This is already happening[1] to smaller creators, and people still buy them because NFTs don't offer any guarantees of authenticity beyond what you'd see on eBay.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/20/22334527/nft-scams-artist...

What would happen if you tried to sell imitation autographs, labeled as such? Im guessing there would be no market, unless you yourself were famous.

The difference is that a facsimile autograph would inevitably be of worse quality. The phony NFT on the other hand would be indistinguishable from "the real thing". Beyond the payload it's just pseudo-random bits generated by an arbitrary CPU, isn't it?

> indistinguishable

I am not sure what you mean by this. Are you referring to art being duplicated, or a digital signature? You can verify that its a forgery, or from a different account than the first author. The digital signature isnt something you can replicate. You can print another one, but you cant duplicate the property of "first" itself.

I can't replicate the exact numbers, but I don't see how one random string looks more authentic than the other. Whereas a handmade autograph with all its human inconsistencies looks more authentic than one made with a mechanical device.

I'm just as good as the most accomplished artist at reading numbers from /dev/random, that's why I don't see why one random-looking string would be more valuable than the other.

Because it's timestamped earlier, or its proven to have been generated by a person who exclusively had a certain private key.

> Because it's timestamped earlier

That depends on who thought of making the NFT first. Which isn't necessarily the artist.

> or its proven to have been generated by a person who exclusively had a certain private key

That has the same problem, it's generated by arbitrary pseudo-random numbers, rather than a real, living human hand. Look, I'm not disputing the underlying cryptographic principles. I'm happy they exist, because they are immensely useful for many purposes, like securing communication and financial transactions. I just struggle to see the artistic merit in someone having pulled some numbers out of /dev/random and having done some math on them.

It’s not artistic merit. It’s artificial scarcity. It’s printing only five of a rookie baseball card because you can.

The NFT is not the image/media - it is the transaction securing a relationship and/or movement of tokens from the artists wallet to the buyers wallet (which may or may not point to a file hash, or some other data).

The authenticity of this is easily verified by querying the transaction directly from the on-chain smart contract.

How do you verify the person in control of the "artists wallet" is actually the person who created the work (or is authorized by them to create the NFT)?

The artist needs to confirm this. For example, many artists selling on Hicetnunc[1] will put their Tezos wallet address as a link in their Twitter bio. If you spot an artwork that looks like theirs minted by a different address, it’s likely a “copymint” (typically seen as worth no value).

There are other blockchain/crypto art projects that use the chain itself to store data; such as Autoglyphs[2], which is essentially a first of its kind generative artwork on Ethereum coded entirely within the Solidity smart contract. In this case there is no question about the authenticity; you simply look at that contract address and the tokens it initiated.

[1] - https://hicetnunc.xyz/

[2] - https://www.larvalabs.com/autoglyphs

I seriously considered doing this (while clearly mentioning it!).

Not sure whether NFT situation got dumb enough for this to work.

You could do it to public domain art. Maybe set yourself up a shell business, 'NFT Certification Enterprise', and offer your official NFT for each object, with a guarantee you be generating only one NFT for each object. Deceptive, but not fraudulent.

It's not very different than selling overpriced and numbered collectibles.

What would happen if you sold to someone the deed to a house you do not own?

This is not the equivalent situation. It's more like I decide to sell an NFT to your comment.

It totally disagree. I think it is quite equivalent. The difference is that we don't have a centralized authority to recognize valid NFTs, as we do for deeds. But if we did have a central authority, like perhaps the artist responsible for the work protected by the NFT, and if the artist made it clear and public that only the NFTs she recognizes could be considered valid proof of ownership of her works, then indeed an NFT would function like a deed.

A common misunderstanding of NFTs is that they give you some level of legal rights. NFTs do not inherently give you rights. That's why a comparison with a deed is fundamentally flawed. A deed is a legal construct - inherently it gives you ownership. So even if it were sold, without the institutions notarizing the transaction it would not be a valid sale and could be easily reversed by the original owner.

I could sell an NFT to your comment trivially because it doesn't mean anything. You can think of it as the digital equivalent of me taking a screenshot of your comment and selling that - sure it doesn't give the purchaser rights to your comment, but that isn't what was for sale anyway.

I have no misunderstanding about this whatsoever, in fact. I understand that NFTs confer no rights, which is why I posited the idea of a necessary authority who can declare which NFTs are valid representations of ownership of their works. It is the pairing of NFT and authority which grant the possibility of ownership.

