Some important differences:

The print is beautiful and hanging on my wall.

The print won't evaporate when the url suddenly points to a server that was shutdown from lack of payment.

I know I bought a print, nobody was trying to trick me into thinking it was the original.

And, most importantly of all, the artist got paid.

The NFT-signed work is beautiful and also hanging on my walls (both digital, such as social media, and physical, in that I own prints representing the tokens, signed by the artists who have distributed the same NFTs).

The media does not evaporate as it is either on-chain, or distributed via IPFS (ie: peer-to-peer rather than a central server).

None of the artists I have purchased NFTs from have tried to trick me (including Anders Hoff, mentioned in the OP article, who has distributed his work as an NFT).

And, most importantly, the artists and non-profit organizations in the arts are getting paid via NFT sales.

:)

But you could have done this with a credit card.

And I think for most people getting a piece of paper, physically signed by the author stating that it's their work is far more valuable than some UUID on a computer.

Some NFT platforms also support credit cards. But, I'd rather buy art in a way that doesn't include exploitative third parties that take a significant cut (Stripe, Shopify, PayPal, currency exchange fees when paying an artist in another country, etc).

For reference, the last NFT I purchased on Hicetnunc.xyz had a protocol fee of 0.002947 XTZ (around 1¢ USD) and a platform fee of 2.5%, the rest of the sale went directly to the artist's wallet.

To your second point; this remains to be seen—society can place value on many different abstract concepts, "ink on paper" may not be the only valuable vehicle for art and culture.

Platform fee of 2.5% doesn’t seem that different from the fees the payment processors you listed charge.

In practice, the fees in traditional e-commerce systems tend to be significantly higher than 2.5% (I say this as an artist running a Shopify print shop for a few years). Some services like Bandcamp are upwards of 12-18%.

Hicetnunc fees are fixed, and the free market gives an opportunity for other platforms to improve on this if the community desires a marketplace with lower fees (it's much easier to build an alternative to Hicetnunc than an alternative Stripe/Shopify/PayPal). Artists are also given a 10-25% royalty (which they decide) for each resale of a token on the Hicetnunc marketplace. And, of course, since it is all peer-to-peer, you are free to exchange art tokens with no fees at all, save the negligible protocol/transaction fees.

> society can place value on many different abstract concepts

What society definitely can't place value on is a URL to a digital asset that may or may not be there tomorrow, because an uninsured, untrusted value store can't be relied on.

There's nothing saying NFT artifacts have to be digital, though, I'd think. Using them to facilitate trade of physical artifacts would back the trade with (relatively) reliable value stores (physical artifacts) while benefiting from the low transaction fees.

you’d think that but you would be wrong. Kids today happily buy skins and items from games and are quite proud of them.

You don't need to buy an NFT to hang prints of the art that's pictured in the URL in the NFT on your wall.

Not even legally. Unless the artist sold you an exclusive license to hang on your wall, I guess, which they can do with or without an NFT.

I hate to break it to you, but things on IPFS can and do evaporate.

You can always pin it on your own IPFS node rather than rely on others to keep the content available.

Indeed; nothing in life is permanent.

> And, most importantly, the artists and non-profit organizations in the arts are getting paid via NFT sales.

So why couldn't you have just donated money to the artists and right-click-saved / printed the art anyway, without involving a blockchain?

For many reasons, including lower fees (see [1]), acquiring ownership of an artist-signed asset, rather than a digital media file (the limited-edition token is cryptographically signed by the artist, the media file is not), participating in a digital art community, supporting decentralized systems, etc.

A simple way to frame Hicetnunc is a social media platform that is not driven by FAANG, advertising models, and "Like" buttons, but instead by artists, collectors, and OSS developers participating in a digital economy: selling and trading tokens, and also exploring ways to steward and maintain that work without solely relying on traditional centralized third-party services.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29160891

> For many reasons, including lower fees (see [1])

The lower fees derive from the medium used (crypto instead of traditional payment processors). You didn't need to involve a NFT to send crypto to the artist's wallet.

