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Comment by root_axis | Hacker News Reader

All of this gushing hype for the future of artistry is transparently performative. Nobody in this tech cares about art or artists, any of the useful functions of NFTs have long been possible and many orders of magnitude less expensive using public key cryptography or digital signatures.

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Eh I have spent ~100 on smaller stuff on hicetnunc. The majority has been on art made by people that I know, and I've really enjoyed the new artists that I've found.

I'm uninterested in the NFTs with big price tags, and I'm uninterested in pieces that I don't subjectively enjoy the art of.

I care, but I'm guessing you either didn't literally mean nobody cares, or you are going to brush off this counter example for whatever reason.

What's to stop someone from finding a random artist on instagram that produces amazing work and selling it as their own on a website like that?

If the community cares they'll try and find out people that do that and blacklist them. hicetnunc does that, it's the only one I could speak to.

That's generally referred to as copy-minting.

EDIT: here's the hicetnunc community write up for basic steps to minimize the change you buy a copy-mint: https://github.com/hicetnunc2000/hicetnunc/wiki/Beware-copym...!

This is a lot of words to say "there is by design no way to do that".

DeFi systems are all designed around the unspoken (although sometimes spoken, honestly) assumption that rules are bad and that the system should make enforcing them difficult-to-impossible. A fun exercise is to consider, if all businesses went to using *coin overnight and one accidentally overcharged your wallet, how would you get your coins back?

You do realize that replicas are a problem in the real world art world as well right?

In real world art this is resolved by proving providence, in crypto providence from minting is trivial, but you still need to prove providence that the minting was honest.

None of which in any way responds to what I said. NFTs, by design, have no fraud prevention mechanism and no mechanism for getting your money back if you were scammed. They allow for arbitrarily many tokens to be minted of the same thing, with no obvious mechanism for people to realize that's what's happening.

Smart contracts can and do limit the amount which can be minted. And fraud exists everywhere, regardless of institutional controls - this is where community matters.

Funny how community came up in the article as one of the ways NFT is really just MLM...

Community comes up in every facet of life...what's your point here?

But you can just make a new smart contract that does the same thing, no? Smart contracts themselves can just be copied.

And saying that the "community" will take care of the fraud issue - isn't this a step backwards?

Sure, but it has a different address...there is no possibility of confusion. Something from the 1950s is not going to be confused with something from the 1980s, especially with a blockchain timestamp.

I think you are confusing providence for provenance here

Ah yeah edited, thanks!

EDIT: oh the window has passed.

In the real art world replicas are... well replicas. Regardless of how good they are, they're not exactly the same, a trained eye can tell them apart.

That's not the case when making a copy of the file. You get a perfect one-to-one replica that nobody can tell apart in any way.

On the other hand, it's trivial to show that an NFT is authentic and not a replica. The difficult part, as always with cryptography, is linking a public key to a know identity.

If you have a trusted channel from the artist (e.g. their twitter feed) it's trivial for them to indicate that a given public key/wallet address is theirs and therefore anything minted on there is authentic and anything minted elsewhere is not.

Determining if a real world piece of art is a replica or authentic can be fairly expensive. Determining if an NFT is authentic is much much cheaper.

I can see exactly how much I'm being charged when making a tx and I can ask them for a refund the way I would if they overcharge my card..

And when they decide that you were charged correctly and tell you to pound sand? Or when you can't contact them because they closed your account but are still charging you? Sometimes, businesses aren't nice or reasonable.

I'm now genuinely curious, have you never heard of a credit card chargeback? What about a stop payment order for a check?

>And when they decide that you were charged correctly and tell you to pound sand? Or when you can't contact them because they closed your account but are still charging you?

Same as when they won't refund my card I take the loss.

>I'm now genuinely curious, have you never heard of a credit card chargeback?

Last 2 times I tried it (debit card refund) it didn't work and I got no money back. The majority of cases it's the business that issues my refund.

At any rate there's nothing stopping you from having a refund functionality or escrow built into a dapp if that's what users want.

> and one accidentally overcharged your wallet, how would you get your coins back?

Wallets are not “charged” like credit cards. I fail to see how this is possible.

Like anything in life, the value and integrity of something is maintained by the community who uses it, a platform is just a tool for people to use.

I don't think that's an example of something unenforceable, though. So long as you still have courts and bailiffs, they can basically just force someone to make a transfer by threatening or employing violence.

As far as I can see that is the valuable part of the work. But blockchains doesn't help with it at all.

So since it all works by the honour system anyway, why would you need a blockchain? You could just store everything in a regular database.

If they weren't on the blockchain they would just be jpgs. Nobody would pay 100 k for a jpeg of an ape.

I'm an amateur generative artist who just started minting on hic et nunc a month ago. I'm extremely sceptical and even disgusted by the big money NFTs, but minting and collecting on H=N has been a lot of fun, there is a very nice community as well.

