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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

But that only has to occur once with the blockchain. Once it is encoded, and recognized to be authentic, the record will remain. Transfers will be recorded perfectly in the ledger. With physical items, the provenance has to be determined independently every single exchange.

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The physical item still has to be examined by experts on every exchange, if you want to avoid the risk that the legitimate owner of the real thing sells a fake and secretly keeps the real item for themselves. The blockchain can't stop that.

NFTs are generally being used for digital art at this time. Physical art of course still has this requirement.

But authenticity is only a concern in physical art.

No, it's not. It's even more of a concern in digital art because until blockchains came around, it was virtually free to make a perfect digital copy of something.

What does it mean to own a digital artwork?

To own the copyright in it? Blockchain doesn't really do much here because ownership of copyrights is determined by the legal system not by a blockchain. (And normally when an artist sells an artwork they keep the copyright themselves; you only get the copyright too if you specifically negotiate with the artist for that, or if you commission the art as a "work-for-hire".)

To own the only digital copy of it? Blockchain does nothing to stop people making more digital copies of it. Blockchain is not a DRM system.

It seems like "owning" digital art where one doesn't have the copyright or exclusive possession of digital copies is basically a meaningless form of ownership. It is the status of "ownership" stripped of all substantive content.

Of course it does. The NFT is created and recognized by the artist's public Ethereum address which can only be generated by their private key.

Full rights can be attached to the artwork, as was done with the Hashmasks sale: https://www.thehashmasks.com/

It is completely up to the artist to customize. It can be embedded into an NFT just like a license.md file can be embedded into an open source code repository. It can be explicit, rights can be transferable, or non-transferable.

Any other address producing an NFT is a forgery.

Blockchain is better than a DRM system. See:

https://audius.org/developers https://opensea.io/blog/announcements/opensea-raises-2-milli... https://eulerbeats.com/

You seem deeply confused. Making perfect digital copies is not something that is prevented by blockchains. Computers make perfect digital copies. If you want to prevent people from making perfect digital copies you have to get rid of computers, and good luck with that!

You seem confused. Blockchains and crypto created the concept of digital scarcity 12 years ago. Its a $1.8 Trillion dollar industry and counting. It's going to eat traditional finance.

You can't copy a Bitcoin. And you can't copy an NFT.

https://coinmarketcap.com/ https://defipulse.com/

But the NFT is not the art itself.

Okay, good luck.

And if somewhere down that chain someone sells the real artwork to one person and the NFT to someone else? who owns the 'real' artwork - the guy with it on their wall, or the guy with the bits?

Pardon my ignorance re: NFT's, but does anyone verify the status of the person creating the NFT as the owner/creator of the digital art/item in question?

Marketplaces like OpenSeas, Nifty Gateway, Rarible, and Zora do work to verify known artists. But not all artists have a reputation, so surely there is risk among some of the NFTs out there. However, the price for unverified NFTs from unknown artists is usually reflective of that risk.

So... at the end of the day, it’s still centralized?

This seems no different from a fungible document in that regard. The trust is still with a verifying third party.

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