651–660 of 687 posts
There’s a lot of confusion here about why NFTs are valuable if the buyer doesn’t get to own the image copyright. This should not feel mysterious - NFTs are just like baseball cards. If you buy a Barry Bonds baseball card for $1,000, you don’t own the artistic rights to the image on the card. All you own is the card itself, which has negligible manufacturing cost. It would be trivial for any card company to produce a…
There’s a lot of confusion here about why NFTs are valuable if the buyer doesn’t get to own the image copyright. This should not feel mysterious - NFTs are just like baseball cards. If you buy a Barry Bonds baseball card for $1,000, you don’t own the artistic rights to the image on the card. All you own is the card itself, which has negligible manufacturing cost. It would be trivial for any card company to produce a…
NFTs are not like baseball cards. NFTs are a JSON string on a proprietary entity that point to the image of a baseball card. The image can be viewed by everyone. The bragging rights of owning a JSON string depend heavily on whether or not the proprietary entity will become the dominant player in the I own a JSON string -world. This also has zero to do with blockchains. The proprietary entity could've used any databas…
Ok, let's see if I'm following the discussion right. let's say you buy an NFT for using a GIF of the Techno Viking, from the Viking himself, and Reddit verifies it. Now you are the only person on Reddit that can have a Techno Viking GIF signature, yippee! Except I can make a new NFT of the same GIF and nothing in the NFT itself betrays that it wasn't issued by the real Techno Viking, so it's up to him, Reddit and you…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, a lot of NFTs will represent some kind of visual media, and you want to know what that visual media is that they represent. But whether the link is a URL in the contract, a hash, or simply collective memory/agreement amongst collectors doesn't matter. Note that the argument that NFTs are useless if you need to rely on social consensus to link token and asset is not valid - the use case is in having a common ledg…
> But whether the link is a URL in the contract, a hash, or simply collective memory/agreement amongst collectors doesn't matter. You voice your objection to this point below, and I'll get to that, but I just want to be clear: the NFTs are adding nothing to the existing social systems we use to determine value. We could have a collective memory/agreement without NFTs. We're going to get to having a shared ledger belo…
- Paper certificates of ownership of ideas/ingantible works, which have been used for art in the past going back some decades, and maybe somewhat more common now with certain conceptual / digital art pieces.
- A centralized leger, as the folks from Blain|Southern tried to do with seditionart.com.
- Or, maybe you can do something with federation, as you suggest?
That is just a tech argument of whether a blockchain (say Proof of Stake-based to avoid the energy argument) or something else is better, but note: It changes nothing about what the NFT is (and we can still call it that for simplicity). It would seem to do nothing to alleviate the concerns of people who don't understand paying for a pointer to a media file; since that is still what the federated ledger tracks, right?
If people feel a federated system works better for this, they can certainly build it. But Twitter is just Instagram from a purely technical perspective. There is more to product-market fit than the underlying database.
The whole thing came together with blockchains, maybe because you need an easy way to buy that stuff too, because there was a bunch of rich crypto people actually willing to spend money (when no one before was much interested in paying digital artists for their work), maybe cause the tech was there.
In general, I don't see what the argument is about; the ledger works quite well on a blockchain, and would work less well in a federated system from a trust perspective. I.e. your analysis about the trust vectors involved making the chain useless is wrong. Sure, platforms can choose not to show certain NFTs, and OpenSea has some dominance in the space, but when OpenSea kicked off a Cryptopunk Clone project no one lost their tokens, they continued to be traded elsewhere, and the community still chose to value their possessions, even if it maybe inhibited their growth.
There is really nothing centralized at the center of it in the end. Artists publish work on their own websites and their own contracts all the time, and if deafbeef posts on Twitter about his new NFT on this website, I will trust the existing social verification system (my friend telling me about it, his Twitter account being a known-entity).
This is distinct from Twitter avatar verification, which I predict a) will not happen and b) is indeed useless unless Twitter wants to be in the business of deciding which Punk-derivative project is looking too much like the real thing, which I doubt it wants to do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Right. But also nobody acts like limited print runs are mathematically non-fungible. You misunderstand the word non-fungible here. They are non-fungible because 2 copies are recorded like this: - token 1, owned by Alice - token 2, owned by Bob Bob and Alice may are may not be willing to make this trade, that is up to them. The two tokens are distinct. After they trade, it is still clear who the owner of each token…
> NFT people do not claim that non-fungible means "you cannot mint two tokens representing the same thing". What NFT people do is argue that the uniqueness of individual tokens matters. It doesn't. They try to have their cake and eat it too, they try to argue that the NFT's link to the individual artwork doesn't matter when evaluating the technology, but that it does matter when trying to determine whether or not NFT…
I don't really understand your concerns to be honest. It is exactly as you say. The connection to the artist and art matters.
Yes if an artist releases 10-editions for their JPEG image (which happens frequently), then those 10-editions may be semi-fungible, in the same way that say "floor-price cryptopunks" are, where many people are sort of happy to put them in a basket and trade the floor without caring too much about whether they have token 1 or 3. But someone might well decide to care, because token 1 is the one their grandfather used to own many years ago.
Some people may value the edition number 1 more than the remaining 9, but maybe edition 8 was previously owned by Elon Musk and carries a premium.
beeple can decide to release 10 thousand more tokens representing the artwork sold at Christies for $69m, equivalent in every way except the serial number It's anyone's guess what would happen, but presumably it would cost him in reputation, and the original would still be able to command a large premium.
Artists releasing physical prints also on occasion release another series some years after the first; Damien Hirst is releasing more dot paintings, and they are all so fucking similar they may well be considered fungible.
It will hopefully make NFTs feel a little sensible :)
NFT always felt ridiculous to me, but I though I understood the mechanism: "it's like baseball cards but in the blockchain". This week I learned it's not. NFT are Non Fungible Tokens, which means tokens that can't be divided, unlike crypto currencies like Bitcoin that can be divided in Satoshis. So you exchange the totality of it, or not. Basically it's a unique number in the blockchain you change ownership by applyi…
While you are right that the NFT is just an entry to the blockchain with a URI to the actual media file, the file is NOT stored on a centralized platform.
While it is possible to use a regular server to store the media file, it is certainly very bad practice and defeats the whole point of NFTs.
The media files are stored on IPFS, which is a decentralized peer-to-peer storage network. This ensures that the media file that a NFT represents, will always be available, since it is hosted by many people on the network.
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This is what happens whenever you see a large amount associated with an NFT. I bet that the art market started like that.
Art market started because people appreciate art. In fact rich people even commissioned art for hundreds, if not thousands of years. It can be used for various scams and as an investment, but the whole premise is ridicolous: people pay for art since they like it and want to own it. (And in this NFT scam they dont own anything useful)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s an infinite number of potential paintings too. I don’t see what that has to do with the value of any one particular painting. There’s not an infinite number of the one original Mona Lisa.
If the original Mona Lisa had been done in photoshop there could be infinitely many indistinguishable copies of the “original” MonaLisa.psd