Not necessarily. The original creator that issued that "Charlie Bit My Finger" NFT could also create 1,000 more of them tomorrow. And all of those NFTs would be exactly as valid as the original, it wouldn't be equivalent to making a print of the Mona Lisa. It wouldn't be downstream of the original NFT, the original NFT is just a link to a publicly hosted asset.
You're trusting the creator that they won't do that, but you have no real guarantee that they won't. That's doubly true when you start looking at corporate-backed NFTs like what the NBA is doing. They control the entire supply of the NFTs they issue, you have no way to guarantee that they won't re-issue all of their NFTs that you own.
Right. But also nobody acts like limited print runs are mathematically non-fungible.
If the best argument for NFTs is that they're scarce in the exact same way that existing systems produce scarcity, and that this scarcity is enforced using the same systems we already have, that's not a good argument for the existence of NFTs. You might as well just do normal token issuance using existing technology.
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 is.
A fungible token is recorded like this:
- Alice owns 1 unit of token CHARLIE - Bob owns 1.3 units token CHARLIE
If Alice sends their one unit to Bob, he now owns 2.3 units. No one knows which one these 2.3 units was Alices. It's just a counter
Note that no one acts like this is any different than I explained it just now. 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 NFTs have value.
There are two ideas being conflated here about fungibility. If you want to argue that NFTs actually represent an artwork in some way, and that owning an NFT is somewhat similar to owning a piece of art or that it carries some meaningful connection to that artwork, then for all practical purposes NFTs are fungible resources. The attributes of an NFT that link it to an artwork are not guaranteed to be unique.
If you want to argue that the part of an NFT that matters is the individual token itself, then sure, they're non-fungible. But if that's all we care about then they're also worthless, because nobody cares about owning serial numbers, they care about owning a token that meaningfully points towards a socially or personally valuable item. They care about the thing that the token represents.
The only reason why one NFT is worth more than another is because of who issued it and what it's linked to. So to argue that the individual token's uniqueness is the only thing that matters is to reject the entire relationship between NFTs and artwork.
I brought this up elsewhere, but if I pull a $20 bill out of my pocket, it will have a unique serial number on it that corresponds to only that bill, and no other bill. So technically, by your criteria, a $20 bill is just as non-fungible as an NFT. It's technically unique in the same way that an NFT is.
But what I'm getting at with that comparison is that it's not enough to have each NFT be technically unique. They have to be unique in a way that matters, they have to be unique in a way that somebody would care about. Otherwise you might as well just collect $20 bills. Back to my original point, if the only thing that NFTs are providing is that the token itself is unique, that's not an improvement over any of our existing systems. You can already issue unique tokens without bringing NFTs into the equation, issuing a unique token is easy.
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 sounds like the current system is working, that the social system for determining value based on context is working. NFTs aren't making that better or worse, we're using the same social process that we used before.
And I mention elsewhere, NFTs aren't even really helping that much with the distributed ledger either, they still have to hook into the existing systems for determining seller trust and authenticating that the NFT you're buying is "real". There's little benefit in decentralizing the ledger when sellers have to coordinate with each other to ban bad actors anyway.
So we have two systems that already work, that have worked for ages, and now they're linked to the blockchain because... why? All of the use-cases people talk about with NFTs are stuff that you could always have been doing, you don't need a blockchain for any of this. And it's not clear that the blockchain makes any of it easier to do.
"I control some arbitrary bits on an arbitrary blockchain" will never have the same cachet.
Most art in the art market is pretty worthless (at least monetarily) - just go to one of a bajillion garage sales to see why. But a few pieces of art will be worth a lot because something about them is desirable.
It's the same with NFTs. There will be a bajillion "beanie-baby-NFTs" that will be close to worthless. And then there will be a few of the "Charlie Bit My Finger" variety that people actually have desire to uniquely "own".