Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnopgnip | Hacker News Reader

The artist could refuse to transfer this if they don't like you, or they don't like who you are selling it to. Or the artist could create a "copy", and sell the exact same thing to two different people and both tell them they own print 03/10. An NFT addresses both of these concerns, and if you are buying these solely for speculation these are both real concerns.

View on HN

Heck, then print out a certificate on some nice paper, state that the holder of this paper is the owner of the work, sign it, and stamp into some wax on it that has radioactive isotopes mixed in that can be used to date it.

You’ve got your NFT which the holder can then resell as you will. If the artist then sells another certificate claiming it is unique, sue them.

An NFT does not solve or prevent the artist from selling additional editions of their work. They can always create more tokens.

Right, but those would be different editions, and would be separate from the original edition.

Even if the artist creates millions of tokens, there's probably prestige from having the first to be issued.

I realize now that calling it an edition was an error on my part, because in irl an edition is a physical copy of the work itself which can be made scarce, whereas a token is just a pointer with a url to some infinitely-duplicable bits, so the edition metaphor does not hold.

Yes the original artist, or anyone else could create NFTs of the same image. And in the same way the artist could come out with a limited series of 10 prints, then make more of the same prints later.

But there is no way to create a forgery and duplicate your NFT. The digital provenance is all there on the blockchain. With a physical object anyone could create it later and claim it was an original.

The NFT is just a receipt, currently without any legal standing.

The digital asset itself is not protected and infinitely copied. Everyone who views the asset has made a copy. There is no original.

Physical items cannot be copied perfectly. There is always an original unit that can only be in one location. This fact alone creates intrinsic value that digital items lack.

I'd argue that this limitation is artificial as well. With some painting forgeries, you're getting down to the molecular or brushstroke level of differentiation. It's all about the value that we humans assign to what's considered "an original", and I think that's what's happening with NFTs today. Unlike tangible art, however, I think NFT art is much more volatile and prone to the Beanie Babies effect if its popularity wanes.

> what's considered "an original", and I think that's what's happening with NFTs today

An original what? Remove everything off-chain from the conversation. All you have left is a small amount text (which itself is *information* !!) in a distributed database. Thats no more original than the particular instance of bootloader code in my desktop computer.

I agree with you. Removing anything off-chain from the conversation, we're left with the equivalent of selling a million pixels on a web page (but at least there was some utility to that, in the form of advertising).

There is a real cost to creating an NFT(on the ethereum blockchain, by people who have valuable ideas/art), it cannot be copied, and it can be sold. That is all you need to have digital scarcity, to have value for speculation. It doesn't need legal standing or any physical attachment to the real world to be valuable.

It's not like people are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on artwork or signed sports memorabilia because of the utlity. You can get a comparable print or a brand new piece of sports gear for far less. There is some grey area on the lower end though, and an NFT has zero utility here.

Scarcity of precisely what is the question. In this case, a small amount of metadata. That metadata is inherently worthless, because the metadata is just information that can be copied, and a new supposedly "scarce" token can be created with the same metadata.

There's no such thing as digital scarcity. It's only artificial scarcity, and for that you need something to control the supply.

Anyone can copy the asset. Anyone can also create another NFT to the same asset. So which token is the "real" one? That's the centralized scarcity that's required, which really just added a layer of indirection without solving for anything.

> "spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on artwork or signed sports memorabilia because of the utlity"

Again, this isn't about utility. It's about intrinsic value. Physical goods have a single original object which gives them value that digital items don't.

This is true in most current examples of NFT protocols, but we are working on this at pruf.io

> The artist could refuse to transfer this if they don't like you

Really? What if I, the person who bought an NFT, just gave my private key it's tied to, to someone else? What recourse does the artist have then?

I think the argument is that the buyer wouldn't know whether you still have a copy of the key or not. The idea is that the blockchain is used to ensure you cannot backdate a transaction.

Mind you, I'm not a blockchain fan, and I believe that blockchains and cryptocurrencies are the absolute worst way to solve the problem.

I mean for non NFT art, at a certain point the legal system can prevent you from selling it. Like if you had a piano made of ivory, or if there were international sanctions on the buyer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com