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Comment by t_akosuke | Hacker News Reader

Ok, let's see if I'm following the discussion right. let's say you buy an NFT for using a GIF of the Techno Viking, from the Viking himself, and Reddit verifies it. Now you are the only person on Reddit that can have a Techno Viking GIF signature, yippee! Except I can make a new NFT of the same GIF and nothing in the NFT itself betrays that it wasn't issued by the real Techno Viking, so it's up to him, Reddit and you to call me out and reach for old school copyright laws to stop me from using it. Which is no different than me uploading a Techno Viking video to YouTube and getting sued by him or flagged by YouTube, is it?

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You're both correct and underestimating how broken NFTs are. If you buy an NFT that gives you nothing except bragging rights that you "own" this NFT. What ownership actually means when devoid of the associated rights is anyones guess. Buying an NFT of a GIF doesn't stop anyone from using that GIF on reddit. No one is going around checking if posted GIFs have a matching NFT out there and enforcing property rights based on that.

When you buy an NFT you're not even buying the GIF, you're buying the receipt proving you bought the GIF. What good that is without owning the GIF isn't exactly obvious to me.

Not that I support NFTs much, but conceptually, how is that different than you buying a Marilyn Monroe from Andy Warhol and him printing the exact same Marilyn Monroe and selling it to someone else ? Hopefully in 2021 everyone would agree that the two are distinct artworks, even if the physical object is exactly the same to the human eye ; that's not what matters when buying art.

The Marilyn Monroes are still limited by the number that Warhol prints, and you have ownership of the print that you bought. Maybe it’s not as valuable as it would be if there was only 1 Monroe print, but you are paying for a physical object made by Warhol.

If I understand correctly, an NFT is like if someone, not necessarily Warhol himself, sold you a note posted on a wall somewhere that said “You own Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe”, without any rights to the underlying work, or any promise that another person might sell another note on another wall that says “Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe”.

Yeah, but what else can you do with digital art? Buy the PC it's sitting on and only share it via webcam of the screen?

The same as with any other intellectual property (books, movies, songs): buy the legally enforceable copyright. As in "right" and "copy".

PS: I'm immensely interested in the process of creating a digital image. It's actually pretty tricky and technical, to apply all those filters in right order and with right settings. I would buy a recording of how the digital art was created.

Not a recording but a deconstruction of the process of creating a digital image - https://rjp.is/blogging/posts/deconstructing-an-image-2/

Except the legally enforceable copyright is just that: legally enforceable. The legal system is what creates a financial incentive to own the rights to something as opposed to just copying it in some way that might constitute IP theft.

With NFTs, there is no legal benefit to actually owning the NFT.

Fun Fact: Rodin was one of the first sculptors to take advantage of reproduction, as he employed craftsmen in his workshop that could build you a custom thinker that was 2 inches tall for a paperweight or another full sized thinker statue for your public park. These statues had his special patina added.

When he died, Rodin destroyed the recipes for his patina but the workshop, run out of an old hotel and eventually becoming the Musee Rodin, continued to make "official" copies. Thus there are 25 full-sized thinkers but only 10 or so have the patina, the rest being made after his death.

> special patina

Sounds like standard trade-secrets.

Warhol mass-produced his prints using silk-screen, and verifying them as authentic is damn near impossible.

The real ones may be limited, but he made a lot of them (you can really churn out artwork with silkscreening), and it’s hard to know which ones are the real ones.

They are also much cheaper than a lot of NFTs eg a late one for $18k https://www.artsy.net/artwork/andy-warhol-marilyn-announceme...

> If I understand correctly

The funny thing about NFTs. The emperor has no clothes. Confusion is evidence of understanding -- there's that little substance. No Fscking Thing.

> a note posted on a wall somewhere that said “You own Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe”

It's basically a pointer. It's not hard to scrounge the sites that track the ETH blockchain, find where a NFT changed hands, and then find the URI for the full res image that anyone can go download. All that's owned is the pointer.

Does the GIF reside on the blockchain or is it hosted on whatever webserver? What if the webserver is shutdown? Now you "own" a pointer to nothing?

It is hosted on some random webserver or on IPFS. If either goes away, it's gone.

> If I understand correctly, an NFT is like if someone, not necessarily Warhol himself.

No, the point is that the NFT is from the artist themselves.

It is not. Nothing about an NFT ensures it is from the artist, and not just from someone random scammer.

Correct. This is your job to ensure.

So why do you say that is the point?

Because that's the reason people value the NFT. The fact that someone can take a picture of the Mona Lisa and try to sell it as an NFT is not the point; people don't value that NFT, and NFTs are not designed to prevent that from happening.

It is a simple ledger entry that records the ownership of an edition released by an artist, and people choose to value it because of that.

