15 ms·

TheNFTBay: Fake, but Worth Discussing

38 points by originalcvk 5y ago

zepto 5y ago
> The value of an NFT is in having the right to insert yourself into that story, as the owner of that work, and with the ability to transfer that right to another person (i.e. selling the work). This is a false statement. The NFT doesn’t make you the owner of ‘the work’. It makes you the owner of the NFT. > The same way purchasing a painting gives you the right to resell that painting and prove to others that you are the owner, but does not necessarily convey copyright or other rights (unless worked out separately via a contract), purchasing an NFT gives you the right to resell that NFT and prove to others that you are the owner. I.e, In the same way that if you own a paining, the painting is yours and not the copyright. If you own an NFT, only the NFT is yours and not the artwork. > Just like a deed conveys ownership of a house at some address, the token conveys ownership of that media. No it doesn’t. If you own a house, there are many things you can do with the house that others are legally prohibited from doing. If you own an NFT, you have no more rights over the media than someone who doesn’t own an NFT. > Just like you can invite a neighbor over to visit your house, and a car driving by can take a photo of your house, anybody can view the media associated with your NFT. This is obviously absurd. If you own a house, it’s illegal for people to visit without being invited. If you own an NFT, an infinite number of people can I air the media without you even knowing, let alone inviting them. Also, a person driving by your house with a car can’t legally park in your driveway or come in and sleep in your bed, whereas someone with a copy of the media can do anything the owner of the NFT can do, including invite others to look at it.
- originalcvk 5y ago
  Society has agreed that a contract written in a certain form, with the requisite signatures and registrations, conveys ownership of land. Subject, of course, to caveats and rules and fine print about what "ownership" of the land really means. The government can sieze it, for example. It's called a deed. Similarly, this community has agreed that a contract written in a certain form, with the requisite signatures and registrations, conveys ownership of a piece of art. Subject, again, to caveats and rules and fine print. If at this point you are trying to argue semantics when most of the community has a pretty intuitive sense of what exactly "owning an NFT" means, it seems a bit pointless.
  - zepto 5y ago
    > Similarly, this community has agreed that a contract written in a certain form, with the requisite signatures and registrations, conveys ownership of a piece of art. Except that they simply haven’t. Try taking someone’s house from them. You’ll find that it’s not just semantics that defines ownership. Try copying the artwork pointed to by an NFT. You’ll find the NFT doesn’t stop you. > If at this point you are trying to argue semantics when most of the community has a pretty intuitive sense of what exactly "owning an NFT" means, it seems a bit pointless. I agree that it’s pointless to argue with people who think “owning an NFT” has any relationship to owning the artwork itself. It’s ok if people want to be part of a community who believe that together. If you feel secure as a member of that community, don’t let the rest of us perturb you. Have you considered that most people are not in fact part of that community, and that discussion of this point is quite relevant to anyone who hasn’t already committed themself to this belief?
    - originalcvk 5y ago
      If you have finished reading the post by now (seems you are commenting and editing as you go along), I think I make it pretty clear when it gets to more detail that the NFT is the thing you own, the right to transfer that NFT is the thing of value, and what gives it value is the person and context around who made it in the first place. Further, I make it clear exactly what rights you and others have over the media, which is basically none. Let me know when you make it all the way through, happy to continue the conversation.
      - zepto 5y ago
        > If you have finished reading the post by now (seems you are commenting and editing as you go along), Wrong. > I think I make it pretty clear when it gets to more detail that the NFT is the thing you own. Yes, you contradict yourself. > Further, I make it clear exactly what rights you and others have over the media, which is basically none. Yes, which is not what you say in the parts I quoted - let’s remind ourselves: > Just like a deed conveys ownership of a house at some address, the token conveys ownership of that media. This is a common pattern in writing about this subject, which is why I point this out. It’s a standard Motte and Bailey technique, which is a dishonest form of persuasive writing. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey
- gfodor 5y ago
  You’re presuming ownership universally means copyright. It doesn’t. Ownership is as much a cultural norm as a legal one. Owning the NFT, in certain circles, allows you to participate in an alternative cultural norm of ownership, decoupled from copyright ownership.
  - evan_ 5y ago
    Would you like to participate in an alternative cultural norm of ownership of a bridge in Brooklyn?
    - gfodor 5y ago
      Depends on the context. For example if it meant I was the only one able to spawn the bridge in Meta’s Horizon, maybe? You just don’t know what’s happening.
      - verdverm 5y ago
        What would stop someone from spawning a slightly modified (imperceptible to human eye) Brooklyn Bridge? The idea of artificial scarcity seems central to NFT, but it is unclear if this is really a moat or desirable. Does it really convey exclusivity over a "unique" set of bits?
        gfodor 5y ago
        No, an NFT is not a pair but a tuple. The third part of the tuple is the third party who issued the NFT. In the case of the Brooklyn Bridge, the NFTs I expect that would confer social status in the metaverse regarding the bridge would be ones issued by the City of New York or perhaps the descendants of the original architects. This will probably actually happen in some form but it will be a while. If you’re talking about a specific work of art depicting the bridge, the only NFT of value is the one sanctioned by the original artist. That NFT is scarce. Too many people do not understand what an NFT represents and what it’s short and longer term expected conferred benefits are, and are hung up on trying to create analogies to existing forms of ownership like physical property rights or copyright.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  > If you own an NFT, you have no more rights over the media than someone who doesn’t own an NFT. False. Just like open source software, the devil is in the details (usually the LICENSE.md file). NFT projects vary dramatically in the rights they convey to holders. To the extent that these meatspace rights are enforceable, some convey commercial use, some convey personal use, some are published as creative commons, and some are ambiguous. The NFT space is rather immature compared to open source software, however. The ambiguity is a real problem. The space would do well to standardize on licenses and stamp that on the NFT's metadata. But in the meantime, by convention in Web3, the apps and websites that integrate NFTs respect the ownership and provide verification of ownership for integrations, such as virtual art galleries, exclusive events or areas in Decentraland, profile pic verification on ENS, wallet gallery on OpenSea, avatars in Sandbox, etc. By convention, web3 marketplaces also respect royalties with original artists on resales. NFTs are tokens that can be used and verified as arbitrary authentication tokens for anything, whether it be a real life event or product or access to some software or other virtual benefit.
  - newhouseb 5y ago
    From a recent conversation with a (soon to be) lawyer [as I understand it] software typically uses what's called a "shrink wrap contract" [1] wherein the _usage_ of the product implicitly accepts a license. As far as I can tell, nothing in the ERC721 standard (for example) has any provision for such a legal instrument to be included. As such, I don't see how NFT "ownership" can (currently) be construed to possess any legal rights whatsoever unless agreed upon externally to the NFT in which case... what value is the NFT adding? Would love to get a proper legal teardown of this space. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrink_wrap_contract https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrink_wrap_contract [2] All this said, I could see a world where an NFT smart contract requires a cryptographically signed _legal_ contract to be hashed into the transfer as a form of legal consent. But for some reason this isn't yet reality.
