Oh! The anti-NFT crowd does get it. Unfortunately, only too well. And the thing is that there is nothing there to actually get it.
>> the verifiable receipt is what matters
No, this is just a marketing strategy to fool gullible and naïve people into aping into NFT. Nobody ever had a problem with verifiable receipts when attending concerts or buying a car or eating at a restaurant. NFT is a solution simply looking for non-problems to solve to justify its existence.
NFT is simply put 100% speculative asset. The only reason it got a big hype is because people want to spend 0.00001 Eth and sell it for 100 Ethers and then they don't have to work for the rest of their lives.
There is a suicide hotline that gets posts after every crypto crash. Inevitably the same thing is going to happen once the NFT market crashes (100% guaranteed) and regular people lose most of their savings for worthless jpeg that nobody else wants to buy.
Do I think it is starting as a stupid toy and may eventually do more interesting things? Yes. If Reddit gives you an NFT for being a top poster for a year in a specific subreddit so you can show it off on Discord and Twitter, I don't see much value in that, but there are plenty of people who do, a lot.
1. Artist creates work, signs it with his good old fashioned PGP key, publishes it.
2. Patron pays to "sponsor" the work. Artist makes a bundle of the work and patron's public key, and signs it with his own. Publishes it.
3. Patron decides he has to "sell" his patronage. He takes the bundle from 2, adds the buyer's public key, and signs it. Optionally, the artist signs it too to indicate he's OK with the "transfer". They publish it.
Are there ways to cheat? Yeah, if you're confident no one has downloaded the signed document that you published, you can try double-selling. But that's risky: if you're wrong, someone can publish the signed document and prove that you are a fraud.
This illustrates that most of the utility of "distributed blockchains" come from simple digital signatures. If all parties are accountable, public identities, this simplified scheme is strictly superior.
And remember, we're talking about art and public patronage here, not trade of illegal goods. The whole point is that you want people to see it and associate it with a public, accountable identity.
You don't need a blockchain for interoperability, neither does it enforce interoperability.
Considering how much most HN users rail against centralized services and things others not to turn stuff off, it seems like the value is obvious to me.
How so? Why is it any better than a public API?
> In the situation above the benefit is you, the recipient, are never again dependent on Reddit to validate that award for you.
You're assuming that Reddit would create an NFT that doesn't grant them any special power. Why would they do that? Why wouldn't they create a blockchain NFT with an admin address that they own and which can do pretty much anything?
> Considering how much most HN users rail against centralized services and things others not to turn stuff off, it seems like the value is obvious to me.
You can be centralized on a blockchain though, e.g. using an admin address as I described.
Specifically in that using my API won't require you to pay him money. There are other reasons they'll claim but once you dig through the chaff that's what it comes down to.
Just consider it something like decoupling in coding but for the whole internet.
- NFT can have data on the .json file, so the rewarded user can be recorded.
Even if they don’t directly care, you had better believe that the price of a Rolls Royce shapes the way that people think about them; and you buy one because of the way people will think about it. Same goes with the art you put on your wall (an incredible painting that you got for cheap will never be as cool as something by someone whose art is in the MoMA, even if it’s still very cool).
I’m not sure NFTs are going anywhere either, but some people definitely care about receipts. Conspicuous consumption can be very conscious.
Fortunately, we have the option to aspire to something better. I’m not saying such signalling etc doesn’t exist, just that in the same way as I choose not to assault or murder people when I’m angry at them, I also choose to present myself and choose my partners based on personal qualities rather than superficial crap.
Seems I’m generally speaking a lot more fulfilled, content, and happy in life than those who choose to live like chimps.
And not everything you signaled was profound and you might not have even realized your partner chose you for the shallow parts, even if they'd never admit it directly.
If you buy a jpg for 300k while you could have bought a nice house with that amount of money, you are honestly unfuckable and being unfuckable and gullible is all that you are signalling.
Besides, it's women who do the signaling, that's because they can't approach to save their lives.
NFT crowd should grow some balls, approach, get rejected and repeat until success...like real men do, instead of buying monkey jpg to "signal mating"
Sorry, but spoken like someone who has no idea how the fashion industry operates.
