Is there a way in your system to avoid the double send?

> "$doomrobo_public_key owns $k as of $date" signed with the minter's private key

If you mean the minter could sign multiple owners of $k, of course that’s true, but that’s like saying that a painter could paint the same thing twice or sell printed copies of their paintings. Of course they can, and if they claim that each one is unique they’re likely to find that people don’t value their stuff much.

How does the receiver of such a transfer know that the transfer is final? There's no way for them to know that an "earlier" transfer of same item won't show up days later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqAOaNS1tqM

(May be NSFW depending on who you work for...)

The problem being described above is the possibility of the trusted author minting multiple digital signature NFTs for the same content. A reseller can't create a copy because they can't sign a message conferring ownership from the trusted source without their private key.

I think that is the "minting" problem.

An artist simply signing stuff does not even prove that a physical object corresponding to the token exists.

I like to think of other use cases, like real estate or stock options. If you talk about a plot of land, it seems feasible to find a unique identifier (you could even involve the government).

Edit: HN does not allow me any more replies right now, so I have to leave it at that. The reason why a "government signature on the deed" would achieve the same thing is because we trust on the government to keep a proper ledger. And the government asks for a lot of money for a transfer.

A deed digitally signed by the government's private key satisfies this need without a blockchain.

Only because the government keeps track of who owns what in a centralized database. Typically they also ask for pretty high transferal fees.

The answer is that this is not a problem, because the whole point is knowing who the creator of the NFT is, and beeple trying to create additional copies using a secret wallet but not telling anyone will be treated by the market the same as me minting a copy of a beeple piece.

You point about minting another is an interesting point but its not a double spend so we veer off the topic.

If we take your point then its the same as saying anyone can create a new crypto and call it Bitcoin. If I have an OG Bitcoin and you have a fake one then you can steel my real one. No you cant.

The reason is that people discern what Bitcoin is vs. other coins.

NFT cooy/paste is a problem but it is a distinct and different problem to double spend.

"Double spend" is a cryptocurrency problem, NFTs do not have this problem since unlike "currencies" the goal is to create a "non fungible" record of ownership for an off-chain asset; a chain of digital signatures satisfies this need, the double spend issue is not relevant to the stated use-case.

You are correct double spend is not a problem with NFT because they piggy back on crypto layers.

However double spend is a problem with just digital signatures that “retroactively obsoleted” NFTs.

Since there are multiple people commenting and steering the thread in different directions I feel this is being filibustered. So ill stop replying. Im exhausted!

As I already stated, this is not true. Nobody can stop an author from minting two different blockchain NFTs pointing to the same content, there's no difference between that and "double spending" a digital signature NFT. At the end of the day, the only thing the NFT does is prove "the author authorized this verbal statement of ownership", a digitally signed text file does exactly the same thing.

btw, I own an NFT that represents all natural numbers, therefore all possible NFTs.

If Y is not an NFT, but you know the original owner X, and you wish to create an NFT, the same kind of mechanisms work: the first time you attempt to assign ownership is the canonical one. Which you seemed to get up-thread, you just failed to "do the math" to see why digital signatures alone don't support that as you are so sure cryptocurrencies have no value.

If you send two digital signatures to two people claiming they both own something, the big issue is that the second person might not even know the first person exists. You need some kind of mechanism to invalidate the second one by exposing the first one in a trustless global ledger of events.... that's what blockchains provide.

If you only care about the semantics of disputes--which is potentially fair for claims over a physical object: it acts as a kind of "second factor"--you get a long way by just including the entire chain back to the root whenever you transfer ownership, allowing people to show prominence over other chains they obviously dominate...

...but any time there is a conflict--and not just on the original sale!--in your histories you can't compare timestamps to resolve the dispute as you can't trust them: digital signatures cannot show that one thing happened before the other thing as any timestamp is just data being signed, attached by the signer, and is meaningless.

