctions houses built on top of Ethereum, plus the social hype being generated. And using those as your starting point you are trying to walk your way backwards towards pointing at some sort of underlying value.
I honestly don't think you'd be trying to find value in NFTs if not for the price action and volumes going amber red to bring the phenomenon to your attention.
It's FOMO-lite, the same that had Stanley Druckenmiller buy the very top of the Nasdaq in 1999, back when he was running Soros' Quantum Fund.
Sometimes no matter how hard you look there is no underlying value beneath the price action, there is no reason or rhyme as to why people become maniac about stuff, and feel like they MUST have it.
Tulips, beanie babies, NASDAQ in 1999, NIKKEI in 1997, Real Estate in 2007...
...like people paying millions for an original painting rather than getting a replica made for $100k (or whatever) for their private collection? My point isn't that NFTs have underlying value (whatever that means), just that they're valuable in approximately the same way that original paintings have value over replicas. I'll quote an earlier comment here:
>But you still paid a few million more for the original painting, even though it's virtually indistinguishable from a replica. It's more helpful to think of an original painting as a bundle of two things:
>Original painting = thing that looks like a painting + bragging rights
>An NFT is just the "bragging rights" part of the original painting, and the JPG that anyone can access is the "thing that looks like a painting ".
The official art market action amounts to 50B/yr. Of the aforementioned figure the vast majority of that is then sent on loan to museums and thus produces revenues for the museum and passive income for the owner.
Let's say 5B is the amount that people pay yearly for paintings they intend to keep in their private collection.
Let's further say the average amount that a collector spends in a year to enrich their private collection is 5M.
5B/5M = 1000 individuals.
Of course we are 8 billion humans, you'll always find 1000 individuals who behave in a way that you cannot explain logically or whose actions leave you scratching your head.
> Original painting = thing that looks like a painting + bragging rights
> An NFT is just the "bragging rights" part of the original painting, and the JPG that anyone can access is the "thing that looks like a painting "
A person with common sense would not even think about splitting the experience and the bragging rights, or even re-arrange something as self evident and self-explanatory as watching a painting in a museum.
You are trying to come up with this explanation in order to justify NFTs and their price action, pretending to know what goes on in the minds of people who buy them, to further reverse-engineer the value that they see in them.
NFTs buyers not only aren't doing all the above reasoning, but they hardly know why they buy them.
In conclusion, there are some things that are just self evident, and need not to be explained. Even in the case of a person spending millions for paintings which will never be sent to museums.
If a common sense person is invited to some rich person mansion and are shown a private collection of real paintings worth millions the thought that come up is inevitably: "A hard working rich person who likes expensive stuff and is not afraid to spend to enjoy life"
If on the other hand a common sense person is invited to some crypto-rich person mansion and are shown a collection of hashes and blockchain transactions pointing to a JPG on twitter or imgur....the thought that comes up is inevitably: "A stoner cryptobro who won the lottery and now is wasting away their money paying 6 figures for some monkeys JPGs"
Source? Moreover, considering that museums need donations/government subsidies to stay afloat, I doubt "making money" is the primary reason people/institutions buy art.
>5B/5M = 1000 individuals.
>Of course we are 8 billion humans, you'll always find 1000 individuals who behave in a way that you cannot explain logically or whose actions leave you scratching your head.
So your point of contention is that NFTs have too many people relative to the amount of people buying expensive original art?
>A person with common sense would not even think about splitting the experience and the bragging rights, or even re-arrange something as self evident and self-explanatory as watching a painting in a museum.
I'm seeing a lot of words devoted to dismissing my comment, but many words being devoted to explaining why my comment is incorrect. Declaring "self evident and self-explanatory" does not make for an argument. I don't see how "a person with common sense" would buy your explanation of people paying millions for the imperceptible 0.000000001%, so they can enjoy it more.
>In conclusion, there are some things that are just self evident, and need not to be explained. Even in the case of a person spending millions for paintings which will never be sent to museums.
