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Comment by nerdponx | Hacker News Reader

Huh?

Buying art with an NFT is just a way to give artists and/or art auctioneers money for their art. That's it.

Oh and it can be used for other things like event ticketing, software license keys, etc.

An NFT is just a way to record (in an immutable distributed ledger) that a specific, uniquely-identifiable token was transferred from A to B.

People have always paid stupid amounts of money for art, and in the last 100 years increasingly art that doesn't require years of training/practice and advanced craftsmanship. Why is this any different?

It sounds like you just don't want to be involved in the art market, which nobody in their right mind wants to be involved in anyway.

Complaining about NFTs is like complaining about "blockchain" or "the internet" or whatever.

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Here is one thing I have a hard time wrapping my head around, and how I think it is fundamentally different from something like a painting:

The thing that is "non-fungible" is the token, not the actual art. The underlying digital asset is actually fungible with copies of it. With a painting, there are prints and reproductions of the Mona Lisa, but they are all fundamentally different in some way - the exact brush stroke texture, etc.

NFTs have this feeling of valuing the receipt, not the art. As if I walked into a gift shop at The Louvre and bought a Mona Lisa slick poster print, but then valued the gift store receipt more than the more-or-less completely replaceable poster.

It's like buying a piece of land. You don't physically take the land home, you just acquire new and specific rights depending on your legal jurisdiction. Are you buying the property, or just the deed to the property?

Acquiring the land makes you the legal owner of it, backed by the law of the country and its military. Owning the nft has no legal consequence at the moment. Who will enforce any right on your behalf?

Which rights? Legal rights that the artist wants to sell alongside the token can be legally enforced. Beyond that, the ownership of the token is enforced by the blockchain, and that ownership token is the thing people value.

From what I gather a blockchain doesn't enforce anything. It simply states who owns what. Anybody can create a blockchain and own the world's entire supply of gold according to that blockchain. But can they enforce that ownership? No, they can't.

It doesn’t even do that. You can easily have one unique NFT claiming it represents ownership of the Mona Lisa, and another, unique and distinct NFT, also claiming ownership of the Mona Lisa. Besides ownership being unenforced, uniqueness is also unenforced.

But that's not how NFTs are being used now. For one, who would issue the Mona Lisa NFT, the Louvre, or Leonardo's family, or the family of his patron at the time? An NFT can't clear up a murky issue anymore than me writing you a paper receipt would.

But, a paper receipt is all that differentiates print #1 from #1005, and #1 is usually more prestigious. And even if those prints came off the machine in the other order, the actual artist is still attaching significance to one of them over the others.

NFTs are a way of saying that my identical print (file) is really the special one. Or that I'm special for having it. Or whatever.

It’s just like you having a paper receipt with #1 on it, and me also having a receipt with #1 on it. Both can be on the same blockchain at the same time, issued by different NFT ‘creators’. Or maybe on different blockchain... Which one is the ‘real’ one? No-one can say.

Do you not crypto? It's clear which address mints an NFT, and that address can be provably linked to the party with the keys. And they can put that proof on their website. You do know your favorite artists website, right?

So yeah, by looking at both NFTs we can clearly determine which is authentic.

If they're supposed to be unique, as opposed to 'we both sponsored the same art', then there are easy ways to ensure that.

For this reason, blockchains are not used that way - it does not track ownership of physical objects, it tracks ownerships of digital ones. If the blockchain says you own the only digital edition that Beeple created for his artwork, then this is so, because the blockchain states this.

If Beeple creates another NFT referring to the same work, then he is simply creating a second edition, in the same way that an artist can create a run of prints limited to 10, and later decide to create 10 further prints.

If someone else creates an NFT claiming to represent Beeples work, then this is like me selling my own unauthorized Robert Rauschenberg print, which I might find difficult to find a buyer for, though with enough talent, maybe not impossible.

In any case, the NFT is merely a digital equivalent of a print.

A digital equivalent of a print is an image file. The NFT has no real-world equivalent. Purportedly it "represents" the artwork, somehow, but in reality it's just a digital token with no connection whatsoever with the artwork.

> Legal rights that the artist wants to sell alongside the token can be legally enforced.

For the first sale. I'm not sure current contract law permits any legal rights to follow the token in subsequent sales.

Contract law can require you to hop on one foot.

But what rights would you need to go to court for? The point of an NFT is that the provided rights are exercisable without further permission.

Also, if the author wanted to control the NFT they'd just code it that way, for instance to prevent sales, or prevent more than one sale per decade, etc.