> acquiring ownership of an artist-signed asset, rather than a digital media file (the limited-edition token is cryptographically signed by the artist, the media file is not)

I'm going to refer to the rest of this comment thread about whether 'ownership' is a suitable word for having a cryptographic signature applied to your blockchain address, when the media file in question is bit-for-bit identical.

As you can guess, I hardly think so. There is nothing you can do as an 'owner' of a digital ape picture that anybody else who right-clicked it and saved it can't also do, with the possible exception of getting kudos from the artist for the money you gave them. But a simple donation would have had the same result.

> participating in a digital art community

Which hardly requires NFTs, only your involvement and communication. Online art communities go back to Elfwood.

> supporting decentralized systems, etc.

Tautology. "I use NFTs because I want to support the use of NFTs".

--

> A simple way to frame Hicetnunc is a social media platform that is not driven by FAANG, advertising models, and "Like" buttons, but instead by artists, collectors, and OSS developers participating in a digital economy: selling and trading tokens, and also exploring ways to steward and maintain that work without solely relying on traditional centralized third-party services.

I'm a Fediverse user and I want to nuke the FAANGs, so I'm fully on board with promoting alternative, decentralized social networks. I just don't believe that adding glorified baseball trading cards to the recipe makes them better or stronger in any way.

I never heard anyone saying that Team Fortress 2 became a better community after it became an online market for ugly digital hats.

And I can copy that url off of the chain, pay nothing, print it out and hang it on my wall. You bought nothing. If you want to support an artist, give them money. NFTs are the new penny stocks. Pump and dump.

Are any NFTs at all actually on chain? First time I hear about this.

Yep, see ArtBlocks, Deafbeef tokens for example.

And unless the artist actually signed the print, it's probably fraud.

Is it even fraud if the artist didn't actually... what even? the NFT?

Hmmmm, all of my prints were bought at museums or from the artist directly. Probably not fraud, but I get your point.

One interesting aspect of NFT's is that the artist can continue to get paid on each sale of the item, automatically receiving a set percentage of the sale price on each sale in perpetuity.

How many NFT systems actually do this?

Almost all of the major marketplaces on Ethereum and Tezos facilitate artist royalties.

How is this being collected/enforced with anonymous wallets and transactions?

It depends on the platform.

On Hicetnunc.xyz, buying a token on the marketplace automatically deducts 2.5% of sale to the platform (for services rendered), 10-25% to the artist (or whatever they set as royalty amount for the token), and the remainder to the seller. This is enforced via the blockchain contract, i.e. it cannot easily be circumvented on that marketplace (but it can be circumvented via peer-to-peer transfer or an alternative marketplace/contract).

The wallets can all be anonymous; it just sends these tokens to different addresses.

The wallet address is your id. So essentially if I create an nft, it is forever associated with my wallet as the creator. I set a royalty amount in the smart contract and the transfer of the nft / token takes place through the contract and automatically sends the percentage of the fee to my wallet. The token does not go directly from A to B, it passes through the contract where the logic to transfer the token is implemented.

So if the artist loses access to their wallet they'll never be able to retrieve payments accrued?

pretty much. You lose access to the wallet and don't have your private key backed up, then its gone. Most wallet providers bug you to back up your key seed and even test you to validate that you have.

Just like losing the key to an encrypted file.

But totally unlike losing my bank card or forgetting my pin.

Immaterial differences at best.

> The print is beautiful and hanging on my wall.

Physical: you can view it, it can be stolen.

NFT: you can view it, it can stolen.

> The print won't evaporate when the url suddenly points to a server that was shutdown from lack of payment.

Physical: might burn down/stolen, insurance + security + safety prevents that.

NFT: Host might disappear. Content-addressing solves that.

> I know I bought a print, nobody was trying to trick me into thinking it was the original.

Physical: You can prove you have it because you have it.

NFT: You can prove you have it because your wallet contains it.

> And, most importantly of all, the artist got paid.

Physical: Artist can get paid when it initially got sold

NFT: Artist can get paid when it initially got sold, and can take a piece of each resell thereafter.

All of these things between physical and NFT are such huge differences in order if magnitude that they can't really be considered the same thing.

