Hacker News Reader

Comment by biztos | Hacker News Reader

Yes, the contract would be on the Ethereum blockchain.

If the contract stores the owner, how is it not the “token” at the same time?

Royalties are pretty easy: contract knows the artist, artist gets say 10% of every resale, owner gets the rest, purchaser becomes new owner. Anyway this and NFT both have a big vulnerability around royalties: I can make some of the payment in cash if I want to cut out the artist.

View on HN

> I can make some of the payment in cash if I want to cut out the artist.

It depends on the smart contract. I can write a smart contract such that if you did that, the ownership of the art would be still the previous owner. The previous owner cannot change the ownership of the art to you without paying fee to the original artist.

I don’t think you actually can. I’m talking about collusion — I sell you the artwork for $X on the contract, but you also give me $Y for it in cash. Artist gets commission off $X, and nothing from $Y. And because it’s not an Actual Contract I haven’t broken the law.

Do you have a solution to that?

I'm not sure this is a real problem. If you gave a Christie's rep $10M for a modern art piece, and gave them another $1M cash and said "this is off the books" I'm sure they could write down the sale was really only $10M. But why would you do that? You are paying extra to shaft the artist of royalties? To devalue work you just purchased? What is the benefit in this transaction?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com