Let’s say you’re an artist, and you’ve decided for whatever reason that your medium of choice is baking cakes. But people keep eating your cakes, and you don’t want that. So you add poison to your cakes.
This is approximately the premise of NFTs, and it’s stupid. If you want to make digital art, and you want the constraints of ownership and transfer that come with physical art, then you’re in the wrong medium. If you don’t like the affordances of digital art, how about instead of trying to restrict them, you go play somwhere else?
The above notwithstanding, it’s unclear what, exactly, the NFT model provides that a contract defining a transferrable license doesn’t. Other than a massive waste of energy for block computation.
So Mark wrote this article to advertise his buddy selling a photo of a piece of paper on a couple of cryptocurrency online auction sites based around a NFTs, a technology whose only real use is burning ludicrous amounts of electricity that’d be more useful for something else. Lovely.
Cryptocurrencies and NFTs are shit for so many reasons:
I don’t think that’s entirely fair. Just because the preferred tools of an artist are digital, that doesn’t mean they should be treated differently from, or have different rights than, any other artist. However, as far as I can tell these NFTs don’t actually protect the artist’s work, they just provide a new way for others to exploit it.
I’m all about finding new economic models for artists. Maybe I’m cynical, but all I can think of is how money laundering is so rampant in the art world. They’re still hiding behind “art,” but there’s not even pretext that it’s for exhibiting and there’s little to no historical value. For example, this was the actual wood, pigments, and fiber used to create this.
I think, like Shuck had said, this is more like a certificate of authenticity. Which means the value comes from trust in the certifying authority. Transferring makes me think of Title Insurance. In the US you pay Title Insurance to cover any disputes over the title to a property even though the state functionally maintains records. The state only records transactions, the actual transactions or missing transactions are settled in court.
Of course, people not paying attention can pay for effectively nothing and people can also “sell” stuff that isn’t theirs.
OK, if you want to make art digitally but you want to have the constraints and affordances of realia on the market, get a giclee printed and then delete your original file. Or, if you want to have a single copy of record but also have digital distribution of unauthenticated copies, print the giclee and then publish a png to your website.
Same direction in terms of being a referential item, but with another layer of abstraction. A deed or title rests with an authoritative record body of some type, has a commonly accepted method for verification, and has fixed rules for what transferring it means. An NFT doesn’t require any of those things. It is possible, and already happening for people to issue an NFT for an object over which they have no ownership stake. You’re establishing a chain of title and clear sales with no underlying referent.
