The thing that is "non-fungible" is the token, not the actual art. The underlying digital asset is actually fungible with copies of it. With a painting, there are prints and reproductions of the Mona Lisa, but they are all fundamentally different in some way - the exact brush stroke texture, etc.
NFTs have this feeling of valuing the receipt, not the art. As if I walked into a gift shop at The Louvre and bought a Mona Lisa slick poster print, but then valued the gift store receipt more than the more-or-less completely replaceable poster.
I heard the bozos on the A16Z podcast (I think it was) compare NFTs to land deeds, but they very seldom know what they're talking about.
The point is not that land is somehow fungible, but that we have plenty of precedent for "owning" a thing without taking physical transfer of that thing.
I don’t feel sorry at all for the clown that paid 69 mill for the url to a jpg, I just think the hype is stupid. Not that we can be sure the buyer was real and distinct from the seller.
PS It would have been quicker to google A16Z than type out those words, but I’ll save you some time by telling you that it’s (the podcast of) a top three silicon valley VC.
But, a paper receipt is all that differentiates print #1 from #1005, and #1 is usually more prestigious. And even if those prints came off the machine in the other order, the actual artist is still attaching significance to one of them over the others.
NFTs are a way of saying that my identical print (file) is really the special one. Or that I'm special for having it. Or whatever.
So yeah, by looking at both NFTs we can clearly determine which is authentic.
If they're supposed to be unique, as opposed to 'we both sponsored the same art', then there are easy ways to ensure that.
If Beeple creates another NFT referring to the same work, then he is simply creating a second edition, in the same way that an artist can create a run of prints limited to 10, and later decide to create 10 further prints.
If someone else creates an NFT claiming to represent Beeples work, then this is like me selling my own unauthorized Robert Rauschenberg print, which I might find difficult to find a buyer for, though with enough talent, maybe not impossible.
In any case, the NFT is merely a digital equivalent of a print.
For the first sale. I'm not sure current contract law permits any legal rights to follow the token in subsequent sales.
But what rights would you need to go to court for? The point of an NFT is that the provided rights are exercisable without further permission.
Also, if the author wanted to control the NFT they'd just code it that way, for instance to prevent sales, or prevent more than one sale per decade, etc.
Nothing about the first sale contract can be legally binding on the person who buys the NFT when resold.
You can end up with an NFT without having been party to any legal agreement whatsoever.
If I minted an NFT that said for every period you paid you could collect royalties from my art then you would have a valid contractual claim after purchasing it, even if I didn't make the deal with you initially.
If you buy a second-hand concert-ticket NFT the requirements of attendance will still need to be met before you can use it.
I don't believe this statement to be accurate.
But if all that was handled and it was considered binging between you and the first guy then I don't think the transferability would phase a court at all. The NFT by nature, being meant to be transferred, and with tools to prevent that where desired, would indicate intent.
Perhaps a better example would be me (the hypothetical creator of cryptokitties) selling a cryptokitty, with the obvious implication that I would not modify my game to invalidate said kitty. The final owner of the kitty, like yourself, could sue me for misrepresentation for selling a product I intended to disable. Perhaps for tortious interference.
Because if you buy a painting, you can hang it on your wall.
That doesn’t not sound at all feasible. But if it were, then sure the prices would have to be close for the original and new one. It sounds impossible to do, and extremely easy expensive to make a copy like that of a real painting. It’s stupidly easy and simple to do with a digital work.
...and if the artist suddenly flooded the market with millions of identical prints, the value would plummet.
If the provenance of the real item could be guaranteed, the fact that you have a really good copy wouldn't matter; people would still pay to own the original.
That's exactly what an NFT is; digital security for a digital print. People who buy NFTs don't care that someone else has a copy, they value the artificial scarcity provided by the NFT.
Look, the fact is that if you like a Picasso, you can have a perfect copy made, and you won't be able to tell the difference between the two. In fact, in a blind test, you may end up liking the copy more. The fact that you value the original more because Picasso touched it is totally, absolutely in your head. Empirically, there is no reason why this should make a difference to you.
And then you have a digital token that Picasso personally signed with his private key.
There are a lot of examples at the intersection of this. If you buy a Damien Hirst, the artist may well never have touched the piece - these are being produced by staff. Sol LeWitt's Wall Paintings exist as instructions that different artists re-execute over an over again.
In all these cases, enjoyment of the art is available to everyone; you can have a really good copy. It is totally disconnected with what people value when they pay large sums of money, which is entirely artificial.
A high quality photo print and frame costs quite a bit of money. That's maybe a couple thousand dollars. And then the artist hangs them in a nice gallery, with sales people. That costs more too. And the final price isn't something like 100x the cost, it's maybe 10x if lucky, often 2-3x.
And again, you can't really reproduce it easily. If I found some really high quality scanning store, I could do a decent job. But it would cost me a lot of money, and the signature on the print wouldn't look or feel real.
So again, big difference, and already we have to admit paintings > prints > digital images.
You absolutely cannot have a perfect copy of a Picasso. Sorry, that's a meme that's not real. You can carbon date the paint. There are ridiculous complexity in his layering techniques. Even the specific paints he used were from his era, and hard to find. It's physically provable to show a Picasso is a real one that came from his hands. Not possible with an NFT as there literally is no original. You can prove the coin is the coin he made, but that's simply not analogous.
Yes, the point I am making though is that if you cannot see the differences with the naked eye, or if in fact you prefer the copy if given a test, then why do you value all that stuff? Enjoy the much cheaper copy.
It is true there are unique properties that a physical original features - it is just that the value assigned to them is arbitrary, and there does not seem to be an obviously good reason to pay a lot of money for it. People do it because of what is essentially a collective hallucination centered around the idea of scarcity.