Many people immediately jump on the idea that NFTs cannot confer ownership, and thus are worthless as a concept, but they fail to recognize that it is only one half of ownership, just as a deed to a house is just a piece of paper (that anyone can photocopy) without an authority to recognize it.

again a deed is referring to a specific thing. a photocopied deed is not a deed anymore than a photocopied dollar bill is legit money. in other words a deed is already authorized by definition.

if you have an authority to confer rights then the NFT itself was unnecessary to begin with.

anyway, the original point I was trying to make is that situation you described (selling a deed to a house you don't own) doesn't make sense since by definition the own who does not own the deed can not sell it. if, somehow the sale did go through, the original owner could easily get it back. this situation is not possible with NFTs without a central authority, but with a central authority NFTs would not be necessary to begin with.

A deed does not refer to a specific thing. It only does so in daily life as a matter of convention. It is the authority of the banks or the government or whatever that gives your particular deed any weight at all. A deed, like a dollar bill, is a piece of paper with no value. Indeed, a photocopied dollar bill has no value whatsoever. It is only our collective agreement to pair value with officially recognized papers that grants those papers value.

The situation I described does make sense, because it's exactly what we are circling around here. Anyone can sell anything; it is merely a question of whether the sale will be recognized by the parties that matter. An NFT is necessary because it distributes the transfer and sale of things without a central intermediary. There is and always will be a required authority to recognize the value of a given NFT, however.

Note that these two ideas of central authority are not equivalent. In one hand, you have a centralized authority over trade; in the other, an authority over value. Note also that in the case of NFTs, there is no "one central authority who governs all value", but instead many authorities, i.e. the creators! The artist or creator of a given work is free to recognize the NFTs that grant ownership of their creations. It is they who have the power of authority.

> A deed does not refer to a specific thing. It only does so in daily life as a matter of convention. It is the authority of the banks or the government or whatever that gives your particular deed any weight at all. A deed, like a dollar bill, is a piece of paper with no value. Indeed, a photocopied dollar bill has no value whatsoever. It is only our collective agreement to pair value with officially recognized papers that grants those papers value.

What? A deed, per common law, is a legal instrument which affirms ownership of something. I'm not going to talk about value as that is independent of the purpose of a deed (you could have a deed to something that everyone agrees is worthless, but regardless you are the owner according to the government(s) in question)

Again, if you have a central authority an NFT is unnecessary and pointless to begin with. Nothing you've said really refutes that. All of the functionality of an NFT can be trivially replicated by a central authority, and indeed it already is.

> Anyone can sell anything

No, they can't. By your own logic, anyone can do anything. Surely you already see that is not true. We live in reality, and in reality others must recognize actions in order for them to be recognized as legitimate.

I can sell an NFT to your house just as easily as I can to your comment, and it confers exactly the same amount of legal rights.

Yes, exactly. You get equal rights, that is to say, nothing. Are you agreeing or disagreeing? It's unclear.

I know nothing about NFTs.

I’d guess it wouldn’t be a sale of rights to the comment (because you don’t own them).

If you advertised it as the sale of rights to the comment, then it would be a fraud? Or you could advertise it as “a collectible item representing one of endisneigh’s parent comments as issued by endisneigh, collect them all”?

That would be fraudulent, but that's not what I'm suggesting.

I suppose I could sell a token for Hacker News, I just couldn't claim that the holder of the token gets any kind of special privilege here.

>I just couldn't claim that the holder of the token gets any kind of special privilege here.

Sounds like an NFT alright.

In that case sure, you could do it, just as you could sell someone a deed to a rock you picked up off the street.

It's even less than that. A deed contains some language to the effect of "the holder of this deed owns the house at such-and-such address", whereas most of these NFTs seem to stop at "the house at such-and-such address".

Is there a way to see the actual language of these NFTs that receive press attention? Do any of them actually claim anything one way or the other?

You can sell a "quit claim deed" for any property. All it means is that you assign all your interest in the property to another party. If you have no interest in the property then you have transfered nothing, but the document itself is valid.

there's nothing stopping you from doing that

people will know and they will value it accordingly but no one will stop you for doing it, at least for now.

> people will know

How will they know?

Someone might buy it but probably not.