>If a common sense person is invited to some rich person mansion and are shown a private collection of real paintings worth millions the thought that come up is inevitably: "A hard working rich person who likes expensive stuff and is not afraid to spend to enjoy life"
>If on the other hand a common sense person is invited to some crypto-rich person mansion and are shown a collection of hashes and blockchain transactions pointing to a JPG on twitter or imgur....the thought that comes up is inevitably: "A stoner cryptobro who won the lottery and now is wasting away their money paying 6 figures for some monkeys JPGs"
The thing that ties both of them is spending money on a non-productive asset, which serves as a costly signal[1] of your wealth. Old paintings definitely have more awareness than NFTs, I'm not going to dispute that. However, all that means is that old paintings are more mature than NFTs, not that paintings are valuable and NFTs are completely worthless. Before archeology was a thing, ancient artifacts probably had zero value beyond scrap, but nowadays there's a thriving market for it. Maybe NFTs will turn out to be like beanie babies, but maybe they'll turn out to be like artifacts?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory#Human_honest...
For a common sense person only an expensive painting serves as tool to signal one's wealth.
An expensive NFT is a tool to signal one's foolishness. For all practical purposes it's like paying 6 figures for some bottled air sampled in Times Square and trying to use it as a way to impress people.
You'd get a huge minus both in your wallet as well as your social status. You could be living in Versailles but if you get to the last room and show people your collection of hashes....then you throw all the other 1000 gold plated rooms straight into the bin and your guests will laugh at you.
That is of course unless you preselect people who hang out in /r/NFTs and only ever invite them over. There's only 237k of them.
Let's say 25% would endorse spending 6 figures for an NFT and still think highly of you. So that's 60k people.
You have to preselect among 60k people on the planet, whereas the expensive paintings would get you the admiration of each and every of the 8.2 billion people. No preselection needed.
Again: Common sense.
People who collect them can explain to you what they see in them, and you can agree that you also see it or you don't.
There's little to no point in continuing beyond that.
The physical world simply cannot be replicated 1:1 .
It can be 1:0,99999999999 but it cannot ever be 1:1
Also it very costly to replicate a painting, whereas saving a JPG is essentially free and can be done infinite amount of times.
I put together a collection that is both art + access to an interactive service that relies on ownership of a token. The right-click download picture is completely meaningless as the true power is simply proof of ownership of the piece, having a copy of the image means nothing if you don't own the token and you will be denied access to the service. I guess it's a completely new concept in a lot of ways and not many people have yet implemented this to scale but it's a fascinating concept to me personally.
However, interestingly if you leverage the token ownership for access, in my collection's case, even if the static image is wiped for whatever reason, they could still access the interactive service and see their art, and interact with it.
This of course has the assumption that I'm continuing to host my service indefinitely, which I know is a problem with my current implementation. I am planning to recreate my APIs as onchain programs, and migrate my app to be hosted on arweave. If it works the way I think it does and arweave doesn't fail as a project (which I don't think they will), then I'm hoping that I can have a service that is permanently accessible. I have yet to test that hypothesis of course.
If the original creator can even delete the artwork, the owner is never sure.
I don't quite know the extent of power that I could leverage as a creator over data on arweave. It's not ever crossed my mind as to why I'd possibly want to alter that.
At the end of the day you have to have some degree of trust with most services you interact with, and I think this would be no different. Maybe I as a creator could eliminate this ability to update anything on arweave after the initial upload by changing the update authority to a wallet that is programmatically created from an onchain program, and off of the Ed25519 curve. If I am able to do something like that, then it would be impossible to access the wallet since it doesn't have a valid private key, and maybe then it's truly immutable?
It's a problem I actually haven't thought of until now. But there's probably something I could do along those lines.
Honestly if something like that works then it might be a generalizable solution to the problem you're suggesting.
Bought source is available for download as soon as I buy something. So i have it in my possession on my drive when eg. Envato deletes the assets because of copyright infringement.
Also, i frequently visit https://rekt.news/ and trust seems to be far-fetched. Even the auditors sometimes keep the 0-days to themselves.
I think it would be possible, and likely, that there could be a marketplace / service specifically for high-end art, that could have built in functionality that explicitly makes their pieces immutable.
But really I do think it kind of comes with the territory in some ways, when it comes to refunds. I think for instance I could create a service that allows for refunds on the initial sale from me as a provider, however if you buy something from the secondhand market, you wouldn't be able to receive a refund from me as a producer, you'd have to work with the secondhand market / user you bought it from personally.