    - mattdesl 5y ago
      Similar to buying a signed print from an artist—no contract involved, no legal transfer of copyright or intellectual property, no claim to anything except ownership of the artist-signed artefact. In the case of NFT it is mostly equivalent: claim of ownership over the artist-signed artefact (the token).
- rvz 5y ago
  Let's just say that this wave of NFTs (in images, videos, audio) are going to die out in favour of the discovery of 'useful' NFTs. The future will probably begin to expand to more than just 'images, audio and video', which those specific NFTs in those categories are absolutely useless.
  - mdoms 5y ago
    We've been hearing the same thing about cryptocurrency and blockchains for literally over a decade now. We always seem to be just a year or two away from real, useful applications of blockchains, or truely useful cryptocurrencies. Now we're we're apparently just a few years away from some nebulous "useful NFTs".
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    I very much doubt this for a simple reason: information is a post-scarcity space. Things like NFTs exist solely to try and shackle that space with concepts from scarcity-based economics. They will never have inherent value because they do not create or enable anything other than a delusion of scarcity.
- Bombthecat 5y ago
  It's like options on a stock market. You don't own the stock itself.(part of the company) Just a link (with rules) to it.
  - zepto 5y ago
    Not even close. Options give you legally enforceable rights to buy the stock itself. An NFT gives you no such rights.
    - Bombthecat 5y ago
      I don't know the name in english, in german they are called "Optionsscheine" they are like options, but they also get taken down, disabled etc if the stock moved too much.
      - zepto 5y ago
        An option can have rules that cause it to expire. That doesn’t make it anything like an NFT, because an unexpired option is still a right to buy the media, whereas an NFT never gives you any rights to anything except itself.
- gruez 5y ago
  >This is a false statement. The NFT doesn’t make you the owner of ‘the work’. It makes you the owner of the NFT. Doesn't the same logic apply to paintings/prints? If you buy a painting from an artist, is there anything preventing the artist from making a copy/replica? As for as I know, selling a painting does not constitute a transfer/assignment of copyright. The only difference here seems to be that paintings are analog, and take more effort to duplicate than right-clicking.
  - zepto 5y ago
    > is there anything preventing the artist from making a copy/replica? Yes, the fact that fake paintings are detectable. Prints are not which is which they are cheap.
- aaron695 5y ago
  > It makes you the owner of the NFT. Not sure if this is true. Some NFT's on resale money goes back to the original artist I thought? Which to me means you don't own it outright.
- Jon12281818 5y ago
  Your points about the media may be the case but there's a lot of other reasons to use NFTs. Let's rephrase to 'perks'. The owner of a house now has access to the perks of owning a house: E.g Noone can enter property without permission, can't park on your driveway, can act how you want in your own home etc People without a house do not have this ability. The owner of an NFT now has access to the perks of owning that NFT: Access to exlusive discord (training and information, etc), early access to new projects, job opportunities etc An NFT can offer a lot of different utility which are only received by proving their ownership of the cryptographic token.
  - zepto 5y ago
    > The owner of an NFT now has access to the perks of owning that NFT: Access to exlusive discord (training and information, etc), early access to new projects, job opportunities etc > An NFT can offer a lot of different utility which are only received by proving their ownership of the cryptographic token. The NFT isn’t offering anything. The business that offers the perks is. If the business changes or goes out of business, the perks disappear. Not so with your ownership of a house.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  NFTs are like those old "star registry" scams. For $20 (or whatever), we'll write your name alongside this star in our registry book, and send you a certificate!
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    They're not, because the star registry doesn't have provenance of the Milky Way.
    - malermeister 5y ago
      And neither does the Blockchain have provenance of... anything really.
      - gruez 5y ago
        But at least some of the NFTs are endorsed by the artists themselves?
      - capableweb 5y ago
        The blockchains have provenance of themselves and the space within them, which is exactly what the NFT represents. Nothing more, nothing less.
        AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
        Right, and the entry in any particular star register's registry is the same thing. They have provenance over their registry, nothing more, nothing less.
        capableweb 5y ago
        Yes, but you cannot act within their registry as a independent actor, transferring and receiving items in the registry on your and others will. They own that registry, and they chose to give you access. That's the difference between a centralized registry like that star registry, and a blockchain where every actor has equal access to the "registry". No one can stop you from transferring your NFT to someone else, while in a centralized registry, they could.
- akira2501 5y ago
  What does "ownership" of an NFT even mean? Can you even repudiate ownership later if you so chose? Can you remove the record of your ownership of the NFT? Can you transfer that ownership outside of the blockchain? NFTs seem like blockchain graffiti. You've purchased the right to tag a passing train car, that's all.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    > What does "ownership" of an NFT even mean? It means that the shared ledger (also called blockchain) has a record of that specific NFT belonging to your address. > Can you even repudiate ownership later if you so chose? Yes, you send it to a "burn address" which is a address no one has access to. > Can you remove the record of your ownership of the NFT? Like remove the history? If so, no, blockchains are (usually) immutable ledgers, it's actually one of the core value propositions for blockchains. You can send the NFT to a "burn address" if you don't want it anymore. > Can you transfer that ownership outside of the blockchain? Well, kind of but not really. You question is a bit like if you can transfer the ownership of a .com domain to outside the internet. I guess you could, in some way, but in most practical ways, no. > NFTs seem like blockchain graffiti. You've purchased the right to tag a passing train car, that's all. I don't know what to make of this, how is it related to graffiti and tagging trains? A NFT is a really simple concept if you stop thinking about pictures and other media (since that doesn't really have anything to do with NFTs): A NFT is a cryptocurrency which only has a single token of itself. Like there only was one Bitcoin that was indivisible. You can transfer it to other addresses, but there can only be one at a time. That's all there is to it.
    - zepto 5y ago
      > Like there only was one Bitcoin that was indivisible. You can transfer it to other addresses, but there can only be one at a time. That's all there is to it. Such a token is inherently worthless. The only value comes from rights that token can confer. That’s why people are trying to associate them with objects of real-world value.
      - 5y ago
- aledalgrande 5y ago
  > This is a false statement. The NFT doesn’t make you the owner of ‘the work’. It makes you the owner of the NFT. That depends on the conditions attached to the NFT. For example, the Bored Ape Yacht Club gives full commercial ownership to the owner of each ape for the particular ape they own.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - zepto 5y ago
    The bored ape yacht club grants a copyright license to people who buy the NFT. Nothing more and nothing else. That is not ownership.