In my 40 years, I've never had someone break into my house and take something and I've never had a house burn down. Yet putting a file on the internet, it will eventually get copied, probably some time in the next 3 months. And I have a bookmarks folder full of once-very-popular sites that are now just completely gone, plus a bunch of still-popular sites that have changed their site layout completely. Hell, it's a bit of a meme that one of the only sites you can count on to never disappear is the god damned original Space Jam movie website.

If someone can break into your property to steal your painting they can break into your crypto wallet to steal your NFT.

Depends on a lot of things. Usually paintings are hanged somewhere where you can see them, usually not in safes. But with NFTs, you can have the display on the wall while the wallet is in a safe. You could put a painting in a safe too, but you won't be able to as easily show it off then.

How safe is your wallet when you’re tied to a chair with a gun pointed at your head?

You can't honestly believe the same skillset applies here. Hacking digital assets is not the same as breaking a quarter inch pane of glass and turning a knob while no one is around.

Only the criminals in my neighbourhood are robbing my house, hackers all over the world are trying to get access to your wallet or exchange.

Robberies are down from 30 years ago, flat for the past 5. Cybercrime is soaring.

Exactly. Hacking digital assets is a lot more accessible. It's almost guaranteed to happen, whereas most people live their entire lives without getting robbed.

There was more artwork stolen last year than crypto. That's a single category of theft.

https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/94627-19b-in-crypt...

https://www.infoplease.com/culture-entertainment/art-archite...

Here's another physical asset theft category that says 1/3 americans have experienced - something tells me you're also wrong about how many people have been stolen from as well.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/10/package-theft-how-amazon-goo...

Ok, so you're comparing absolute numbers between things in different categories and with wildly different liquidity levels. And then I don't get how comparing NFTs to "leaving valuable packages completely unsecured outside" is supposed to help your case. And if we believe 1/3rd is accurate, the easiest crime of theft on the planet is only getting us to 1/3rd? Last time I checked, 1/3rd was significantly less than 1/2. Generally, when people say "most", they mean "50%, plus at least one person".

This is why I've muted "NFT" on Twitter. You can't get answers out of proponents without them massively shifting the goal posts.

Weren't you just suggesting more hacking attempts happen against NFTs because they're accessible and now you're saying package deliveries are more exposed to theft and so the comparison is unfair?

I agree these comparisons aren't perfect, but I certainly wasn't trying to move the goalposts - I am trying to understand how you've not done just moved the goalposts yourself, though.

"Looted" art was not stolen off somebodies wall. It was taken by "explorers", occupiers, colonizers, Nazi's etc. That is a terrible link for this discussion.

I have dozens of signed prints and it is true that all you get is an accompanied verification document and not any form of legal ownership over the original.

But what you do get is a guarantee from (a) the author and (b) the fact that prints are reasonably difficult to duplicate that there will only be a limited number in circulation. And this enforced scarcity is what makes it valuable even though it's just a print of the original.

If NFTs could limit duplication of digital art that would be something but right it seems like they are more akin to a payment system like PayPal only psuedo-public.

Many signed prints I own do not even include a verification document (not all artists distribute this).

NFTs do not need to limit duplication; the tokens are already unique, as each is addressable to a different contract hash. This is why, although there are many copies of the CryptoPunks contract for example, there is only one CryptoPunks token that tends to have a market around it[1]. Those tokens are linked with a contract address that has become widely recognized as stemming from the original project.

[1] - https://etherscan.io/token/0xb47e3cd837ddf8e4c57f05d70ab865d...

I am not talking about the NFT but about the artwork.

If you had an image file format that embedded an NFT and every device would refuse to allow copies then that would be something. But right now NFTs seem pointless to me because I can always just copy the underlying image once I see it online.

I answered a similar question here[1]. The economic value of art has historically been tied to the scarcity of access to its media. NFT presents an alternative paradigm that separates the signature (artist-signed token) from the artistic media (image, GIF, conceptual art project, etc), allowing the former to remain scarce & uniquely transferable while the latter remains abundant & widely accessible.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29160090

the fact that prints are reasonably difficult to duplicate that there will only be a limited number in circulation

How so? The author can (and probably does) sell signed prints all the time. How is a print difficult to duplicate?