It's possible to create trustworthy products and platforms I think. But yeah, right now there exists no easy mechanism to get a chargeback, nor do I think there likely will ever be such a thing on most chains, as chargebacks rely on centralization (banks) to transfer funds to your account.
Also thanks for sharing that link, I've never heard of the site and it's pretty interesting.
How would NFT access work for a service which requires monthly or usage based billing? (As this seems like a one time payment currently)
Edit - For the other cases you added to your original post, I've thought about the subscription problem some and have ideas but it's outside of the scope of my current project, but I think it is a solvable problem with some underlying changes to token mechanics.
How does this work if a person makes a unique wallet for this NFT and then shares the private key? Does that essentially break the exclusivity mechanics?
And sure, a user could create a shared wallet and let others see the interactive capabilities of the art in that wallet. Personally I wouldn't mind if someone wanted to do this, my collection will have X number of unique pieces, each of them are a completely different generative piece. So, yeah, you could buy a piece, put it in a shared wallet, and share it with your friends. Up to the purchasers of the piece to do what they want with it :)
Sure, fine. Why do I care? I can use said copy on any other service I want. If your argument is "ah yes, but someone out there believes that's not as valuable because it ignores their 'ownership'", and you can't see why that isn't persuasive, then I really am not sure we share enough of the same reality to discuss this rationally.
I have a program, think of it as a traditional web app, that has a backend that validates whether you own the asset prior to granting access.
You can't use any copy of the png to interact with other services, since there is only *one* service that allows for the interactive capabilities, and it requires ownership of the token to access. Hell, you could even take it a step further, take the png and make a forge of a token from my collection. You still won't be able to access the service with a forged token with the exact same metadata and image, because it will easily be able to detect it is not part of my collection.
All you would have is a PNG. Not access to the actual services that are only possible via ownership. I could extend my project and create a plethora of services that are only accessible to people who own one of the NFTs from my collection, and that is what I intend to do.
This makes no sense. Given any possible interaction you could have with a PNG some other service can replicate it. They could choose to do so with alternative NFTs pointing to the same PNGs, or just let you use any PNG at your leisure.
Let's give the benefit of the doubt and say your service is utterly unique. That you have somehow invented some kind of super-magic software that does something super incredible with PNGs that no one else can manage, and you've decided that NFTs are the way to determine who can and cannot use the service. What exactly is your reasoning to use NFTs in this way instead of traditional authentication mechanisms? Because the only one I can think of is capitalizing off the NFT hype.
Please, convince me that NFTs as a technology have some inherent value instead of all their value being derived from a collective delusion and FOMO. I'm aching to hear a good, concrete usecase for the technology that simply cannot be done better without it.
If I was to implement this with traditional web infrastructure, it would increase the scope of my project by likely 2-3 times. I am a single developer, and yeah I may have like a decade of experience at this point, but utilizing this instead of integrating traditional payment and authentication services, as well as traditional database services, dramatically decreases the scope of my project. Seriously, it would probably not be a feasible project for me alone if I stuck to traditional infra. It is empowering me, as a solo developer, to create something unique that I hope people find some enjoyment out of.
Let me be very straightforward here - I have spent the past 4 months working full time creating interactive generative art, that I 100% absolutely never would do so, unless there are economic incentives. This is an independent venture, I'm running it as my first business venture outside of the traditional corporate world, and I want to create something unique. I am planning on charging a very fair price for mint, basically only enough that if my full collection is minted and I do nothing else, then I would extend the amount of time I have until I have to go back to the corporate grind from about 6 months from now to about a year. I'm not creating a collection and charging like $500 per piece, I am targetting like $20.
Just because there is a ton of hype in the technology and people are making get quick rich schemes left and right with really low effort collections, please don't rule out the tech entirely.
People keep saying this, but I'm pretty sure I know what it is. But what I'm asking is: what in god's name is it actually good for, other than scams?
> Just because there is a ton of hype in the technology and people are making get quick rich schemes left and right with really low effort collections, please don't rule out the tech entirely.