To resolve these conflicts you need to use your distributed ledger to establish that no such signature has been signed previously: you need a way to authoritatively assign prominence. If you have a solution for this, what you have invented is a cryptocurrency and could be used as such (as there is no relevant difference between fungible and non-fungible tokens).

(And note that this is true even if you try to solve this by using some complex web-of trust of a ton of random third-parties or overlapping sets of parties that different people haphazardly might choose to trust instead of a linear blockchain... you are just talking about systems like Holochain or Stellar or Avalanche instead of systems like Bitcoin or Ethereum.)

Incorrect. As @saurik says, but I'll just restate: an NFT also tells you the ordering of all such statements within one context (a single blockchain). So you can know whether this was the first such transfer by this owner or a subsequent one. This is the entire purpose of distributed databases, including blockchains.

There are so many problems being skated over here about provenance and ownership and nfts provide nothing of value in that domain, they’re just a get rich quick scheme.

The digital signature is thing that people want to own in the real world!

Being in physical possession of the bytes to a JPEG is not what gives people the sense that they own this piece of art in the way they might own a painting, because the bytes are so cheaply copied.

Owning the intellectual property behind a JPEG is an entirely different kind of ownership; the value is in the commercial exploitation of those rights, and the buyer is now taking over from the creator in being responsible for said exploitation to get their money's worth. This is not what artists or art collectors want.

The whole point is to artificially recreate the traditional experience of ownership, but for immaterial/digital goods. People talk about owning the work (or an edition of it), not the signature, because that is the whole point of the exercise.

Immaterial artworks such as video art, performances etc. are already being sold in the art market; what you get is a piece of paper stating that you own the work. It's exactly the same as an NFT.

It may seem utterly useless for people who don't care about owning editions of immaterial works of art, but there is nothing scammy about it. It is done entirely in earnest.

You created the image. You own the copyright to the image (which has legal weight). You may restrict distribution or reproduction in those situations.

These are all more meaningfully ownership than owning a digital receipt on the blockchain pointing to a url on a 3rd party site, which is more akin to buying a star or a piece of the moon from somebody who sets up a website and purports to be selling these ineffable things.

I disagree with you about the point of NFTs, the point of them IMO is to provide cover for ponzi schemes and convince marks parting with their cash that they are buying into a get rich quick scheme in which they'll get rich and someone else will be left holding the bag when they sell their receipt for digital art to someone else.

The references to art markets, asset tracking, provenance, new technology etc etc are just indirection used to distract from the fundamental transaction - give me money (including really high transaction fees for the marketplace) for this worthless receipt which says you own* this digital lion pic, unique amongst thousands of other similar lion pics because it has a cigar or an eye patch. No wonder companies like Nike, Games companies and football clubs and are rushing to take part too and sell fans NFTs, they can't lose!

* For certain values of own not conferring any rights over the image whatsoever.

By my count you listed just one - owning the copyright. But as I said, while owning intellectual property is certainly meaningful (and can be valuable), it is not art collecting. There is a reason why there exists no art market where people are trading copyright claims.

As a collector, I don't want to be in the business of managing an intellectual property licensing enterprise. Yet, I want the artwork I own to become a well-known, celebrated cultural object; the artist also wants this, and thankfully - incentivised and empowered by still owning the copyright - will try to manage their career to achieve this.

We can all agree that crypto lends itself to rampant and unrestricted speculation / gambling, which attracts all kinds of people looking for a cash grab or get-rich scheme. Those speculative bubbles have been going on for years, and in all likelihood will continue. It's an issue that artists and collectors in this space are struggling to deal with; people don't like that new releases are sold out in minutes, because flippers and their bots think they can make a profit (this is not dissimilar to event ticketing issues).

However, artists who have experimented with blockchain 10 years ago, were not looking for marks to scam. While pics of lions will go up and down in price, and people who bought even respectable art at the height of the bubble will be looking at a loss in resale value, this market will not disappear; it provides a product that artists and collectors find useful.

I am not of the opinion that this will be as world-changing and all-encompassing as web3 proponents proclaim. Art collection is a niche in the real world, and it will be a slightly larger niche in the digital realm.