It is none of those things. It does not record ownership, there is no guarantee it is released by an artist... And people do not really value them either, other than people speculating or scamming.

The problem is that anyone can mint an NFT. Verifying that an NFT is actually minted by the artist would likely require some sort of external certification that you can trust. This is done for paintings and other collectibles as well.

What I don’t understand is: Once you have an external certifying authority, why have blockchain based NFTs at all? Couldn’t you save a lot of energy and complexity by tracking purchases in a database?

I mean, yes, but if you buy a painting you have the exact same issue no ?

No?

... you think counterfeits are not a thing ? People spend inordinate amounts of time and money to ensure that the painting the buy is indeed from the painter it is said to come from

Yes, for very expensive paintings, and it takes incredible amounts of effort do it.

You and I, however, will never encounter any of this. It is the most niche of niche issues.

Having ownership of the physical print is a pretty big differentiator. I guess you could have always bought that same print from someone who created it illegally rather than Warhol himself, but that is where the vague "supporting the artist" reasoning comes in to play.

Since NFTs don't provide that physical object, all that is left is the "supporting the artist" angle. If that is central to NFTs, why is the secondary market such a big aspect of the community? To extend your analogy, that would be like me buying the Warhol print for $10, turning around and selling it for $100, and claiming that $90 in my pocket is supporting Warhol.

Warhol is dead, yet people still value authorized prints much higher than fakes.

Why would "supporting the artist" be relevant at all? Apart from NFTs whose smart contract gives the minter a share of resales, I have never heard anyone say that.

And definitely not in relation to the $90 profit.

Of course there's a difference between the original and a print. An NFT is not an original though. At best an NFT comes with an URL to an image you can use to make a print. But guess what? anyone can make that print.

If you buy an NFT you don't buy an original. You buy proof that you bought the original. It's like buying the receipt to the Mona Lisa. Doing so doesn't gain you anything. It doesn't even gain you the original Mona Lisa.

Unless people are ceding the point that NFTs are art in and of themselves I don't see the point. And I hardly see a receipt as a form of art.

If you buy the Marilyn Monroe print then you can legally put it up on your wall at home and other people can see it.

If you buy an NFT (which is just an URL to somewhere that might have a picture today but might be a 404 tomorrow or an ipfs hash if you're lucky) then you can not (in most cases I've seen) legally put that picture that's behind the link in the NFT up on your website and show it to others. Heck, in some countries this doesn't even grant you the right to store that picture itself on your own computer.

(Most) NFT's don't give the owner of the NFT any rights for the linked art itself - you can't copy it, distribute it, present it etc. You can do all of that with the NFT but _not_ the actual art piece.

I would say it's not different and it's a great analogy that shows how NFTs are ridiculous. It could be even more extreme than your example. The piece of art could be entirely reproductible by anyone and still only some versions would be considered valuable. See the $150,000 banana.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so8sB25IL4o&t=1s

This is exactly why very little art is valuable until the artist is dead, and even those rare artists who can sell while still alive see the value of their work skyrocket when they die. Andy Warhol definitely can't make a copy of anything you own that he created and he has verifiably been unable to since 1987.

I think you underestimate how important bragging rights are. That's the reason people purchase Rolex watches! And because you can't show off your Rolex watch in the online world, instead you'll use an NFT as a profil pic.

I think it's hard for people that don't care about bragging rights / status symbols to understand NFTs. Conversely, I think that status symbols are a very important part of the lives of the people that understand and advocate NFTs.

I understand bragging rights, but it's pretty hard to brag with something noncorporeal. That profile pic? Anyone can use that, whether or not they own the NFT or not. Makes for some pretty poor bragging material if you ask me.

> That profile pic? Anyone can use that, whether or not they own the NFT or not.

Currently yes, but that's a fixable problem.

For instance Twitter could start preventing users from having profile pics that look similar to NFTs that were minted earlier.

Except copyright and trademark laws exist. The Washington Redskins lost their trademark. You can create as many NFTs of their logo as you want. But you cannot stop me from putting that logo on my website.

Showing NFTs on your website will not increase your status, because nobody will know if you paid for them or not.

Showing NFTs on your profile on a website that only accepts verified NFTs (see my previous message for what I mean by that) will increase your status.

>That's the reason people purchase Rolex watches

But people can just make fake Rolex watches and wear those too! Watches are a scam /s

As someone pointed out already in the baseball card example. NFTs do not give you copyright over the images. You may buy a baseball card but that doesn’t let you sell or license the image displayed on the baseball card. NFT is exactly the same in that sense. It is purely a collectible not explicit ownership of a likeness.

You're married.

You don't own him / her, but people still brag about it and it's a frequent rite.

The NFT equivalent of marriage would be getting married, and your spouse continuing to live with their old roommates, date around, keeping a separate bank account, going on other people's family vacations, and starting multiple families other than yours.