But this is precisely what you're doing with it too! Your service is just creating generative art and minting an NFT for it, from what I can tell, with the sole intention of convincing people to pay for the NFT so you can make money. From the sounds of it, the NFT is just the authentication token, perhaps signing some set of parameters that determine the "unique" generative algorithm that the user "bought". Sure, fine, whatever, but you could have done that with boring old certificates and a database. What value, other than NFT hype, did putting it on a decentralized trustless blockchain do for you?
People keep trying to sell this as some revolutionary technology and I just don't see it.
This is the fundamental difference between what my project can do and what a static image does. My service does not interact with the PNG, it interacts with the space that my program generated, and took a picture of. The user can connect their wallet, select their art, and explore the "room" generated with it.
To do this in web2 infra, like I said, is a much more complicated problem and would involve probably non-user friendly DRM. It's simply a different technology, and really if you don't understand it I hope there are more projects out there that come out in the next year that change your mind.
You can write off my project as a get rich quick scheme, but that is from a point of ignorance from someone that probably hasn't tried to create something on their own and market it. I'm creating a project, charging a very reasonable price, for interactive art. I don't really care about your opinion on if you think I'm trying to make money for providing a product.
You already said this, and as I mentioned you do not need, nor can I see why anyone would want, a decentralized trustless blockchain-backed token for this.
> To do this in web2 infra, like I said, is a much more complicated problem and would involve probably non-user friendly DRM.
No it wouldn't, it just requires certificates and maybe accounts if you want a backup in case people lose their certificates. Or you could use the accounts without the certificates. Millions and millions of services provide "access to a virtual room" or the equivalent already today without ever touching a blockchain.
Besides which, what are you describing if not Digital Rights Management? Don't pretend that NFTs aren't the same damn artificial scarcity nonsense in a hip new garb.
> You can write off my project as a get rich quick scheme, but that is from a point of ignorance from someone that probably hasn't tried to create something on their own and market it.
I have, and I wasn't any good at it, but that's irrelevant. The point is that the only reason you seem to want to use an NFT is so you can get paid for it, presumably because NFTs are hip and sexy and traditional infrastructure doing the same thing for millions of online services isn't. You're praying on people falling for the hype.
You have not explained specifically in what ways an NFT gives you a better ability to do what you're doing than traditional solutions, other than to simply assert that it does.
> I don't really care about your opinion on if you think I'm trying to make money for providing a product.
I don't bemoan people trying to make money on a product. But I do, in fact, look down on people trying to take advantage of a hype bubble and push FOMO by pretending like it is some kind of revolution.
Please, just believe me when I say that I'm an engineer that is exploring the space to try and do something independent and something I personally find cool. If I wanted to make money quick, I would have made a shitty PFP apes collection 3 months ago and charged half an ETH per mint. I decided to try and create a unique product, and also explore an emerging space.
Yeah, see, this is why I can't take you seriously. Everything I ask for an explanation on is all "trust me bro, I can't explain because um...". Yeah, that's how scammers talk, buddy. You can't even tell me why and how are NFTs better than the alternatives. That seems like something any engineer should be able to do: explain the merits and reasoning behind their choices. I can only see two possibilities: You don't want to admit the answer, or you don't know the answer. You seem like a reasonably intelligent person, so I can only assume the former.
If you just use an NFT because you think it is cool, fine, whatever. Just don't go pretending it is revolutionary when you can't back up that assertion with any kind of explanation.
Fuck off.
Crypto.com did not buy the Staples Center, and doesn’t have the right to charge admission. They bought (leased, really) the right to have their name associated with it. Some of that has the force of law, but a lot of it is social convention too. Here in Chicago, the Willis Group owns the legal naming rights to a large building downtown, the building itself is owned by Blackstone, and locals actually call it the Sears Tower.
Easiest explanation is that a NFT is like a new cryptocurrency, except it only exists one token of that cryptocurrency, and it's indivisible.
What determines that NFT "A" is the canonical NFT of artwork "X"?
Is this for real? Why would they do it this way? I can buy 20TB of storage for less than $1000 (in New Zealand, no doubt far far cheaper in USA). Using one fifth of my residential gigabit bandwidth that would take just over a day to download.
Why on Earth would someone spend $20k and a month to achieve what can be done for one twentieth the cost in one thirtieth the time? Only to have the files on a remote AWS instance where you would still need to download them if you wanted to access them?