The art market is a racket entirely divorced from value, if you want to emulate that, good luck to you, but know what you're getting into, the comparison with the manipulated and celebrity led current art market is entirely unflattering to NFTs as it shows them up for what they are - a get rich quick scheme.

I think this market will disappear when the cryptocurrency bubble bursts, which seems imminent now it has mainstream attention again and with the coming withdrawal of stimulus.

Monies for the transaction can be put into escrow with a third party (you'll need to go back in time to invent that too). When the notary notifies the escrow holder of the signatures they can release the monies.

When you have a legal system to enforce contracts and people put their own money or legal liability on the line two parties don't need to trust one another to conduct transactions. People buy expensive shit all the time. They don't need to trust each other with the money or valuables because they involve third parties that proffer up (staking if you will) liability to let the two parties conduct transactions.

The blockchain model replaces the staked liability with "expensive" proof of whatever. The only problem is monied entities can these proof systems. They can afford to run a majority of miners, stake the most (or spam stake offerings), or whatever otherwise supposedly expensive resource. They're only expensive resources if you naively assume all mining will be done by randos in their bedrooms.

Blockchains are just a way to do something almost no one needs in a slow expensive way.

Leonardo could still create one NFT saying "this is ownership of my painting of the woman that always looks at the beholder" and another saying "this is ownership of my painting "Mona Lisa" and it would perhaps not be immediately clear that they are the same painting.

Nevertheless, that is the "minting" problem and not the "spending" (or transfer) problem.

Edit: HN does not allow me any more replies at this point, sorry.

There is an infinite number of blockchains.

Even if the seller says "xyz is the official blockchain", it does not really solve the problem, as they could just say that several times for different blockchains. It does not actually add new information (signing something and putting it on blockchain xyz is equivalent to signing something, putting it on blockchain xyz, and saying "xyz is the official blockchain for my NFTs").

Just use a different private key for each sale.

Instead, what identifies the artist, is the artist saying "hey, this thing over here is the real one!".

None of which involves a Blockchain.

The artists says "this is my key" to their public key. Then they can use their key to sign things, and people can verify the signature because they can check that it belongs to the public key, which the artist has publicly announced.

People also used to create chains of trust with public key infrastructure. Maybe you trust Bob, and Bob trusts Alice, and Alice has personally met the artist at Burning Man and verified their key there.

Or you go to the government and let them provide a register of identities. In any case it is a separate problem.

If you can't verify the artist, don't buy the NFT, or only buy it at a discount, accounting for the risk. Forgeries are a problem with physical works of art, too.

Thats the point though. Nothing about the blockchain has anything to do with this part, and this is really the only part that matters.

So, once again, my point stands. The private key has nothing to do with identifying the real artist. Instead, it is something else entirely that identifies the real artist.

> on their official web site

So then the official website is what is doing the identifying here, of what the real art it. Not the blockchain. It is the artist themselves, saying "This art is the real one", not cryptography.

It is not proof of work, or proof of signed private keys. Instead, it is proof of "official website".

> In any case it is a separate problem.

It is the only problem that matters. The actual way to identify the real artist, separate from the blockchain, is what is actually doing all of the heavy lifting here. The private key isn't doing anything on the important part.

No it isn't. The point of NFTs is to prove ownership and facilitate trade. Not identifying creators.

You can only prove ownership of that specific crypto transaction, which might be just a fake NFT, or duplicate.

There is nothing about crypto that actually proves it was the "real" NFT, or real art.

You need something else to actually prove that you own the "real" piece of art or NFT.

> Not identifying creators

If you are unable to identify creators then you are unable to prove ownership, because that NFT could just be a fake one, or even a duplicate that the creator has issued many times without you knowing it.

With crypto alone, you'd only be able to prove that you own something that might just be a fake or duplicate, and anyone can make as many fakes or duplicates as they want, so that's not really proving ownership.