- lukebuehler 5y ago
  While I agree with your comment, new tokenization laws, like the one in Switzerland, make it possible to create tokens and NFTs that transfer legally binding rights. E.g., you can go to a judge, prove that you own the private key to a wallet owning assets, and they will enforce the contract behind a said assets. Edit: here is one article describing the Swiss framework: https://thelawreviews.co.uk/title/the-virtual-currency-regulation-review/switzerland https://thelawreviews.co.uk/title/the-virtual-currency-regul...
GDC7 5y ago
It seems to me lots of people who are buying NFTs were never that into graphic art in the first place, but they all of a sudden became graphic art aficionados because it's the only type of art that can be distributed via this NFT mechanism that they deem as socially fair because it has a generic "sticking it to the man" vibe.
- originalcvk 5y ago
  Yep - a side effect of this is that NFT art has a distinct aesthetic which is different from prior digital art. I am hoping that as the space settles down, less "lazy" art and more thoughtful art can rise to the forefront again. NFTs are a useful mechanism for the digital art medium, I hope they come to be seen in that light a bit more and a bit less as valuable in and of themselves because of the mechanism.
  - GDC7 5y ago
    The problem is that the mechanisms that regulate real art are clear. Take a painting. You have to stand in front of it to truly appreciate it. A pic won't do it. So the buyer of the painting has an exclusive asset which produces returns in terms of appreciation but also periodic fees when they lend it to museums. NFTs have nothing of the sort because the enjoyment is essentially the same between owning it and right clicking it. In order to mimic the real world enjoyment you'd have to find a way to immerse the asset in a virtual world in which avatars pay for the privilege of seeing/using that art content. The NFT maybe here, but the virtual world , not yet.
    - meheleventyone 5y ago
      Even then you can bootleg the virtual world, the real world not so much.
      - GDC7 5y ago
        You technically can do it in the real world! It's called stealing the painting lol. When buying an NFT you are essentially betting that society would come around to equate "right-clicking" with stealing. And that would employ the same social and technological resources to prevent right-clickers to do their bidding as it does today to prevent thief from stealing paintings from museums.
bellajbadr 5y ago
For the same object we can have n NFT.
arduinomancer 5y ago
Can I legally create an NFT of someone else's artwork? What determines that NFT "A" is the canonical NFT of artwork "X"?
- TrevorAustin 5y ago
  Legally, there’s nothing stopping you. The only thing that would make “A” the canonical NFT for “X” is social convention. I imagine that where the original creator of the artwork is involved in the minting of X that convention can be pretty strong, but I also expect lots of boundary-testing. This is the art world after all, and a particularly weird slice of it at that.
  - originalcvk 5y ago
    Actually, legally, there is. Copyright still exists, and still applies to NFTs.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      Sure, in the same way that copyright still applies to NES roms. That doesn't really stop anyone from copying them and calling Nintendo sill for asking $40 for one.
    - ViViDboarder 5y ago
      And does copyright prevent someone from sharing a link to someone else’s work? If so, someone should tell Google.
mdoms 5y ago
> We at ClubNFT fired up a massive AWS instance with 40TB of EBS disk space to attempt to download this, with a cost estimate of $10k-20k over the next month, Is this for real? Why would they do it this way? I can buy 20TB of storage for less than $1000 (in New Zealand, no doubt far far cheaper in USA). Using one fifth of my residential gigabit bandwidth that would take just over a day to download. Why on Earth would someone spend $20k and a month to achieve what can be done for one twentieth the cost in one thirtieth the time? Only to have the files on a remote AWS instance where you would still need to download them if you wanted to access them?
- originalcvk 5y ago
  Because when we heard about this it was about 2am and we wanted to get it going ASAP to see what was actually in there. It did not actually take a month, since this all happened two days ago. I think if we decided to become a torrent downloading company (is that a thing?) we'd go about it a different way. Anyway total actual cost (wasted, in this case) was a few hundred bucks.
shiohime 5y ago
I someday hope that people realize what you can do with single issue tokens beyond simply having a link to cloud storage. You can create products that utilize this same behavior, but also leverage proof of ownership to create actual unique applications. With even just an ounce of developer ingenuity, you can use NFTs as an access token to whatever service you wish to provide. I put together a collection that is both art + access to an interactive service that relies on ownership of a token. The right-click download picture is completely meaningless as the true power is simply proof of ownership of the piece, having a copy of the image means nothing if you don't own the token and you will be denied access to the service. I guess it's a completely new concept in a lot of ways and not many people have yet implemented this to scale but it's a fascinating concept to me personally.
- NicoJuicy 5y ago
  The digital piece can disappear when you still have the ownership and there's still nothing the owner can do about it.
  - shiohime 5y ago
    In my case, if arweave allows for digital pieces to disappear from the web, then that means they've likely failed as a project considering they've positioned themselves to be a permaweb. However, interestingly if you leverage the token ownership for access, in my collection's case, even if the static image is wiped for whatever reason, they could still access the interactive service and see their art, and interact with it. This of course has the assumption that I'm continuing to host my service indefinitely, which I know is a problem with my current implementation. I am planning to recreate my APIs as onchain programs, and migrate my app to be hosted on arweave. If it works the way I think it does and arweave doesn't fail as a project (which I don't think they will), then I'm hoping that I can have a service that is permanently accessible. I have yet to test that hypothesis of course.
    - NicoJuicy 5y ago
      And how can the "buyer" verify if the creation has unlimited "lifetime"? If the original creator can even delete the artwork, the owner is never sure.
TrevorAustin 5y ago
It’s weird to keep using the Mona Lisa, when there’s a much more apropos metaphor intimately connected to crypto: NFTs are like naming rights. Crypto.com did not buy the Staples Center, and doesn’t have the right to charge admission. They bought (leased, really) the right to have their name associated with it. Some of that has the force of law, but a lot of it is social convention too. Here in Chicago, the Willis Group owns the legal naming rights to a large building downtown, the building itself is owned by Blackstone, and locals actually call it the Sears Tower.
- capableweb 5y ago
  It's a fools errand to try to equalize NFTs with anything from the physical reality we live in. NFTs are exclusive to blockchains and have no real-world counter-part, I think that is a part of why people are so confused about them. No analogy is perfect, and makes it hard for people to understand what they really are about. NFTs are not like naming rights, nor domain names, nor is it art, nor is it anything else. Easiest explanation is that a NFT is like a new cryptocurrency, except it only exists one token of that cryptocurrency, and it's indivisible.
  - bradleyjohnson 5y ago
    I like to compare it to public art or a public art museum. One entity paid for it but everyone is allowed to look at it and take pictures of it. Not quite the same since public art is typically a physical object and not a digital one.
  - gfodor 5y ago
    Most of the stuff going on in crypto like you state defies analogy, and in the end, will be used as the grounding example of future analogies.
lowdest 5y ago
The best description I've ever read: NFTs are a postmodern absurdity asset that you buy/sell independent of the underlying art, the NFT is given value by the fact the art was made in a way that anoints the NFT as canonical.