Selling my art for ~real money for the first time has been such a motivating experience, even knowing that we are in a strong mania phase now. So I can say that I care too!

One thing to note is that hic et nunc is ran by one guy who doesn't really like to communicate and doesn't believe in paying for stuff like devops work, so I'm not sure if this will be the one site to survive on tezos. The community will eventually decide over time.

Oh some of your stuff is quite nice! If there were still maze pieces for ~3 tez I'd pick one up.

I've really been enjoying the community around hic et nunc. Hopefully if the site collapses the community will mostly stay around, it's been such a breath of fresh air compared to most of the NFT activity on ETH.

Interesting - what is it that makes you care? (Possibly related question: why didn't you just donate ~100 to the artists you found and enjoyed?)

There's a couple things:

I like the fact that it's normal to include royalties on secondary sales, I think that it much better for the artist.

I generally like generative art and there's really been a huge explosion in generative art being produced.

I already followed some of the artists that have minted and was excited to more fully participate by buying some of their NFTs

I don't find NFT ownership that different than high end physical art ownership (high end enough that you simply don't display it, but display a replica instead)

Lastly for the friends I have bought from, donating money and buying something are very different social interactions. IMO donating money creates an implicit power imbalance, there's a connitation of being owed something in return. Instead I am buying something from them, that is a market based interaction & while it has good feelings associated there is no power/reciprocity imbalance there. They aren't doing this for their full time job, just a fun hobby.

Thanks for sharing - I didn't know about the royalties, if that works then that's sensible. I'm afraid I don't quite understand why NFTs would be necessary for the rest though, other than just being a contingent catalyst stimulating the creation of generative art. If it's purely the fact that you're buying something from them, them sending you an autograph, or a video in which they say "thanks X6S1x6Okd1st for buying this video" seem to have the same effect (though with the "downside" of you not being able to resell it to make money off it yourself).

Another property of NFTs I enjoy is that being an early supporter of an artist can yield you sharing in their future success.

Is that not only if you sell the NFT to someone else again, presumably because the artist has become successful? Do you have any insights into why that person would buy it from you - it seems the attractions you listed would no longer apply to them?

The guy who came up with the idea and has been paying me for the last few months to build our NFT auction site is a musician trained at the New England Conservatory, working doing performances in a band and as a music teacher, paying out of his savings, and he definitely cares about artists since he is one. Also these systems do use public/private keypairs and signatures (Algorand). https://gifeconomy.com

Being an artist doesn't mean you care about other artists. There are a looooot of selfish people out there and they'll often use the trappings of helping people to claw their way skyward.

If you think this is about tech, I have bad news for you about art dealers.

Hasn’t Banksy setup a whole pipeline to do just that?

He also created a painting that, upon being sold immediately shredded itself. They pulled the plug halfway through, though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXKE0nAMmg4

Did they pull the plug? I was under the impression that it was done halfway on purpose.

It apparently malfunctioned. He posted a video on Instagram of it a few days later of practice run that fully shredded it with a caption saying something like "worked in rehearsal"

It’s interesting how the malfunction itself created a very unique work of art depicting a moment suspended in time.

The work is actually back at auction now, with a significantly higher estimate than its original sale price.

https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2021/contemporary-ar...

How can the battery last so long?

> any of the useful functions of NFTs have long been possible and many orders of magnitude less expensive using public key cryptography or digital signatures.

A major useful function being the ability to buy and sell with purely digital money, was that possible before?

Yes? Even if you're exclusively referring to cryptocurrency when you say "purely digital money", it was already possible before the popularity of NFTs to accept cryptocurrency as payment for anything.

I'm saying you still needed https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721 to appear on the scene to facilitate NFTs, that implementation isn't as omnipresent as the possibility of buying anything with crypto.

But you don’t need NFTs to sell a digitally signed copy of a picture for say Bitcoin.

A cryptographically signed picture may tell you its from a certain artists, but it cannot enforce uniqueness.

There are only two options - tokens, and ledgers. Despite the name, there is no such thing as a digital token, because digital objects cannot move, they only copy.

So you need a ledger, so basically something like a blockchain, to keep track of copies.

https://dergigi.com/2021/01/14/bitcoin-is-time/

But a ledger doesn’t prevent copies of the art or duplicate tokens it just enforces uniqueness of the singular token. So you’re still left with the uniqueness problem. Essentially trying to create scarcity where there is none is a spectacularly silly idea.

1. I am artist X 2. I have an Ethereum wallet and even own the ENS name X.eth 3. I mint an NFT that represents ownership of one of my digital works

That NFT cannot be duplicated, because the Ethereum network enforces unique IDs for each ERC 721 token and prevents the double spend problem. What's more, I can look at the NFT and determined that it was indeed minted by artist X because it was his address that created it.

The artist can later mint duplicate NFTs but everyone will still know which NFT came first.

What's "major" useful for doing it with pure digital money?

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