To verify the identity of a creator is a solvable problem, though, and is also yet another issue than the "sell it multiple times" problem.

Let's say I create a piece of digital art and create an NFT out of it. The NFT somehow starts increasing in value. Then I copy my original digital art-asset and perhaps use a Photo-Shop filter to make it have a different hue. I turn that into another NFT. And I keep on doing this for all colors of the rainbow.

What prevents me from creating new NFTs with the same or slightly modified underlying digital asset?

My way of thinking is an NFT is a shitcoin with supply 1 and smallest denomination 1.

Ah, see, I ususually skip over NFT nonsense because of the sheer number of WHY and WHO it brings up… but now and then it’s summed up nicely.

What prevents this and maintains the value of the work is that there are legal and social norms enforced through a vast network of institutions (galleries, museums, collectors, art fairs) that ensure that there will never be more than 1 actual edition of the work, or 2 or 3, whatever it is the number never changes after it is set, and minting more editions would be professional suicide, and the network of institutions would never allow or recognize it even if an artist tried it.

Lawrence Lessig's book Code developed the argument that any combination of social norms, legal structures/enforcement, and code or infrastructure can function as law, and sanction or foster certain behaviour and markets. "Code is law" was a clever observation and a bit of a revelation, but the NFT crowd seem to believe that it's enough or that it has more value than the social norms and contract law of the existing art world. It's engineering mindset hubris.

There's an attempt now to work social norms into the NFT space and enforce etiquette around "right-clicking", but convincing collectors of paintings that they could continue to collect photography was less of a challenge than convincing generations raised on BitTorrent, DRM wars, and authorless memes to introduce false scarcity into online digital abundance.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_... [1] https://artblart.com/tag/transparency-in-light-box/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Destroyed_Room:_B-Sides_an...

The "non-fungible" part refers only to the receipt, not the original work.

Right but a receipt of what? A receipt, evidence, or proof, that a transaction took place. But a transaction of what? One party got money. What did the other party get? A proof that s/he paid the money. For what? For the proof that s/he paid the money ... for the proof that s/he paid the money for the proof that ... LOL.

Makes me think that I should make an NFT out of Brooklyn Bridge. That might gain lots of fame and thus lots of value?

Your last sentence hit the nail straight on the head. You can in fact make a Brooklyn Bridge NFT and you would hardly be alone.

Heck you can mint as many NFTs as you like of any image you own the copyright of :)

That hasn't stopped loads of NFTs of copyrighted images being minted ofc.

And if NFT does not give you the copyright I might sell the copyright or license it to 3rd parties who could not care less about you having an NFT somehow "associated" with it.

I guess the key is what does it mean for an NFT to be "associated" with anything.

It's mind-boggling

It's a terrible analogy from the start, don't blame me.

My point is that if you buy a new record from an artist you generally expect it to be original music that’s the product of creativity. But a lot of artists release things that are perceived by many to be very derivative, unoriginal, and not creative.

No, you expect it to be one of hundreds to hundreds of thousands of exact copies that anyone else could buy regardless of whether you own a copy or not, and that will usually be repressed if the supply runs dry. It's the product of a record pressing/CD replication machine more than anything else; no creative or original work goes into producing copy 67,904 out of 100,000. There is no expectation that you are paying for original work. The money you spend might go into funding original work, indirectly, but what you're paying for is a copy, and that's also what you generally expect it to be.

If consumers generally each bought the only copy of the records they own, it might have been more relevant.

That one seems like a classic supply and demand thing. Make too many, sell none

Having said that, that does actually seem to be the business model in this wave. At least for the ones people are heavily pushing that get on on my radar. Maybe not hues but "accessories" (procedurally generated png layers, flattened)

But because anybody else can sell anybody else very similar NFTs it looks like the supply is infinite.

The only differentiator then is who is the seller, right? But how can the value of a thing be different based on who sells it?