38 points by originalcvk 5y ago

> The value of an NFT is in having the right to insert yourself into that story, as the owner of that work, and with the ability to transfer that right to another person (i.e. selling the work). This is a false statement. The NFT doesn’t make you the owner of ‘the work’. It makes you the owner of the NFT. > The same way purchasing a painting gives you the right to resell that painting and prove to others that you are the owner, but does not necessarily convey copyright or other rights (unless worked out separately via a contract), purchasing an NFT gives you the right to resell that NFT and prove to others that you are the owner. I.e, In the same way that if you own a paining, the painting is yours and not the copyright. If you own an NFT, only the NFT is yours and not the artwork. > Just like a deed conveys ownership of a house at some address, the token conveys ownership of that media. No it doesn’t. If you own a house, there are many things you can do with the house that others are legally prohibited from doing. If you own an NFT, you have no more rights over the media than someone who doesn’t own an NFT. > Just like you can invite a neighbor over to visit your house, and a car driving by can take a photo of your house, anybody can view the media associated with your NFT. This is obviously absurd. If you own a house, it’s illegal for people to visit without being invited. If you own an NFT, an infinite number of people can I air the media without you even knowing, let alone inviting them. Also, a person driving by your house with a car can’t legally park in your driveway or come in and sleep in your bed, whereas someone with a copy of the media can do anything the owner of the NFT can do, including invite others to look at it.