If that's how marriage worked, people wouldn't get married either.

Anybody can own and share the media file (one of the great things about crypto art is that we can all access and view it), but only one wallet owns the token that links back to the original creator’s signature.

To use a print analogue: a print of a photographer’s work likely holds no significant value* unless that artifact is provably signed (or otherwise approved) by the artist. To take it a step further; a convincing photocopy with a fraudulent signature will also hold no value, once it’s determined to not have come from the original creator.

* Here “value” refers to cultural and artistic significance in how it is perceived by an art market. Of course a poor photocopy of a Mona Lisa holds cultural value because of what it signifies, but a museum isn’t about to acquire that artifact from you.

I didn't see this answer and wanted to submit it. So, in order for this NFT to have any authenticity, it has to be made under some sort of "technoviking" name right? Ultimately, this technoviking guy is probably reputed and if someone found his content through NFTs, would probably let him know. You can argue that the chain can't regulate itself, but as it stands it does -- just by virtue of there being one large platform (opensea). I'm not sure that Technoviking could easily get his content pulled from the chain, but it can be delisted entirely from opensea, and probably rigged up so future items of his would be caught and shadowbanned immediately.

Is this a solution that works long term? I'm not sure about that. It's a hard question to answer, but I'm glad someone's going for it. I would personally expect ycombinator to be more open to these kinds of ideas -- Programmatic solutions are something we can all get behind. It's a hard problem to solve but that's what drives a lot of our passion in this field, correct?

Basically yes, you'd be right. Someone has to call him out. But do you expect an automated system to handle that in a fair and ordered manner? We already have a terrible (user-wise) implementation of that -- DMCA. What's important is ascribing ownership for the long-term, even if we have to do it manually and surprise -- that's what NFTs (could) do.

I could be wrong but from what I've seen, I think DAOs could bridge that gap. These 'headless' communities create that manual self-regulation that is needed -- social verification fueled by some sort of financial incentive, driven through a very public system.

This touches upon the main issue with NFTs and tokens in general, that they always have to rely on a centralised authority to connect them to the real world, and except when it comes to derivatives on crypto assets, that real world connection is crucial.

> nothing in the NFT itself betrays that it wasn't issued by the real Techno Viking

This part is incorrect. Every token is signed can be verified against the content creator's public key. You can absolutely verify a "genuine" NFT.

You have to first know which public key is genuine.

Well blockchains aren't trying to solve the digital identity problem. Artists can share their public key however they like.

Then its left as an exercise for the user to actually verify the authenticity.

Sure, but if Warhol had each of his prints signed with an unforgeable signature akin to a private key, while we still have to know what is private key was, the Warhol Authentication Board wouldn't have been in the mess that it was in.

It seems like the digital identity problem is fundamental to actually do what NFTs claim to do, though.

>Well blockchains aren't trying to solve the digital identity problem

They are! BrightID and Proof of Humanity are two of the leading projects working on decentralized identity. It's a pretty exciting space!

https://www.brightid.org/ https://www.proofofhumanity.id/

So, are artists suddenly getting in on pgp key-signing parties to establish a web of trust, or is the public key of the artist really just a key claiming to be that of the artist? What is to stop me from buying "bank.se", "banksy.me" and "banksy.io," and actioning off three different NFTs (of three different digital representations of the same street art) to different online art communities? What is to stop someone who MITM's the artist's webpage from selling NFTs on their behalf?

> What is to stop someone who MITM's the artist's webpage from selling NFTs on their behalf?

I guess anti-fraud laws… Also, to my disappointment, someone already got banksy.io :D

No, you need to think about what you’re buying as a unique address and tokenID pair. The same way someone can recreate a hackernews at a different URL, most people here are going to continue to see https://news.ycombinator.com/ as th real one

It is more like buying a signed baseball card. And with NFTs being digital tokens they can't be forged or duplicated, and the original creator can't stop you from transferring to someone else, and they can be transferred to someone else relatively securely if you have the private key and pay the gas.

Anyone else could print and sign a baseball card, mint an almost identical NFT. But if they come from someone besides the techno viking they won't be worth anything, because anyone could do the same thing. But the techno viking can certainly sell more to others just like a baseball player can sign a lot of cards.

Your NFT’s trade provenance will reveal it was never owned by Technoviking’s key. He won’t need to use copyright law, you simply can’t impersonate him so no one will value your duplicate NFT.

I might be mistaken but I don't think >99% of people who have bought an NFT have verified that the key used to generate the token does in fact belong to the artist that created the piece that's (currently) behind the link that's in the token.

They don't have to, generally speaking. OpenSea does that for them, and issues a blue checkmark to items belonging to the collection of the verified key.

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