Scams, All the way down.
Yay! Making something not scarce that still isn’t scarce by cryptography pissing on the receipt.
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This is not the argument you think it is. That’s why I linked to Thomas Struth’s auction records in my first post. Notice how many times the same motifs come up for auction. That is not the same artwork being bought and sold repeatedly, it is different collectors selling their respective editions. I.e. a copy.
If you’re an art collector with a fuck off expensive photograph on your wall (there are Thomas Struths worth nearly $2m) you will in most instances not be the owner the IP. The artist (or their estate) still owns that. You own and edition of that work, as certified by your, er, certificate.
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Let’s not mince words- It’s a limited edition print. Most people can grok what a limited edition print is without putting hoity-toity labels into it.
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But if you own a photograph, you at least own a physical photograph. And if you own a certificate that allows you to get that photograph reprinted, then you own a license that affords you certain rights in association with the IP embodied in the photograph.
An NFT doesn’t offer you anything other than the NFT. If it’s got a JPG embedded in it, you can have that JPG without an NFT attached and still have the JPG. It doesn’t offer you any legal ownership or licensure of anything, other than (perhaps) the implicit licensure of the included image that goes along with the NFT, if it was issued by the copyright holder of the image (*). And what is a license to use a JPG worth? And to the extent that an artist can license the JPG, what does transferring licensure via NFT get them that a plain old contract doesn’t?
The only benefit I can find for anyone is the chance to scam a sucker out of their money for a JPG. Oh, and to burn the earth.
(*) IANAL; IP lawyers feel free to shut me down here.
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It’s even dumber. Because it would be detrimental to the size of the blockchain the jpg isn’t in there but just a link in the json meta data. So a web-server has to keep hosting the link to the jpeg.
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That’s kind of the issue I have with this. It’s too much effort for something that existing infrastructure exists to facilitate. The whole trustless part of blockchains are really good for transacting between parties you’ll never know or have a means to through the civil courts to pursue any recourse if defrauded. I see it as a solution in search of a problem and there’s really no problem in authenticating art.
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Which is also dumb in its own special way, since we all know how good web servers are about never changing URL paths and also continuing to exist. Not to mention, if the URL is right there then anyone can just go there and get it!
Assessment: dumb no matter how it’s architected.
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I suspect this is the true nature of the NFT bubble:
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Oddly, it was a hack done by the original authors of the NFT concept. He had no idea anyone would keep using it later. It was more of proof of concept than anything else. It’s just weird seeing how techbros don’t seem to grasp how to engineer protocols or upgrade them when they reach a blocking issue.
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If the only purpose of the NFT is to serve as a digital certificate of authenticity for a “limited edition” file then it still isn’t serving any point that couldn’t be better served using less resource intensive means… like a signed piece of paper.
Plus a limited-edition print is just that—limited. If I could walk into a photography gallery and covertly right-click any print I saw to create an identical print for my own home—accurate down to the individual atom—then the market for limited-edition prints would look pretty different than it does today.
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It may have been cool for a brief sliver of time in the mid 80’s.
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And here we see the reason why the cryptocurrency folks are so adamantly opposed to any kind of government oversight or regulation. That’s him using a fake trade to establish a false high price for his NFT. Doing the same thing with stocks or real estate or basically any worthwhile investment is blatantly illegal.
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“Zero trust” indeed.
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Yeah, nah. This video, despite the “even handed” framing, just comes off as an NFT booster, ultimately. Framing it like, “NFTs are like… the internet” is some real bullshit, there. Sure, in the sense that people threw money at something they didn’t understand, but that’s true of many things that otherwise have nothing in common.
The whole idea that this is good for artists? Every day I see artists on Twitter talking about how they found other people using their work as the basis for NFTs. And not just a couple instances, but hundreds of NFTs for each artist. Every. Day. The idea that the artist will get money on each resale falls apart if the artist never got compensated in the first place, and requires the marketplaces to all be set up that way, which they aren’t. Even the “best” marketplaces are full of stolen content, and some are explicitly premised around the idea that the seller doesn’t own the content they’re minting NFTs off of (e.g. multiple sites based on tweets - not that person’s tweets, but random tweets).
There’s apparently a huge problem with NFT owners selling their NFTs to… themselves as a means of inflating the price. That’s actually the majority of the activity on some marketplaces. Which makes sense as they got started as a way of inflating the value of Ethereum. Because neither NFTs nor their marketplaces are regulated, they’re consistently full of the kinds of activities that would outright illegal in any other context - and that’s when they’re working the way they’re “supposed to.”
The short description: it’s bullshit. It’s not even really new, as when MMOs took off, people were trying to make it (usually under different names, because “metaverse” is the dystopian fiction version), but all failed, because it’s bullshit. Part of the reason it’s bullshit is because it’s essentially the web, but with virtual spaces, so it needs a level of standardization, of ubiquity, to work at all. Facebook thinks they can do it because they’re effectively the internet for a lot of the world’s population, so have the scale, but that’s only one of many problems with it.
Game companies are jumping on this, as they already have the “virtual spaces” down, but they’re just selling the things they used to sell in their game real-money marketplaces, while pretending it will have value outside that game. (It doesn’t. It logically can’t.) As soon as those games get shut down (as they inevitably are), all the associated NFTs will be worthless, which will have an… interesting impact on the marketplaces.
Yeah, exactly, no one has anything like the monopoly that lets de Beers do its thing. There’s nothing remotely like scarcity at any point. The same image/content could be minted into NFTs infinite times - there’s nothing to stop it from happening.
I mean, the video can point at NFTs sold by auction houses all it wants, where you can kind of pretend “authenticity” means something and NFTs can function as Veblen goods, but most NFTs aren’t being sold that way - they’re just people selling NFTs based on random shit they don’t have any connection to (much less ownership of).
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I imagine Zuck saw the evil corporation in Ready Player One and thought he could do better.
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