originalcvk 5y ago
Society has agreed that a contract written in a certain form, with the requisite signatures and registrations, conveys ownership of land. Subject, of course, to caveats and rules and fine print about what "ownership" of the land really means. The government can sieze it, for example. It's called a deed. Similarly, this community has agreed that a contract written in a certain form, with the requisite signatures and registrations, conveys ownership of a piece of art. Subject, again, to caveats and rules and fine print. If at this point you are trying to argue semantics when most of the community has a pretty intuitive sense of what exactly "owning an NFT" means, it seems a bit pointless.
- zepto 5y ago
  > Similarly, this community has agreed that a contract written in a certain form, with the requisite signatures and registrations, conveys ownership of a piece of art. Except that they simply haven’t. Try taking someone’s house from them. You’ll find that it’s not just semantics that defines ownership. Try copying the artwork pointed to by an NFT. You’ll find the NFT doesn’t stop you. > If at this point you are trying to argue semantics when most of the community has a pretty intuitive sense of what exactly "owning an NFT" means, it seems a bit pointless. I agree that it’s pointless to argue with people who think “owning an NFT” has any relationship to owning the artwork itself. It’s ok if people want to be part of a community who believe that together. If you feel secure as a member of that community, don’t let the rest of us perturb you. Have you considered that most people are not in fact part of that community, and that discussion of this point is quite relevant to anyone who hasn’t already committed themself to this belief?
  - originalcvk 5y ago
    If you have finished reading the post by now (seems you are commenting and editing as you go along), I think I make it pretty clear when it gets to more detail that the NFT is the thing you own, the right to transfer that NFT is the thing of value, and what gives it value is the person and context around who made it in the first place. Further, I make it clear exactly what rights you and others have over the media, which is basically none. Let me know when you make it all the way through, happy to continue the conversation.
    - zepto 5y ago
      > If you have finished reading the post by now (seems you are commenting and editing as you go along), Wrong. > I think I make it pretty clear when it gets to more detail that the NFT is the thing you own. Yes, you contradict yourself. > Further, I make it clear exactly what rights you and others have over the media, which is basically none. Yes, which is not what you say in the parts I quoted - let’s remind ourselves: > Just like a deed conveys ownership of a house at some address, the token conveys ownership of that media. This is a common pattern in writing about this subject, which is why I point this out. It’s a standard Motte and Bailey technique, which is a dishonest form of persuasive writing. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey
gfodor 5y ago
You’re presuming ownership universally means copyright. It doesn’t. Ownership is as much a cultural norm as a legal one. Owning the NFT, in certain circles, allows you to participate in an alternative cultural norm of ownership, decoupled from copyright ownership.
- evan_ 5y ago
  Would you like to participate in an alternative cultural norm of ownership of a bridge in Brooklyn?
  - gfodor 5y ago
    Depends on the context. For example if it meant I was the only one able to spawn the bridge in Meta’s Horizon, maybe? You just don’t know what’s happening.
    - verdverm 5y ago
      What would stop someone from spawning a slightly modified (imperceptible to human eye) Brooklyn Bridge? The idea of artificial scarcity seems central to NFT, but it is unclear if this is really a moat or desirable. Does it really convey exclusivity over a "unique" set of bits?
      - gfodor 5y ago
        No, an NFT is not a pair but a tuple. The third part of the tuple is the third party who issued the NFT. In the case of the Brooklyn Bridge, the NFTs I expect that would confer social status in the metaverse regarding the bridge would be ones issued by the City of New York or perhaps the descendants of the original architects. This will probably actually happen in some form but it will be a while. If you’re talking about a specific work of art depicting the bridge, the only NFT of value is the one sanctioned by the original artist. That NFT is scarce. Too many people do not understand what an NFT represents and what it’s short and longer term expected conferred benefits are, and are hung up on trying to create analogies to existing forms of ownership like physical property rights or copyright.
chrisco255 5y ago
> If you own an NFT, you have no more rights over the media than someone who doesn’t own an NFT. False. Just like open source software, the devil is in the details (usually the LICENSE.md file). NFT projects vary dramatically in the rights they convey to holders. To the extent that these meatspace rights are enforceable, some convey commercial use, some convey personal use, some are published as creative commons, and some are ambiguous. The NFT space is rather immature compared to open source software, however. The ambiguity is a real problem. The space would do well to standardize on licenses and stamp that on the NFT's metadata. But in the meantime, by convention in Web3, the apps and websites that integrate NFTs respect the ownership and provide verification of ownership for integrations, such as virtual art galleries, exclusive events or areas in Decentraland, profile pic verification on ENS, wallet gallery on OpenSea, avatars in Sandbox, etc. By convention, web3 marketplaces also respect royalties with original artists on resales. NFTs are tokens that can be used and verified as arbitrary authentication tokens for anything, whether it be a real life event or product or access to some software or other virtual benefit.
- newhouseb 5y ago
  From a recent conversation with a (soon to be) lawyer [as I understand it] software typically uses what's called a "shrink wrap contract" [1] wherein the _usage_ of the product implicitly accepts a license. As far as I can tell, nothing in the ERC721 standard (for example) has any provision for such a legal instrument to be included. As such, I don't see how NFT "ownership" can (currently) be construed to possess any legal rights whatsoever unless agreed upon externally to the NFT in which case... what value is the NFT adding? Would love to get a proper legal teardown of this space. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrink_wrap_contract https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrink_wrap_contract [2] All this said, I could see a world where an NFT smart contract requires a cryptographically signed _legal_ contract to be hashed into the transfer as a form of legal consent. But for some reason this isn't yet reality.
  - mattdesl 5y ago
    Similar to buying a signed print from an artist—no contract involved, no legal transfer of copyright or intellectual property, no claim to anything except ownership of the artist-signed artefact. In the case of NFT it is mostly equivalent: claim of ownership over the artist-signed artefact (the token).
rvz 5y ago
Let's just say that this wave of NFTs (in images, videos, audio) are going to die out in favour of the discovery of 'useful' NFTs. The future will probably begin to expand to more than just 'images, audio and video', which those specific NFTs in those categories are absolutely useless.
- mdoms 5y ago