Sure, but the subsequent buyer of the NFT is (potentially/likely) not a party to any contract.

Sure they are, the original contract was that the blockchain asset was authoritative. If you buy that asset then you obviously share that view. If the asset has limited transferability, well you agreed to that. It was in the code for you to test for, if not read.

Engaging with a smart contract is not an action that binds you to a legal contract.

Nothing about the first sale contract can be legally binding on the person who buys the NFT when resold.

You can end up with an NFT without having been party to any legal agreement whatsoever.

No, but purchasing it effectively will. If I create a software-license rental NFT which you have to refill periodically, you won't be able to force me to provide full coverage to that software. Even if you purchased it from someone else without being told the rules - the NFT encodes them and you'd be expected to read it and know the limitations on your claim.

If I minted an NFT that said for every period you paid you could collect royalties from my art then you would have a valid contractual claim after purchasing it, even if I didn't make the deal with you initially.

If you buy a second-hand concert-ticket NFT the requirements of attendance will still need to be met before you can use it.

> If I minted an NFT that said for every period you paid you could collect royalties from my art then you would have a valid contractual claim after purchasing it, even if I didn't make the deal with you initially.

I don't believe this statement to be accurate.

I don't think it's plausibly true now because of the complexity of that contract and the difficulty in expressing it, jurisdictional issues, etc.

But if all that was handled and it was considered binging between you and the first guy then I don't think the transferability would phase a court at all. The NFT by nature, being meant to be transferred, and with tools to prevent that where desired, would indicate intent.

Perhaps a better example would be me (the hypothetical creator of cryptokitties) selling a cryptokitty, with the obvious implication that I would not modify my game to invalidate said kitty. The final owner of the kitty, like yourself, could sue me for misrepresentation for selling a product I intended to disable. Perhaps for tortious interference.

If you have the deed to a piece of land that’s (usually, in stable-ish jurisdictions) backed by the police and ultimately, military, of the government. You can stand on it, build on it, possible mine it, and the cops will stop anyone from interfering.

Land can't be copied. Land is rivalrous. Digital art is not, in any meaningful way.

Try telling that to the MPAA.

No it's more like the opposite of buying land. Land is non-fungible, "digital art" is exceedingly fungible. A land deed is perhaps not fungible, but it is reproducible, unlike an NFT.

I heard the bozos on the A16Z podcast (I think it was) compare NFTs to land deeds, but they very seldom know what they're talking about.

I have no idea what A16Z is.

The point is not that land is somehow fungible, but that we have plenty of precedent for "owning" a thing without taking physical transfer of that thing.

When you buy land you gain a right to physically use (or charge others to physically use) the land you didn't previously have. Exceptions include the Brooklyn Bridge scam, where you actually gain no control over the use of the land whatsoever, no matter how verifiably unique the vendor promises the token they're giving you as proof is, and the people selling certificates with parts of the moon and your name on it. A token which grants you legal control of distribution of a piece of digital art so you can charge others to look at or listen to it might be like a real land deed, but a token giving you a nominal association with something already in the public domain is much more like the latter examples.

Of course, but I don't understand the issue here. Everyone involved knows that, and buyers don't care. What's the problem?

The problem is that supposedly knowledgeable people hype the concept as something new and clever, they claim it solves a real problem.

I don’t feel sorry at all for the clown that paid 69 mill for the url to a jpg, I just think the hype is stupid. Not that we can be sure the buyer was real and distinct from the seller.

Yes, and the point is that this is not what art NFTs do at all.

PS It would have been quicker to google A16Z than type out those words, but I’ll save you some time by telling you that it’s (the podcast of) a top three silicon valley VC.

> Why is this any different?

Because if you buy a painting, you can hang it on your wall.

Buy an NFT and make it your desktop and mobile backgrounds. You’re welcome.

You don’t need to buy an NFT to make it your desktop or mobile background.

Right and you can also buy a cheap print of an expensive, famous piece and hang it on your wall. In fact, people do it all the time! Doesn’t diminish the value of the original.

Except that in this case the bits are literally identical.

So, if we in the future are able to clone a Mona Lisa perfectly, will it be as worth as the original? Does it decrease the value of the original?

No, because the original was made hundreds of years ago by a now globally recognised artist. A jpg is just a jpg.

Perfectly as in the exact paint compounds, the effect of that order of brush strokes and timing, and then aging. Such that no art expert or chemical/forensic analysis can tell them apart other than the label saying which is which?

That doesn’t not sound at all feasible. But if it were, then sure the prices would have to be close for the original and new one. It sounds impossible to do, and extremely easy expensive to make a copy like that of a real painting. It’s stupidly easy and simple to do with a digital work.