Artists sell self signed prints all the time.

In limited editions e.g. 50 or 100 as they know that releasing more would reduce scarcity, prices would drop and no-one would buy their art any more.

And the prints are difficult enough to duplicate without having some artistic skill. Infinitely more so then choosing Duplicate on a computer.

> How so? The author can (and probably does) sell signed prints all the time.

Artists in the signed print run business don’t generally run new runs, for the simple reason that they understand the moral contract and more importantly the economic implications: if you do reprint, the value-add of your assertions plummets.

The same artists will usually have other non-numbered or print-on-demand art.

> How is a print difficult to duplicate?

A multi-layer screen print is not trivial to replicate without the original assets for the individual layers, and material information about the inks. That’s like asking how a painting is difficult to duplicate.

Exactly, you have bought the image and the license to display that image as it was delivered to you.

You cannot then sell copies of it to someone else. (well you can but not legally.....)

I have many NFTs that I have purchased, and although there was no license agreement (just as with signed prints), it is reasonably expected that I may display that art (on my digital or physical walls, or in some other fashion).

I can of course sell these tokens to others (again, as with signed prints), but if I attempt to copy/clone the tokens and distribute more, I enter into legal/ethical grey area (again, just as with signed prints).

Somewhat related, see MSCHF's latest work:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/art-pranksters-sel...

But... There's no legal grey area? And the ethical grey area doesn't need NFTs - that could be served just as well by the artist asking people other than the buyer not to copy it?

This is a very accurate perspective i think: NFTs are "digital prints" of an artwork, not originals

All digital artwork are "prints" when you save or transfer the work. There's really no concept of "original" in digital as they are indistinguishable. NFT's attempt to add time as a metric of scarcity (this artwork exists on this blockchain at this point in time, regardless of copies). It relies very heavily on a social and cultral decision to place value on this new form of provenance.

If there is no original than all digital artwork is worthless because it can be endlessly copied which would diminish its value.

Rarity is what dictates price, not only social decisions.

If I make an NFT of my photograph and sell it to someone, what is stopping me from making copies and selling it to someone else again? Or giving it away? Nothing. This will crash the price of an NFT if the NFT's value was dictated by the artwork.

So NFT's are just bitcoin, another scam.

> If there is no original than all digital artwork is worthless because it can be endlessly copied which would diminish its value.

Digital art is worthless, though. It's as you said. There are no original copies, all of them are equivalent. They can be trivially and endlessly copied. Once created, the cost of creating more copies might as well be zero.

It's the artist's labor that's valuable. It's the artists themselves who are scarce.

The art itself has value even if all the copies are equally "original", interchangeable, and superabundant.

Put another way: there may not be any change in value between one copy and two copies, but there is a big difference between one copy and zero copies.

Of course. At zero copies, the art does not exist. At one copy, it exists. The artist's job is to generate that initial copy. This is what all human intellectual work boils down to: discovering data, numbers whose bits are set just right.

Once that initial copy is found, any number of copies can be created and distributed at zero cost. Value is determined by supply and demand. If supply is infinite, value must be zero no matter what the demand is.

That's the big question. Will there be any cultral shift in recognising NFT's as legitimate signals of "value" after the hype dies down? You can stretch the hype train out by convincing some big brands to get on board, this will push the price up just by force of recoginition but are the fundamentals sound for what values the NFT? as like you say, there's no real scarcity and we still rely on meat space for settling real disagreements about ownership.

NFTs are a public proof of purchase.

They aren't digital prints in any sense of the word.

And a public proof that you purchased the NFT, not the artwork itself or any particular license or rights in it.

As the OP mentions, people are selling NFT's with URLs pointing to art without the permission or involvement of the artist. This demonstrates that ownership of an NFT does not "prove" anything about ownership related to the art itself.

hey siri: set a reminder to publish my grocery bill on the blockchain

I'd go further. Only NFTs that have the image stored on chain are signed digital copies. It's the association between the signature and the actual data that's important and if that can rot it's bad.

Which only leads on to the next problem of how you associate the signature with a real human.