  We've been hearing the same thing about cryptocurrency and blockchains for literally over a decade now. We always seem to be just a year or two away from real, useful applications of blockchains, or truely useful cryptocurrencies. Now we're we're apparently just a few years away from some nebulous "useful NFTs".
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  I very much doubt this for a simple reason: information is a post-scarcity space. Things like NFTs exist solely to try and shackle that space with concepts from scarcity-based economics. They will never have inherent value because they do not create or enable anything other than a delusion of scarcity.
Bombthecat 5y ago
It's like options on a stock market. You don't own the stock itself.(part of the company) Just a link (with rules) to it.
- zepto 5y ago
  Not even close. Options give you legally enforceable rights to buy the stock itself. An NFT gives you no such rights.
  - Bombthecat 5y ago
    I don't know the name in english, in german they are called "Optionsscheine" they are like options, but they also get taken down, disabled etc if the stock moved too much.
    - zepto 5y ago
      An option can have rules that cause it to expire. That doesn’t make it anything like an NFT, because an unexpired option is still a right to buy the media, whereas an NFT never gives you any rights to anything except itself.
gruez 5y ago
>This is a false statement. The NFT doesn’t make you the owner of ‘the work’. It makes you the owner of the NFT. Doesn't the same logic apply to paintings/prints? If you buy a painting from an artist, is there anything preventing the artist from making a copy/replica? As for as I know, selling a painting does not constitute a transfer/assignment of copyright. The only difference here seems to be that paintings are analog, and take more effort to duplicate than right-clicking.
- zepto 5y ago
  > is there anything preventing the artist from making a copy/replica? Yes, the fact that fake paintings are detectable. Prints are not which is which they are cheap.
aaron695 5y ago
> It makes you the owner of the NFT. Not sure if this is true. Some NFT's on resale money goes back to the original artist I thought? Which to me means you don't own it outright.
Jon12281818 5y ago
Your points about the media may be the case but there's a lot of other reasons to use NFTs. Let's rephrase to 'perks'. The owner of a house now has access to the perks of owning a house: E.g Noone can enter property without permission, can't park on your driveway, can act how you want in your own home etc People without a house do not have this ability. The owner of an NFT now has access to the perks of owning that NFT: Access to exlusive discord (training and information, etc), early access to new projects, job opportunities etc An NFT can offer a lot of different utility which are only received by proving their ownership of the cryptographic token.
- zepto 5y ago
  > The owner of an NFT now has access to the perks of owning that NFT: Access to exlusive discord (training and information, etc), early access to new projects, job opportunities etc > An NFT can offer a lot of different utility which are only received by proving their ownership of the cryptographic token. The NFT isn’t offering anything. The business that offers the perks is. If the business changes or goes out of business, the perks disappear. Not so with your ownership of a house.
pfdietz 5y ago
NFTs are like those old "star registry" scams. For $20 (or whatever), we'll write your name alongside this star in our registry book, and send you a certificate!
- chrisco255 5y ago
  They're not, because the star registry doesn't have provenance of the Milky Way.
  - malermeister 5y ago
    And neither does the Blockchain have provenance of... anything really.
    - gruez 5y ago
      But at least some of the NFTs are endorsed by the artists themselves?
    - capableweb 5y ago
      The blockchains have provenance of themselves and the space within them, which is exactly what the NFT represents. Nothing more, nothing less.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
        Right, and the entry in any particular star register's registry is the same thing. They have provenance over their registry, nothing more, nothing less.
        capableweb 5y ago
        Yes, but you cannot act within their registry as a independent actor, transferring and receiving items in the registry on your and others will. They own that registry, and they chose to give you access. That's the difference between a centralized registry like that star registry, and a blockchain where every actor has equal access to the "registry". No one can stop you from transferring your NFT to someone else, while in a centralized registry, they could.
akira2501 5y ago
What does "ownership" of an NFT even mean? Can you even repudiate ownership later if you so chose? Can you remove the record of your ownership of the NFT? Can you transfer that ownership outside of the blockchain? NFTs seem like blockchain graffiti. You've purchased the right to tag a passing train car, that's all.
- capableweb 5y ago
  > What does "ownership" of an NFT even mean? It means that the shared ledger (also called blockchain) has a record of that specific NFT belonging to your address. > Can you even repudiate ownership later if you so chose? Yes, you send it to a "burn address" which is a address no one has access to. > Can you remove the record of your ownership of the NFT? Like remove the history? If so, no, blockchains are (usually) immutable ledgers, it's actually one of the core value propositions for blockchains. You can send the NFT to a "burn address" if you don't want it anymore. > Can you transfer that ownership outside of the blockchain? Well, kind of but not really. You question is a bit like if you can transfer the ownership of a .com domain to outside the internet. I guess you could, in some way, but in most practical ways, no. > NFTs seem like blockchain graffiti. You've purchased the right to tag a passing train car, that's all. I don't know what to make of this, how is it related to graffiti and tagging trains? A NFT is a really simple concept if you stop thinking about pictures and other media (since that doesn't really have anything to do with NFTs): A NFT is a cryptocurrency which only has a single token of itself. Like there only was one Bitcoin that was indivisible. You can transfer it to other addresses, but there can only be one at a time. That's all there is to it.
  - zepto 5y ago
    > Like there only was one Bitcoin that was indivisible. You can transfer it to other addresses, but there can only be one at a time. That's all there is to it. Such a token is inherently worthless. The only value comes from rights that token can confer. That’s why people are trying to associate them with objects of real-world value.
    - 5y ago
aledalgrande 5y ago
> This is a false statement. The NFT doesn’t make you the owner of ‘the work’. It makes you the owner of the NFT. That depends on the conditions attached to the NFT. For example, the Bored Ape Yacht Club gives full commercial ownership to the owner of each ape for the particular ape they own.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- zepto 5y ago
  The bored ape yacht club grants a copyright license to people who buy the NFT. Nothing more and nothing else. That is not ownership.
lukebuehler 5y ago
While I agree with your comment, new tokenization laws, like the one in Switzerland, make it possible to create tokens and NFTs that transfer legally binding rights. E.g., you can go to a judge, prove that you own the private key to a wallet owning assets, and they will enforce the contract behind a said assets. Edit: here is one article describing the Swiss framework: https://thelawreviews.co.uk/title/the-virtual-currency-regulation-review/switzerland https://thelawreviews.co.uk/title/the-virtual-currency-regul...