Any number of artworks are being sold which allow for reproducibility, say photographs. Expensive limited edition prints are a thing. In most of those cases the particular physical manifestation you acquire is entirely a construct. Even for an original painting, the fact that you desire that particular manifestation (over say an improved one which the original artist may now be able to do) is a construct. If a painting needs restoration, you may find that some elements are no longer original; this will not diminish its value. If over the years we replace all the parts of the Mona Lisa, it will still be the Mona Lisa (see also: the Ship of Theseus).

Even the photos that sell are scarcer than digital photos - the only people who could reproduce it are the original artist, or an owner of the photo who made a perfect scan, and the owners of the photo likely aren’t going to distribute scans of their own art.

But that is entirely artificial scarcity. The fact is that they could be produced perfectly; the physical prints need physical security, because if copies were allowed to be made, it would be difficult to know who owns the original.

If the provenance of the real item could be guaranteed, the fact that you have a really good copy wouldn't matter; people would still pay to own the original.

That's exactly what an NFT is; digital security for a digital print. People who buy NFTs don't care that someone else has a copy, they value the artificial scarcity provided by the NFT.

Look, the fact is that if you like a Picasso, you can have a perfect copy made, and you won't be able to tell the difference between the two. In fact, in a blind test, you may end up liking the copy more. The fact that you value the original more because Picasso touched it is totally, absolutely in your head. Empirically, there is no reason why this should make a difference to you.

And then you have a digital token that Picasso personally signed with his private key.

There are a lot of examples at the intersection of this. If you buy a Damien Hirst, the artist may well never have touched the piece - these are being produced by staff. Sol LeWitt's Wall Paintings exist as instructions that different artists re-execute over an over again.

In all these cases, enjoyment of the art is available to everyone; you can have a really good copy. It is totally disconnected with what people value when they pay large sums of money, which is entirely artificial.

It's not analogous, still. First of all, copies of photos are worth less than paintings for a reason. So already we see the price scales down based on how reproducible things are. NFT's therefore should never be close to your average gallery selling a photo reproduction, as they are infinitely copyable for free.

A high quality photo print and frame costs quite a bit of money. That's maybe a couple thousand dollars. And then the artist hangs them in a nice gallery, with sales people. That costs more too. And the final price isn't something like 100x the cost, it's maybe 10x if lucky, often 2-3x.

And again, you can't really reproduce it easily. If I found some really high quality scanning store, I could do a decent job. But it would cost me a lot of money, and the signature on the print wouldn't look or feel real.

So again, big difference, and already we have to admit paintings > prints > digital images.

You absolutely cannot have a perfect copy of a Picasso. Sorry, that's a meme that's not real. You can carbon date the paint. There are ridiculous complexity in his layering techniques. Even the specific paints he used were from his era, and hard to find. It's physically provable to show a Picasso is a real one that came from his hands. Not possible with an NFT as there literally is no original. You can prove the coin is the coin he made, but that's simply not analogous.

> You absolutely cannot have a perfect copy of a Picasso. Sorry, that's a meme that's not real.

Yes, the point I am making though is that if you cannot see the differences with the naked eye, or if in fact you prefer the copy if given a test, then why do you value all that stuff? Enjoy the much cheaper copy.

It is true there are unique properties that a physical original features - it is just that the value assigned to them is arbitrary, and there does not seem to be an obviously good reason to pay a lot of money for it. People do it because of what is essentially a collective hallucination centered around the idea of scarcity.

Now if there were a way to copy a Picasso perfectly, I posit that people would still assign an arbitrarily high value to the original. I mean, you can see that being the case with diamonds.

Obviously, there is something about a physical object that a digital image will never be able to reproduce. That's why people still enjoy real books, right? So I wouldn't be surprised if a real painting would carry a certain premium over an NFT. But the idea that people pay for an NFT, signed by Damien Hirst's own private wallet? I see no fundamental difference between valuing that and valuing the entirely imaginary benefit of Damien Hirst having once stood in the presence of that physical object you bought.

Because in one case I have an original Picasso, in the other all I have is a hash in a blockchain somewhere. I don't get how people don't see the difference.

An original Picasso... vs a hash number.

Would I rather have the basketball that Lebron dunked in a game or some random basketball that Lebron issued an NFT for? They are for all intents and purposes identical. Why do people care?

It's likely because authenticity matters, hard work begetting achievement matters, real world deeds, real world objects matter. Matter matters. It's just how humans work, maybe because we are matter..