Now if there were a way to copy a Picasso perfectly, I posit that people would still assign an arbitrarily high value to the original. I mean, you can see that being the case with diamonds.
Obviously, there is something about a physical object that a digital image will never be able to reproduce. That's why people still enjoy real books, right? So I wouldn't be surprised if a real painting would carry a certain premium over an NFT. But the idea that people pay for an NFT, signed by Damien Hirst's own private wallet? I see no fundamental difference between valuing that and valuing the entirely imaginary benefit of Damien Hirst having once stood in the presence of that physical object you bought.
An original Picasso... vs a hash number.
Would I rather have the basketball that Lebron dunked in a game or some random basketball that Lebron issued an NFT for? They are for all intents and purposes identical. Why do people care?
It's likely because authenticity matters, hard work begetting achievement matters, real world deeds, real world objects matter. Matter matters. It's just how humans work, maybe because we are matter..
Diamonds are a great example. They are in fact scarce, which drives value, and the reason artificial diamonds don't retain value is because they are less scarce. Now work backwards.
I agreed that physical objects have unique properties that digital objects cannot match. But presumably we can appreciate digital artworks nonetheless?
It is also true that the nature of the digital object means that ownership of the NFT is somewhat disconnected from whether a .jpg is physically in your computers memory at any given time.
But the choice is not between an original Picasso and a random hash number, but rather:
- An original Picasso painting vs an equally enjoyable copy. - An NFT of Picasso's digital illustration vs an equally enjoyable copy.
Are you able to experience that same intangible connection with history by looking at a blockchain entry, as you might be standing in front of an old painting? Maybe not. But you may experience a version of it, in the same as you might by looking at the first websites.
> Would I rather have the basketball that Lebron dunked in a game or some random basketball that Lebron issued an NFT for?
Sure. What about a unique NFT of a sword that was used to win in a watershed eSports event? Note that this would be a digital object that does not merely represent the sword, but it is the sword, i.e. I can now use it in the game. I think people would value that through largely the same mental mechanism as the basketball.
Yep exactly. Quod erat demonstrandum
In real life you cannot make perfect molecule-for-molecule clones of physical objects, so what's your point?
A lot of art, for many, is that others see the same thing through different eyes. Looking at the Mona Lisa or a Rembrandt, means that I'm experiencing what millions have but uniquely. Shared experiences create bonds, even across time and space. It's also perhaps a bit humbling in a way another similarly good painting from now wouldn't be because of the temporal distance it comes from.
But we could already do that. It's a solution to a problem no one had. A NFT would only be useful for proving ownership if it will hold up in court, which I doubt it would without accompanying proof of purchase.
Whatever their flaws, NFTs are perfect proof of ownership of the token...
But yes, once you've stolen the thing from me I have less control over it...
Also, this would never happen as written. If you tried to claim my asset without having changed the key, then I would. We'd never be in court with shared custody, and thus they'd never get a chance to rule on this. The only time a court would come in would be criminally if you actually hacked my system.
Otherwise, owning the key is the entirely of ownership. Blockchain is intentionally a knowledge-based version of a bearer bond. (It could be based on hash-preimages which would count as a password and probably be legally protected, but intentionally it's based on math because factors in an equation aren't protected.)
Also, you aren't really purchasing art because it's untenable. You're purchasing something like the right to show that the artist considers you to have purchased art. To actually purchase art would be to actually codify a contract (from what jurisdictions?) in an NFT, and that's not what anyone is doing. It's all just digital signatures of a phrase like "Thanks for being the first sponsor of my work 'Autumn Leaves', with shasum XYZ".
C.f.: https://www.reddit.com/r/NFT/comments/m3y4go/my_art_stolen_a...
But if you care about the artist enough to want to donate I imagine you're more familiar with their work than all that.
Anything you can do with a non-fungible piece of paper, you can do with a non-fungible token. Anything you can't do with a non-fungible piece of paper, you can't do with a non-fungible token.
I'm blown away by how many people are upset that other people are doing stupid things at the confluence of new technology and excessive spending money.
Pretty much. It's a bit harder to show your paper autograph (and prove its veracity for full status points or before selling it) than to demonstrate this with an NFT. If that's what the paper is about for you, the NFT is better.
With concert tickets though there are a ton of benefits from proving authenticity, not needing to meet to transfer paper, not needing ID to prove you didn't steal it when checking in, etc.
> I'm blown away by how many people are upset that other people are doing stupid things at the confluence of new technology and excessive spending money.
Me too.
I mean this artist is now the third highest paid artist alive and it seems like he just pretended to sell the art to his business partner and the money transfer may not have even happened. That’s not excessive spending if true, that’s lies and fraud
https://twitter.com/checkmynft/status/1371633090318249984?s=...
https://twitter.com/scanlime/status/1371509988179464196?s=21
From secondary market sales, the artist can get a royalty if they choose and the secondary transaction is on the same platform. Typically around 10%. The same platform requirement is an issue and hopefully a future NFT standard smart contract will build in a royalty option/.
Those Oracles would ideally be known parties who could be sued under the laws of their jurisdiction for lying.
Buying art with an NFT is just a way to give artists and/or art auctioneers money for their art. That's it.
Oh and it can be used for other things like event ticketing, software license keys, etc.
An NFT is just a way to record (in an immutable distributed ledger) that a specific, uniquely-identifiable token was transferred from A to B.
People have always paid stupid amounts of money for art, and in the last 100 years increasingly art that doesn't require years of training/practice and advanced craftsmanship. Why is this any different?
It sounds like you just don't want to be involved in the art market, which nobody in their right mind wants to be involved in anyway.
Complaining about NFTs is like complaining about "blockchain" or "the internet" or whatever.