GDC7 5y ago

It seems to me lots of people who are buying NFTs were never that into graphic art in the first place, but they all of a sudden became graphic art aficionados because it's the only type of art that can be distributed via this NFT mechanism that they deem as socially fair because it has a generic "sticking it to the man" vibe.

originalcvk 5y ago
Yep - a side effect of this is that NFT art has a distinct aesthetic which is different from prior digital art. I am hoping that as the space settles down, less "lazy" art and more thoughtful art can rise to the forefront again. NFTs are a useful mechanism for the digital art medium, I hope they come to be seen in that light a bit more and a bit less as valuable in and of themselves because of the mechanism.
- GDC7 5y ago
  The problem is that the mechanisms that regulate real art are clear. Take a painting. You have to stand in front of it to truly appreciate it. A pic won't do it. So the buyer of the painting has an exclusive asset which produces returns in terms of appreciation but also periodic fees when they lend it to museums. NFTs have nothing of the sort because the enjoyment is essentially the same between owning it and right clicking it. In order to mimic the real world enjoyment you'd have to find a way to immerse the asset in a virtual world in which avatars pay for the privilege of seeing/using that art content. The NFT maybe here, but the virtual world , not yet.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    Even then you can bootleg the virtual world, the real world not so much.
    - GDC7 5y ago
      You technically can do it in the real world! It's called stealing the painting lol. When buying an NFT you are essentially betting that society would come around to equate "right-clicking" with stealing. And that would employ the same social and technological resources to prevent right-clickers to do their bidding as it does today to prevent thief from stealing paintings from museums.

bellajbadr 5y ago

For the same object we can have n NFT.

arduinomancer 5y ago

Can I legally create an NFT of someone else's artwork? What determines that NFT "A" is the canonical NFT of artwork "X"?