Diamonds are a great example. They are in fact scarce, which drives value, and the reason artificial diamonds don't retain value is because they are less scarce. Now work backwards.

> An original Picasso... vs a hash number.

I agreed that physical objects have unique properties that digital objects cannot match. But presumably we can appreciate digital artworks nonetheless?

It is also true that the nature of the digital object means that ownership of the NFT is somewhat disconnected from whether a .jpg is physically in your computers memory at any given time.

But the choice is not between an original Picasso and a random hash number, but rather:

- An original Picasso painting vs an equally enjoyable copy. - An NFT of Picasso's digital illustration vs an equally enjoyable copy.

Are you able to experience that same intangible connection with history by looking at a blockchain entry, as you might be standing in front of an old painting? Maybe not. But you may experience a version of it, in the same as you might by looking at the first websites.

> Would I rather have the basketball that Lebron dunked in a game or some random basketball that Lebron issued an NFT for?

Sure. What about a unique NFT of a sword that was used to win in a watershed eSports event? Note that this would be a digital object that does not merely represent the sword, but it is the sword, i.e. I can now use it in the game. I think people would value that through largely the same mental mechanism as the basketball.

NFT's that aren't just images could be valuable. I had a friend doing TikTok but with a NFT animated assets store. That makes sense! I could see it become popular some day, and then we'd see if Apple, Disney, Blizzard / everyone decide to jump in.

NFTs are basically immutable certificates for ownership of land on Pluto.

> Diamonds are a great example. They are in fact scarce, which drives value, and the reason artificial diamonds don't retain value is because they are less scarce. Now work backwards.

Yep exactly. Quod erat demonstrandum

> Expensive limited edition prints are a thing

...and if the artist suddenly flooded the market with millions of identical prints, the value would plummet.

Even if that were possible, it wouldn't BE the original. Digital bits, unlike physical matter, has no identity, so the concept of "original" makes no sense.

If anyone could instantly make perfect clones of the Mona Lisa anywhere, at any time, then yes in fact the original would lose its value. By definition, it would be impossible to tell which is the original, and anyone could replace it the moment nobody is looking. You'll have to assume it's already happened countless times.

In real life you cannot make perfect molecule-for-molecule clones of physical objects, so what's your point?

It diminishes you, it's tacky.

Right, art is only for the rich who can experience the original in person. My evil school with that art history textbook...

No but getting an obvious replication is just a little weird. There is plenty of art of identical and higher quality than the famous pieces within affordable prices.

You seriously think so? Or is that for the uncanny valley where it's obviously just a replica, but not just a poster?

A lot of art, for many, is that others see the same thing through different eyes. Looking at the Mona Lisa or a Rembrandt, means that I'm experiencing what millions have but uniquely. Shared experiences create bonds, even across time and space. It's also perhaps a bit humbling in a way another similarly good painting from now wouldn't be because of the temporal distance it comes from.

You can do this without buying the NFT also.

>Buying art with an NFT is just a way to give artists and/or art auctioneers money for their art. That's it.

But we could already do that. It's a solution to a problem no one had. A NFT would only be useful for proving ownership if it will hold up in court, which I doubt it would without accompanying proof of purchase.

It's literally impossible for someone without the purchaser's key to pretend to be the purchaser. That's 1000x what a receipt proves.

Whatever their flaws, NFTs are perfect proof of ownership of the token...

NFTs provide proof of ownership of the token, but no guarantee the NFT wasn't issued "fraudulently".

C.f.: https://www.reddit.com/r/NFT/comments/m3y4go/my_art_stolen_a...

So? You can buy "counterfeit" or "stolen" art at many galleries.

But if you care about the artist enough to want to donate I imagine you're more familiar with their work than all that.

Isn't this literally the only thing an NFT guarantees anyway? It is precisely a "non-fungible token" and nothing more.

Anything you can do with a non-fungible piece of paper, you can do with a non-fungible token. Anything you can't do with a non-fungible piece of paper, you can't do with a non-fungible token.

I'm blown away by how many people are upset that other people are doing stupid things at the confluence of new technology and excessive spending money.

> Isn't this literally the only thing an NFT guarantees anyway? Anything you can't do with a non-fungible piece of paper, you can't do with a non-fungible token.

Pretty much. It's a bit harder to show your paper autograph (and prove its veracity for full status points or before selling it) than to demonstrate this with an NFT. If that's what the paper is about for you, the NFT is better.

With concert tickets though there are a ton of benefits from proving authenticity, not needing to meet to transfer paper, not needing ID to prove you didn't steal it when checking in, etc.