People only want to pay for the NFT, because it is supposed to represent a desirable piece of art. The only person who has the moral authority to sell it is the artist. Anyone can create an NFT that "links" to some piece of art they found online, but if I am not the artist, why would anyone pay me for it?

Additionally of course, there are artists whose work is more desired, so they command a premium over other artists.

If I tried to create such an NFT from someone else's art that would be fraud if I don't own the copyright to that art.

Is that how it works in practice? Do NFTs (typically) include immutable text which clearly spells out what rights are transferred to the buyer of the NFT? And because the text of the NFT is in the blockchain which can not easily be forged, courts will accept that fact as evidence of a binding contract?

This can be included immutably on-chain. Mostly it is done off-chain, which is ok, because enforcement of any such license would happen off-chain and in courts anyway. Frequently, no license details are given at all, which may also be ok, because people who collect fine art aren't doing it for the use value ("I need a stock photo for my landing page"), they are doing it because they feel good about being an art collector. In that sense, very limited use-rights are actually required.

Specifically, what use rights does an NFT grant?

For photographs (and I have a small gallery of them collected over the years in art festivals and galleries), they're hanging on my wall... though I can't publicly display them (that's part of the copyright).

If I sell a print of a digital image (that I captured with a camera) and I sell a NFT of the same digital image, what are the differences in the use rights that the two buyers have?

If the digital image, hosted on a server that I maintain goes offline (I didn't pay my network solutions bill and someone else buys the domain), what does does the NFT retain rights to?

However, I believe in the US, there is no right to even download a copy of a file on the internet for purely personal reasons. I could see an NFT buyer successfully argue in court that this right is implied, even if not specified.

What happens if the file goes offline? I would think that this will not effect an existing license that you have previously granted. Of course, the buyer may struggle to make use of their license rights if they did not retain a copy of the image themselves.

Do you have any examples of an NFT that grant rights accompanied by TOS terms for minting the NFT that affirm that it is the original artist or someone who is authorized to do so who is creating it?

> However, I believe in the US, there is no right to even download a copy of a file on the internet for purely personal reasons.

There is de minimis which isn't so much a right but rather a "this is beneath the concern of the law".

As to the US aspect, every country that is a signatory of the Berne Convention ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention ) recognizes the minimum standard for protection which includes the right to to make replications or display to the public that is held as part of copyright.

For an NFT, would a baseball card be an acceptable comparison for what it represents in the real world? To that end, I would contend that the same thing happens to it when the player that it represents (there is no ownership conveyed in a baseball card beyond the card itself) leaves the game.

But baseball cards also have physicality. They are close to our world we can see them and turn them around. Physicality gives them desirable properties like easily carrying them around, no computer required. A physical thing is unique. Any sequence of bits on the other hand can always be copied.

That's what I fathomed. What I don't get is why would anybody pay anything for them

But consider a very successful real world use case: trading cards. As NFTs, these digital cards are limited by contract on their respective blockchain such that infinite copies cannot be printed - they are limited edition. Scraps of cardboard for this rookie or that player only have ever had value to people who collect them - now the same sort of thing exists in the digital realm, without the risk of losing the physical collection in a house fire. It's less the artwork that is valuable, but the NFT itself.

Another valid use case is Patreon-like support of artists (especially in the music industry). As it is now, tens of thousands of people contribute money monthly to their favorite artists via platforms like Patreon often in exchange for perks like early releases to tracks or works in progress. NFTs can represent the same sort of thing, except that at some point in the future these early released tracks - or really - the possession of a fact of support for a band during their career as an NFT - has value amongst other fans. In some cases possessing these things can become backstage passes to a band at a concert.

Much of the NFT space right now is a cash grab. That doesn't mean valid use cases won't emerge.

So. Digital art can be replicated, and they may or may not convey ownership. And then you immediately turn around, replace "digital art" with "digital cards" and "perks" and pretend that this is now somehow different just because you're using NFTs for literally the same thing, but called a different name.

> That doesn't mean valid use cases won't emerge.

It means exactly that: valid use cases will not emerge because of what NFTs are.