I agree with you.
I’m only saying that verifying an NFT- crypto money laundering scam or not- is the digital version of checking a Banksy for its veracity.
Obviously the latter is more complicated and requires more skill because it’s real.
I agree with you. I’m not sure where the conflict is coming from.
It is really similar for sure.
“NFT” is one of the magic words around here - don’t mention cast iron pans or knife sharpening or the same attitude appears 
- people love arguing about it, from the same side, mostly. Bit weird, I know. 
There is no The Blockchain, just ones agreed on by the consensus of the sites supporting the distributed chain under the rules at that time. It’s all fun and games until they stick a fork in it.
I think the subset of people who really understand blockchains and the people who understand the legalities is probably quite small. (I’m not in either, lucky me!)
there’s no value in the copy of the painting, irrespective of the duplicate’s quality.
Only if the copy is a digital image. If it’s a physical copy, it has some value, precisely depending on the quality - and scarcity - of the physical object. Granted, the original will always have more value (unless you manage to pass off a sufficiently-good copy as the original), but that’s because Guernica didn’t start off as a digital image - there’s only one of it. And this has always been the problem for artists working natively with digital images - value is in scarcity, and if there are potentially an infinite number of identical copies, the value of the work is zero, from the traditional capitalist collector/speculator point of view. (There are, of course, other ways of funding artists, but there’s not a lot of money in them, relatively.)
Some natively-digital artists have been hoping that NFTs could be used to create scarcity in digital images (and therefore value), but on a fundamental level they don’t actually do that, so all the hopes built on the back on them are based on misconceptions and doomed to disappoint.
No, not at all, the issue is claiming that they’re “exactly like traditional paintings” when they’re absolutely not - their nature and dynamics are completely different. There’s certainly similarities and parallels between speculation in NFTs and art world speculation in paintings (at the moment, anyways), but the things themselves aren’t comparable. Pretending they’re the same is why the NFT market is a house of cards built on sand - as soon as the market fully comes to the realization that NFTs themselves don’t even address the issue of digital scarcity, the whole thing collapses.
Yeah, this is one of the major problems with NFTs - they have nothing to do with provenance (which must be shown in a fully external process), nor (as shown by the case of Seth Green’s monkey pic) are they necessarily even accurate records of financial transactions, so the blockchain entries don’t even prove ownership. The NFT itself does… nothing.
I’d argue that with these big art institution sales of NFTs, the art institutions were the ones giving legitimacy to the NFTs, rather than the NFTs legitimizing the digital images being sold. The art institutions could have said “here’s a jpeg and an actual physical receipt for it” and it would have worked entirely the same (and probably been more valuable in the long run).
I’d probably pass for a member of that sub-group, which is one of the reasons I know most of this Web3 stuff is a scam.
The only thing that makes sense to me about why people have paid so much for NFTs recently is that they think they’re getting one of the first few artifacts of a new type of artifact that will be commonplace in the future. The type of artifact being the NFT itself, not what it refers to (which is pretty much irrelevant for this purpose).
In the same way one of the first few Ferraris has value as a collectible, or one of the first electronic calculators has value as a collectible, it’s not because it has enormous functional value, but because it is historically interesting.
If you’re a true believer, and speculate that NFTs will take over the world because they’re so cool, then having one of the first ones might give you bragging rights that are worth something to someone who is also an NFT collector. But not because the thing it points to has any value, it’s the NFT itself that’s generating the speculative interest. It could point to any stupid thing, and usually does.
Like bibblees and masses available only in Latin for people who couldn’t even read or write their own language, I find that shit exceptionally suspicious.
Same, and same!
This is really just an argument about capitalism.
There are grifters trying to trick you into buying a stupid cartoon with the promise it’ll grow in value, and there’s this other lower level where creators initially thought the concept could be a way to protect and monetize their digital art. The crazy volatility of this new “market” has soured that idea. Maybe the way capitalism works it was just destined to go bad.
I have a friend who had to put his music career partially on hold to care for his ailing mother. He was talking about turning some of his sketches and demos into audio NFTs, I briefly argued against it but felt callous considering the spot he’s in. Whether he’d be ripping people off or not I can’t say.
"NFTs seem to me just a way for artists to get a little piece of the action from global capitalism, our own cute little version of financialization. How sweet—now artists can become little capitalist assholes as well.” -Brian Eno
The article says “it is impossible to produce the same hash sequence for different inputs”, which is not true. Depending on the hashing method, it’s not practical with current knowledge and technology, but that may change sooner rather than later: Quantum Computers Could Crack Bitcoin Security by the 2030s.
We already have a distributed signing mechanism in the form of the X.509 public key infrastructure. Blockchain could be useful to establish a clock to determine the order of events, but so could a traditional, trusted non-blockchain signing service.
There’s also a 51% Attack, where you can forge blockchain results if you can control a majority of the computational resources.
What a blockchain is not:
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