Seriously though, it’s one thing to not like the superficiality of the fashion market, but to deny that NFTs exploit the same demand (for less-gauche proof of wealth) seems wrong.
Recently I learned folks appraise ‘64 mustangs based on VIN and markings - so they know how close to the “first off the lot” that mustang was. They don’t need a blockchain to do that.
I think there is a valid point to this take - humans don’t need irrefutable cryptographic proof that something has a story attached to it; they just need enough compelling evidence the story attached to an object is true. And the kinds of stories folks value tend to be human stories (this is the crown worn by so and so, this is the finger bone of saint so and so, etc.) which NFTs can’t capture.
You indeed do not need a blockchain - the artworld has been doing it using paper certificates for a long time. But these are conceptually the same as an NFT, just accessible and tradable.
All potential solutions to that question have one thing in common: An event has by definition a centralized entity, which is the organizer. Everything that a blockchain supposedly solves in event ticketing is after all a solution due to digitization, not decentralization.
> If you sell it to me as an NFT, how do I know it‘s not a fake NFT ticket or even a fake event?
This is actually not a problem at all:
- It's not likely you'd buy ticket for some event that you don't know/not interested.
- The event official (which you already know) should publish these info for query:
- The blockchain
- The contract address
- The NFT token ID
How often do you actually know who that really is? Let‘s say Beyoncé is coming to the arena closest to you. Are you aware of who actually organizes that event and is in charge? Ticket buyers most often don‘t know and don‘t care.
Plus, if I have to go to the central entity and check all that data, where is the benefit of going decentralized?
> How often do you actually know who that really is? Let‘s say Beyoncé is coming to the arena closest to you.
Interesting, so you are saying either:
- Beyoncé official publish nothing about the event
- We have no way to look up the ticket info
> Plus, if I have to go to the central entity and check all that data, where is the benefit of going decentralized?
Well, de-centralization is nothing about convenience, and it's not just about ticket-selling.
I totally agree that blockchain & web3 is not mature at all comparing to how it is now, and I don't think it's going to be success unless they find a way to generally interact with real-world technically and legally.
1. How do you know the ticket is valid?
2a. How do you know I send the ticket after you pay me?
2b. How do I know you send the money after I send the ticket?
3. How do you know I don't send the ticket to someone else too, if it's digital?
A cryptographically signed I owe you is and will always be meaningless. What is meaningful is the signature at the end of the chain, when the concert organizer lets you in.
(My understanding is that NFTs can be constructed to charge a fee on transfers. At least, this is what I've been told by people trying to promote their use for artwork...)
They charge as much as they do because they have removed a lot of competition from the market (see e.g. jwz - https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2018/01/31.html). There’s no reason why they would implement an NFT where they’d get less money — in fact, they’re the kind of unethical weasels who’d figure out as many ways to hide fees in the smart contracts and play games with the blockchain they use to maximize their take.
Blockchains not only don’t change that, they encourage it by so heavily favoring the richest participants. There’s no way an unethical incumbent would use that as you hope rather than how they’ve used everything else, and without access to the venues and artists in their network you’re going to be limited to the smallest places and bands.
EDIT: remember, everyone not getting paid by them hates Ticketmaster. Their website has been terrible since the 90s and their random fees have been the subject of rants and jokes for just as long. There have been several generations of developers who thought tickets shouldn’t cost so much, knew their musician friends hated Ticketmaster, and said “hey I know Perl/PHP/Python/Node/etc. and could build a better website!” They all failed, and it would be really critical to ask what you’re bringing which is different and especially whether this is actually a technical problem or you have power to apply leverage to the business problems.
Importantly, wouldn't those tokens be... fungible...?
What are the gas fees and how do they compare to the average concert ticket?
BOOM!
5 minutes later I was under the stage.
They do when buying physical artwork, coins, stamps, pokemon cards or other collectibles. There are plenty of things people buy that are only valuable because they are provably "genuine", and would be worthless if they were exact replicas with no provenance.
My friends won a contest for an all inclusive trip to the Super Bowl a few years ago when it was in Arizona.