> I'm blown away by how many people are upset that other people are doing stupid things at the confluence of new technology and excessive spending money.

Me too.

Well when artists are pretending to sell art for $69 million to their business partners to create hype for NFTs and lure in clueless people who will lose their money on a pump and dump virtual asset then people start to feel like it’s a scam not just “excessive spending”

I mean this artist is now the third highest paid artist alive and it seems like he just pretended to sell the art to his business partner and the money transfer may not have even happened. That’s not excessive spending if true, that’s lies and fraud

Hypothetical situation. You purchase some digital art for $1M from a marketplace and get issued a NFT for the purchase. I slip on my black hoodie and balaclava, hack the Gibson and acquire your private key for the NFT then try to sell the digital art. You then sue me in court. Both you and the marketplace can produce documents of the financial transaction verifying that you were the legitimate purchaser and all I have is just the stolen NFT. Who is the court going to rule in favor of? Well you and if that's the case what proof does the NFT provide that a standard purchase agreement and the accompanying financial documentation of the purchase doesn't which is how we already purchase something like art?

That would be an actual crime. If you guessed my key, perhaps by knowing I generated it insecurely or watched me type it (when not under an NDA or some duty to me), you could do this legally though.

But yes, once you've stolen the thing from me I have less control over it...

Also, this would never happen as written. If you tried to claim my asset without having changed the key, then I would. We'd never be in court with shared custody, and thus they'd never get a chance to rule on this. The only time a court would come in would be criminally if you actually hacked my system.

Otherwise, owning the key is the entirely of ownership. Blockchain is intentionally a knowledge-based version of a bearer bond. (It could be based on hash-preimages which would count as a password and probably be legally protected, but intentionally it's based on math because factors in an equation aren't protected.)

Also, you aren't really purchasing art because it's untenable. You're purchasing something like the right to show that the artist considers you to have purchased art. To actually purchase art would be to actually codify a contract (from what jurisdictions?) in an NFT, and that's not what anyone is doing. It's all just digital signatures of a phrase like "Thanks for being the first sponsor of my work 'Autumn Leaves', with shasum XYZ".

Because without NFTs there would be no way to give money to the original artist, right.

How is the token associated with the work?

The token (according to the ERC-721 standard) contains a URL to a hosted JSON which contains a URL to the hosted image. So to access the actual image you need to go through two different servers.

Serious question: What happens in 20 years if the domain registration for that URL is not renewed, or the website hosting that JSON is gone?

What happens if you drop your print in a puddle and it's destroyed, but you still have the proof of authenticity in your pocket? While the artist is alive, they'll probably replace it at cost. But after the artist is gone the certificate does nothing. (It still proves your status, like the NFT, but otherwise is worthless.)

Use IPFS.

This doesn’t solve the problem at all. Many of the NFT sites are hosting their own IPFS and many of the images have already gone missing from the IPFS because no one is hosting that file still.

https://twitter.com/checkmynft/status/1371633090318249984?s=...

https://twitter.com/scanlime/status/1371509988179464196?s=21

couldn't anyone else start hosting that content on IPFS, and the URL would resole to it? Since it's content-based addressing? (I don't have a great understanding of IPFS, I could be totally wrong)

If you Google you will find that a lot of NFT art has already gone missing

Does most of the money actually go to artists?

If the artist is themself selling the art as an NFT, I believe so.

Yes, but there is a big problem of people other than the artist creating NFTs for other peoples art. There is nothing in the NFT process that guarantees the money is going to the "right" person.

From the original sale almost all of it goes to the person who minted it, minus a small fee (around 5%) for the platform. That should be the artist, but of course there are people minting art that isn't theirs. There's efforts to catch and remove that, but a lot slips through.

From secondary market sales, the artist can get a royalty if they choose and the secondary transaction is on the same platform. Typically around 10%. The same platform requirement is an issue and hopefully a future NFT standard smart contract will build in a royalty option/.

How do you remove tokens minted by people other than the artist? Who removes it, and what stops that person or those people from removing legitimate tokens?

Either you don't, and can't, or you build a special script with a revocation list run by trusted 'Oracles' who would essentially notarize a legal claim by the artist into a blocklist of image hashes, or a whitelist of who can mint NFTs for those hashes.

Those Oracles would ideally be known parties who could be sued under the laws of their jurisdiction for lying.

How is an NFT in any way better than a signed proof-of-purchase?

Not any better, unless you value having the exchange recorded in an immutable distributed ledger. Some people value that.

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