A mere NFT by itself is not a digital certificate of any kind. It is a small json snippet with a uri to an resource, that is not even stored on the blockchain.
The other aspects of an NFT, such as it being created by a trusted authority (like the original artist) is not encoded on the NFT itself. You have to trust the minter, you have to trust that other people see the minter as original, and you don't truly have a way to verify except via an existing social structure. aka, technology cannot solve this problem.
That is why i call NFT a digital certificate of authenticity. It has the exact same problems as the paper version of a certificate (obviously, a digital version has some good utility like ease of trade/uncopiable and verification etc).
In “paper” life, doesn’t instances of such certificates have various levels of notarization: wet stamps, seals, watermarks, actual signatures, actual notarization by a license notary? NFT does not define and have no way of enforcing authenticity. What would be an example when NFT can serve as such certificate?
If I mint an NFT for something and its hash gets inserted into the blockchain, it should be possible to prevent minting the same thing again by checking against hashes in the chain before adding it in.
If they won't even do that much, what's the point?!
If you buy an NFT of a Blender artwork that the artist has "minted" in 4K quality, and he later exports an 8K copy, do you "own" the lower-res one but not the higher-res one?
The answer is that the NFT represents the artwork, not the bytes in any particular file, in the same way that intellectual property law recognizes that the painting on your wall is merely a particular instantiation of the real, immaterial artwork that is protected.
The trick is to understand that neither links nor hashes are a key component of the concept (though both are useful to create a link between ownership record and some kind of representation of an artwork).
This is the key quote for me: "...leaving many baffled as to why so much money is being spent on items that do not physically exist and which anyone can view online for free."
I honestly do not understand the current state of NFTs... I mean, I understand the technology, and I understand what a smart contract is, but really - what is the point of "owning" this tweet: https://twitter.com/jack/status/20 and why would you pay $2.9m to "own" it? Another article (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/22/jack-dorsey-sells-his-first-...) tries to compare "owning" the tweet/NFT to owning a virtual autograph, but that still doesn't make sense to me.
What if Jack Dorsey quit Twitter in a rage and deleted his account? That tweet would vanish. Or perhaps Jack gets fired from Twitter, and Twitter deletes his account? What exactly does the owner of that tweet get for their $2.9m?
It may well me that buying tweets is stupid, and that no one will ever again pay even a dollar for the NFT of that first tweet, I don't know.
Nevertheless - it doesn't matter if Jack Dorsey deletes his account, or even Twitter shuts down. The tweet cannot disappear in the same way that all historical events continue to be a part of the human story. It sure would be nice to have a copy - the Internet Archive probably will, and surely others. But the fact that Twitter existed and that Tweet existed will never stop being true, and once the website disappears, nothing changes for the person who owns that NFT: There are no rights that he loses, nothing tangible that disappears for him.
Well notice that you don't "buy the rights" in any sense, but sure, someone might buy "the first transatlantic flight", if it was sold by the pilot who flew it, much like Tim Berners-Lee sold an NFT to the WWW.
The key difference to naming a star, as always, is that the person selling this thing to you has a moral claim to it.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 66.0 ms ] threadNFTs don't really solve many problems.
it's easy to make many, and pretend that they are legit.
The other aspects of an NFT, such as it being created by a trusted authority (like the original artist) is not encoded on the NFT itself. You have to trust the minter, you have to trust that other people see the minter as original, and you don't truly have a way to verify except via an existing social structure. aka, technology cannot solve this problem.
That is why i call NFT a digital certificate of authenticity. It has the exact same problems as the paper version of a certificate (obviously, a digital version has some good utility like ease of trade/uncopiable and verification etc).
If they won't even do that much, what's the point?!
The answer is that the NFT represents the artwork, not the bytes in any particular file, in the same way that intellectual property law recognizes that the painting on your wall is merely a particular instantiation of the real, immaterial artwork that is protected.
The trick is to understand that neither links nor hashes are a key component of the concept (though both are useful to create a link between ownership record and some kind of representation of an artwork).
I honestly do not understand the current state of NFTs... I mean, I understand the technology, and I understand what a smart contract is, but really - what is the point of "owning" this tweet: https://twitter.com/jack/status/20 and why would you pay $2.9m to "own" it? Another article (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/22/jack-dorsey-sells-his-first-...) tries to compare "owning" the tweet/NFT to owning a virtual autograph, but that still doesn't make sense to me.
What if Jack Dorsey quit Twitter in a rage and deleted his account? That tweet would vanish. Or perhaps Jack gets fired from Twitter, and Twitter deletes his account? What exactly does the owner of that tweet get for their $2.9m?
Nevertheless - it doesn't matter if Jack Dorsey deletes his account, or even Twitter shuts down. The tweet cannot disappear in the same way that all historical events continue to be a part of the human story. It sure would be nice to have a copy - the Internet Archive probably will, and surely others. But the fact that Twitter existed and that Tweet existed will never stop being true, and once the website disappears, nothing changes for the person who owns that NFT: There are no rights that he loses, nothing tangible that disappears for him.
While they may have lost nothing, did they gain to begin with?
I find it hard beyond bragging rights and then finding the next fool
The key difference to naming a star, as always, is that the person selling this thing to you has a moral claim to it.
The whole art market is a rigged game on long bets.
But at last, there is a lot of money floating around since 2009 that needed to be put somewhere.