Flight was good, hotel was good, but they showed up to the stadium for the game... fake tickets. Someone scammed the people running the contest. (I think it was a radio station -- need to check)
NFTs fix this in a way nobody else in the industry is.
That still leaves authenticity, which necessarily runs on trust and reputation. Although you can mechanize and formalize many aspects of reputation, I do not follow the crypto/web3 scene close enough to know the practical aspects of this (my interest are in distributed systems and malicious actor resistant decentralized permission-less systems).
I'd say the reason why people can't just spin up new certifiers is the reputation aspect. With regards to art, people aren't necessarily trading copyright or items but basically a right to brag via verifiable certificates which claim links to origins or creators of some piece.
----
EDIT: This is a neutral observation on the unique technical properties of a solution concept not a defense of it. The necessity of storing logs on open/permission-less (no PKI setup) networks, which the provenance aspect runs on, can be argued. But once chosen, there are formal limitations (such as bounds on byzantine agreement and limits on asynchronous deterministic consensus) which force to a particular space of solutions ("blockchains"). The social aspect of status goods and signaling (which I've never understood) or the speculative bubble driver of participation are not commented on.
This can be an issue for brand new projects. Bad actors will duplicate it and list at low prices. Most users are savvy enough to only use links from a trusted source. Marketplaces also whitelist the real contract (and show warnings for unverified contracts). You can also look at the contract deployers wallet history to help determine if it is legit. IMO it’s easier to prove authenticity for NFTs than most stuff
What characteristic of an NFT makes for "easy interop". Please explain to me how the information in an NFT would add a new skin to another game, in a different engine, by a different company, using a different asset pipeline?
2) There's a more collaborative environment with NFTs because project owners are more open to others giving utility to their NFTs as it drives value back to the project itself. It's not a sell something and end customer relationship model.
3) You can target any specific asset and give it any usecase you want - you don't literally need to map 1-1 every single asset.
Right... they can just post the PGP NFT to their website, no blockchain required.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-09-09/twenty...
whichever them who you want to recognize your status know about.
As the article points out, the blockchain doesn't prove provenance either, that's because anyone can mint an NFT for anything. There's no proof that what's on the blockchain came from the original artist, you must rely on some external trusted authority (like their website, or twitter) to verify the authenticity of the NFT. The artist can just print the PGP NFT on their website and completely eliminate the need for a blockchain altogether. The "Pro-NFT" crowd cannot accept this simple technical truth because it is devastating to the NFT hype train.
The proposed scheme does not track ownership. The trick is to proof that I /no longer/ own a token. It's about having a ledger of ownership.
The only thing the blockchain does is provide shared state, a ledger. To rip out the one thing that matters in this, then claim you have the same thing, takes se kind of hubris.
If I've got a photograph that I took, how do I sell the right to print a copy of it? How do I make sure that only one copy of it gets printed?
Alternatively, if I sell a NFT, what does that mean in the world of copyrights and intellectual property that can be enforced by the courts?
Until that linkage from the real world to the blockchain is made, much of this "mining and selling NFTs" reminds me of my days of playing on MUDs and creating objects to populate a game with that have since lost every iota of value since that MUD does not exist anymore. Even then, people did tricks and exploits to get it so that they'd have more people in the room that the other clan did so that they gained control of the artifact (yes, we had 51% attacks back then too).
And there's my skepticism on this all. Until I can see the block chain data moving back into the real world, it's no more interesting than another news story on a game site about how many titans were made or destroyed in EvE. Sure, people spent real money to create in game assets - but it doesn't mean anything more outside of the game except as a headline to a journalist.
Let's see that venue that sells seats at concerts as NFTs that can be transfered as a competitor to Ticketmaster (I'm honestly interested in the permeant public ledger of everyone attends political rallies). Lets see the season tickets get managed by a NFT ( https://zonecoverage.com/2021/packers/the-insanity-of-the-pa... ).
Until then, all I see are tulips, beanie babies, and EvE titans. But at least the tulips grow in my garden, and my niece and nephew played with some old beanie babies and people trading EvE titans know exactly what they're trading.
Maybe an issuer might still find it useful to hook into an existing standardized open financial ledger like Ethereum, but in the end, the issuer will decide who can attend the venue, not the blockchain.