TrevorAustin 5y ago
Legally, there’s nothing stopping you. The only thing that would make “A” the canonical NFT for “X” is social convention. I imagine that where the original creator of the artwork is involved in the minting of X that convention can be pretty strong, but I also expect lots of boundary-testing. This is the art world after all, and a particularly weird slice of it at that.
- originalcvk 5y ago
  Actually, legally, there is. Copyright still exists, and still applies to NFTs.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    Sure, in the same way that copyright still applies to NES roms. That doesn't really stop anyone from copying them and calling Nintendo sill for asking $40 for one.
  - ViViDboarder 5y ago
    And does copyright prevent someone from sharing a link to someone else’s work? If so, someone should tell Google.

mdoms 5y ago

> We at ClubNFT fired up a massive AWS instance with 40TB of EBS disk space to attempt to download this, with a cost estimate of $10k-20k over the next month, Is this for real? Why would they do it this way? I can buy 20TB of storage for less than $1000 (in New Zealand, no doubt far far cheaper in USA). Using one fifth of my residential gigabit bandwidth that would take just over a day to download. Why on Earth would someone spend $20k and a month to achieve what can be done for one twentieth the cost in one thirtieth the time? Only to have the files on a remote AWS instance where you would still need to download them if you wanted to access them?

originalcvk 5y ago
Because when we heard about this it was about 2am and we wanted to get it going ASAP to see what was actually in there. It did not actually take a month, since this all happened two days ago. I think if we decided to become a torrent downloading company (is that a thing?) we'd go about it a different way. Anyway total actual cost (wasted, in this case) was a few hundred bucks.

shiohime 5y ago

I someday hope that people realize what you can do with single issue tokens beyond simply having a link to cloud storage. You can create products that utilize this same behavior, but also leverage proof of ownership to create actual unique applications. With even just an ounce of developer ingenuity, you can use NFTs as an access token to whatever service you wish to provide. I put together a collection that is both art + access to an interactive service that relies on ownership of a token. The right-click download picture is completely meaningless as the true power is simply proof of ownership of the piece, having a copy of the image means nothing if you don't own the token and you will be denied access to the service. I guess it's a completely new concept in a lot of ways and not many people have yet implemented this to scale but it's a fascinating concept to me personally.

NicoJuicy 5y ago
The digital piece can disappear when you still have the ownership and there's still nothing the owner can do about it.
- shiohime 5y ago
  In my case, if arweave allows for digital pieces to disappear from the web, then that means they've likely failed as a project considering they've positioned themselves to be a permaweb. However, interestingly if you leverage the token ownership for access, in my collection's case, even if the static image is wiped for whatever reason, they could still access the interactive service and see their art, and interact with it. This of course has the assumption that I'm continuing to host my service indefinitely, which I know is a problem with my current implementation. I am planning to recreate my APIs as onchain programs, and migrate my app to be hosted on arweave. If it works the way I think it does and arweave doesn't fail as a project (which I don't think they will), then I'm hoping that I can have a service that is permanently accessible. I have yet to test that hypothesis of course.
  - NicoJuicy 5y ago
    And how can the "buyer" verify if the creation has unlimited "lifetime"? If the original creator can even delete the artwork, the owner is never sure.

TrevorAustin 5y ago

It’s weird to keep using the Mona Lisa, when there’s a much more apropos metaphor intimately connected to crypto: NFTs are like naming rights. Crypto.com did not buy the Staples Center, and doesn’t have the right to charge admission. They bought (leased, really) the right to have their name associated with it. Some of that has the force of law, but a lot of it is social convention too. Here in Chicago, the Willis Group owns the legal naming rights to a large building downtown, the building itself is owned by Blackstone, and locals actually call it the Sears Tower.

capableweb 5y ago
It's a fools errand to try to equalize NFTs with anything from the physical reality we live in. NFTs are exclusive to blockchains and have no real-world counter-part, I think that is a part of why people are so confused about them. No analogy is perfect, and makes it hard for people to understand what they really are about. NFTs are not like naming rights, nor domain names, nor is it art, nor is it anything else. Easiest explanation is that a NFT is like a new cryptocurrency, except it only exists one token of that cryptocurrency, and it's indivisible.
- bradleyjohnson 5y ago
  I like to compare it to public art or a public art museum. One entity paid for it but everyone is allowed to look at it and take pictures of it. Not quite the same since public art is typically a physical object and not a digital one.
- gfodor 5y ago
  Most of the stuff going on in crypto like you state defies analogy, and in the end, will be used as the grounding example of future analogies.

lowdest 5y ago

The best description I've ever read: NFTs are a postmodern absurdity asset that you buy/sell independent of the underlying art, the NFT is given value by the fact the art was made in a way that anoints the NFT as canonical.