The reason NFTs work is because they do not attempt to track ownership of real world assets. They are about creating a new asset that o my exists on the chain.
The artworld has a long history of doing so: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/t-ma...
This surely isn't for everyone, but for art enthusiasts who are into NFTs, it's super exciting.
That said, you're trading json strings that have no real world application as part of an "experience" of art with others who want to have the same "experience" but has no real world application or ability to enforce anything relating to the intellectual property of that art. If Twitter deletes a tweet that has a NFT attached to it there's squat that anyone else can do about it; or if an artist loses control over their hosting site, or if a URL changes with a host upgrade... that's all too bad as it was the experience of the art that matters?
I appreciate the energy footprint concerns, but will say that I find this the least interesting part of the thing, and that certainly NFTs are being done an blockchains such as Tezos which have no energy impact of note.
When you say "trading JSON strings", it strikes me that you get hung up on technical details that are irrelevant. The URL is similarly unimportant. Think of it as sugar to help software display images in a standardized way. NFT platforms generally try to use IPFS to provide stable resource locators that anyone can seed, but even if that is not the case, and the URL goes down, as long as two (or more) parties can agree on what piece of art the token represents, they can recognise the ownership over it (not the copyright! - ownership over the digital edition.)
Early experiments from 5 to 10 years ago generally just encoded a hash of the file, and that's all that is required to create a link between token and file.
Yes, someone has to keep the file around, but there is no magic way to ensure that. The Sehgal article is actually an interesting connection here in that they explicitly discuss the challenge of keeping alive these experiences.
So are we talking about "ownership" like name a star catalogs? or the "adopt a zebra" at the local zoo?
What does that ownership mean and what can a person do with it (besides selling it to another person)?
Is there any rights or privileges that the NFT "ownership" is supposed to convey?
And if the hosted file somewhere that it purports to claim ownership of moves to another site/url/resolution (or even goes offline completely) what does that "two or more parties can agree on what piece of art the token represents" mean? Is it "that URL is offline so lets pretend that the image is over there is what this represents?" What if that other image has a different NFT that claims ownership?
Aside from all of these "what ifs" - what practical use do they have outside of an art experience? Without much difficulty I can point to people claiming that NFTs will be used for {practical situation} and then there appears others who point to this as art and can wave away the issues with practicality as buying an art experience that will never translate to anything in the real world or a legal framework that governs copyright. Even in the comments on this post you can see people claiming that it facilitates interoperability between skins on csgo and Roblox.
For example, if I sold a NFT for an image hosted on a server and then sold the art (and its copyright) to someone else who then removed its presence from the net and hung up a print in their own private gallery - is there anything that the NFT owner can do about it?
If the answer is "no", then it's as meaningful as names in a star catalog. If the answer given is "yes", then somewhere, someone believes that the NFT has meaning in the legal framework of the practical world.
People appear to be paying for these with the presumption that the answer is "yes" - and yet I've never seen anything with claims of how that would work or what that is founded on.
Personally, I'm waiting for it to be decided somewhere in court where either everyone who has fraudulently sold NFTs for works they don't hold the copyright on go "oh crap" or everyone else realizes that its digital performance art and has no other value.
Yes, I think is an apt reference, though an important component that critics who use it to disparage that is missing here is that the issuer of the ownership certificate is the creator of the artwork, and can therefore claim a moral right to do so; this is not the case with a company selling stars. A zoo maybe is closer to being able to claim to be some kind of authority. It's interesting to think about: Would we give a star registry run by NASA more credit for being non-scammy?
Do you feel the same confusion about what ownership means when museums buy immaterial or digital artworks for which they only receive a paper certificate (or indeed, not even that, as in the case of Sehgal)?
> What does that ownership mean and what can a person do with it (besides selling it to another person)?
Yes, nothing. You can feel like and claim to be the owner, and there is a community of people who respect that. For example, and this is the case today, by common agreement if a museum or gallery were to want to display a digital artwork that was issued as an NFT, they would certainly not do so w/o permission from the artist, and the artist would be expected to defer to the collector who owns the NFT.
Real-world laws about intellectual property certainly intersect here, and creators do often provide license agreements along side the NFT which are supposed to give legal clarity about their legal rights; sometimes CC is used, and on occasion some are given into the public domain.
> And if the hosted file somewhere that it purports to claim ownership of moves to another site/url/resolution (or even goes offline completely) what does that "two or more parties can agree on what piece of art the token represents" mean? Is it "that URL is offline so lets pretend that the image is over there is what this represents?" What if that other image has a different NFT that claims ownership?
What's the relationship between the file and the artwork? If the artist exports their Adobe After Effects composition into a 1080p clip, but still has the source file around on their hard drive, and later exports a 4K clip, is this now a new NFT that someone else should own? The artist can of course release as many NFTs and editions as they want, but conceptually, it's the artwork that the token represents.
What you want is not to forget or disagree on what the token represents. For the most famous NFTs, that is maybe already unlikely, but a good solution is to store a hash of the file (or /a/ file representing the artwork) with the token.
> What if that other image has a different NFT that claims ownership?
I can create a 100 NFTs right now that points to any Cryptopunk, or to the $60 million beeple piece, much in the same way as I can issue paper certificates representing a Sehgal or Sol Le Witt artwork; these would presumably not be desirable.
I find people become confused with the URL, but as I said: early NFTs experiments did not have them. Just imagine all NFTs w/o them, and just a hash of the file. To see what the NFT looks like, you have to go to the website of the artist, where the image is available. The collector may keep their own copy. If you want to display all your NFTs in an app, the makers of the app have to go around collecting the images of each NFT manually. Maybe the artist's galleries would take on the job of submitting the images to a place like artsy.com, so a registry could be built for easy lookup. That would all be conceivable, and again, very similar to how some art is sold using paper certificates today.
Then someone came up with the idea of adding a URL alongside the token to just make this all easier.
Rafaël Rozendaal was famously selling websites as artworks via ownership of the domain, w/ the collector then simply being responsible of keeping them online.
> Personally, I'm waiting for it to be decided somewhere in court where either everyone who has fraudulently sold NFTs for works they don't hold the copyright on go "oh crap" or everyone else realizes that its digital performance art and has no other value.
(Aside: Stolen artworks are not really a big part of the NFT market; there is a bot epidemic, yes, but those works remain mostly unsold.)
> For example, if I sold a NFT for an image hosted on a server and then sold the art (and its copyright) to someone else who then removed its presence from the net and hung up a print in their own private gallery - is there anything that the NFT owner can do about it?
> If the answer is "no", then it's as meaningful as names in a star catalog. If the answer given is "yes", then somewhere, someone believes that the NFT has meaning in the legal framework of the practical world.
I hold our legal system in great stock, and I know it as one that is very adaptable. There are probably a number of possibly legal claims that could result from an NFT transaction. Having said that:
The intellectual property is not on sale - as it isn't with physical artworks or paper certificates.
There are probably some practical license rights the collector requires for their own enjoyment of being the owner of the artwork. If nothing else, the right to have access to a copy of the file.
Ultimately, if the artist themselves (or a possible subsequent copyright holder) were to renounce the NFT and insist that no one may own a copy of the file, including websites were such NFTs are being displayed, then maybe the collector is just out of luck. But that's ok. After all, they are already relying on the artist to manage their career well, if they are hopeful that the NFT will have some kind of value in the future, which most of course won't.
I don't hate on NFT themselves, but the artificial scarcity bizzaro ponzi pump-and-dump cult aura around them.
Sure, but you don't need a blockchain for that. It could be published anywhere.
When it comes to publishing information, a blockchain is one of the least efficient ways of doing that.
The blockchain doesn't change much in the equation here.
Are you sure it’s not the pro-NFT people that don’t get it?
It came out recently that the ecosystem around NFTs is all set up to trust OpenSea’s version of truth, regardless of what’s on the blockchain, and so it can be revoked at will.
Whereas with a proof-of-work blockchain, whoever has 51% of the network's mining hash rate is in control, which is effectively who is the most well-funded, well-connected, innovative, etc.
Or a proof-of-stake blockchain, where whoever has 51% of the network's stake, which is effectively who is the most well-funded, well-connected, innovative, etc.
It will cost millions of dollars to maintain a one hour attack against a PoW chain. It is crazy inefficient, it is slow, but it provides a level of trust that is unique. A software license NFT that lives on a blockchain is a perfect example - would you rather have that or one that depends on a centralized company keeping their server's running (like Adobe's with CS3 and before)?
You were saying that the verifiable provenance is part the value, and I'm saying that that provenance is just as trustworthy as if a centralized service provided it because my trust that what they're asserting (that person X owns token Y) is true depends on how vulnerable they are to tampering, and all these systems are ultimately controlled by traditional factors like how much money you have access to, who you know, etc.
With the centralized solution all responsibility is defined with the operator. In practice this means that virtual goods markets are underexplored because it's a huge platform service investment - only the likes of Valve and Roblox will consider it. And in those cases it's also a monopolistic play since the exits from the market are barricaded in various ways, with restricted APIs and hidden data and so on.
The blockchain solutions create a public database with multiple frontends. A third party can add on whichever service they want to, e.g. verify the data's provenance, present trading opportunities or incentives. Therefore the platform builds from an aggregation of independent services, more like the early Internet.
This is the "consensus" part of the tech in action, and also differentiates it from signed receipts. The agreement of consent precedes the participation. If you don't like the agreement, it's public data, so you can launch alternatives. Threat of forking keeps stakeholders willing to stay at the bargaining table. It doesn't matter if you are a well-capitalized stakeholder if you torpedo the value of the chain. However, the early entrants to every space in crypto look scammy and try to jump ahead with hype because it's faster to run a scam than to actually work through the civic problems of maintaining the chain. To date, they always wash out with the bear markets.
Same as creating an open protocol like the article suggests and getting participants to opt-in to supporting that protocol. The difference being that open protocols would require you to either accept _any_ provider or vet and choose which services you trust, vs the blockchain where the trust is in the chain itself and it's inability to be tampered with, i.e. the consensus you're talking about.
And the core of my criticism here is that the factors that give one person or a group of people the ability to tamper are the same; the companies that don't really experience consequences for bad behavior are large, well-funded, well-connected, and these things will also let you buy tons of mining rigs, low-power-cost facilities, and connect you with other wealthy miners who are interested in whenever the next DAO reversal needs to happen.
"There's nothing to stop me buying an NFT for 100ETH and the seller immediately returning that to me in cash."
The chain doesn't really guarantee this anyway because a wallet is not a person. There are already examples of big wash sales.
an entry in the blockchain is literally a signature though...
a piece of art is yours if it's hanging in your living room.
much easier IMO
The actual provenance cannot be established with NFTs or by cryptographic signatures alone, because anyone can generate a pair of keys and pretend to be someone else.
As a reseller, publishing your PGP signatures on a git repository provides the same level of authenticity: you can't prove where it came from, and you can't silently erase past transactions to the eyes of people who have a copy of the chain/repo.
[0] https://www.davidrevoy.com/article864/dream-cats-nfts-don-t-...
And blockchains can't guarantee provenance either, although they can help ensure that the claimed provenance (probably) hasn't changed since the data was first added.
though, of course , it wouldn’t really be secure at that point, as it would be relatively cheap to make a fork that outpaces them (assuming proof of work. In proof of stake I suppose they would become the only one with any stake?).
So, I’m not sure quite how this impacts your point?
The function of continuing to handle transactions? It can do that fine I suppose.
The fact that it's even possible to not "get it" means that NFTs are not an effective status signaling tool. If it has to be explained, the status signal was not received.
Lamborghinis, yachts, and large diamonds inspire a visceral reaction; there's nothing to explain.
> Without a verified on-chain transaction, there is a risk that either the buyer or the seller may be lying about the transaction price.
I mean, this is kind of the whole point - the published record on the chain is what actually matters. I don't like NFTs, but the anti-NFT crowd doesn't seem to get it and that is just as frustrating. People value status signaling tools. A lot. Image 99 of 1000 isn't a status signaling tool, showing you paid for the image is, the verifiable receipt is what matters.
This article is like suggesting the signature on art is what matters, but what matters is the actual provenance.