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Comment by mattdesl | Hacker News Reader

How do you know a signed print is really from the artist? If the artist themselves gave it to you, then you can probably be fairly certain. If the provenance of that artefact can be reliably tracked over the years, then you can also be fairly certain.

Obviously, a signed inkjet print can be forged more easily than a NFT, as it is just ink and graphite on paper.

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I can go and make an NFT by absolutely any artist I want and there's nothing that can be done to stop me. Nobody is forcing me to provide several levels of documentation to prove my identity before selling my image online.

In fact, it's pretty much daily that I see fellow artists warning people that fake NFTs are being sold in their name.

A signed inkjet print is harder to forge than an NFT. A hand-written signature is possible to forge, but it's substantially harder to forge than a copy-pasted digital file.

I mean, there are documented cases of it happening as well[1]. Faking an NFT is an incredibly easy way to get rich and there's no liability. It's wonderful for scammers.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58399338

You can easily copy the CryptoPunk contract and mint your own token[1], but the new token will be very easy to spot as a fake (as it will have a different contract address), and will have no market value, and likely zero buyers.

Compare this to physical prints, which can and often are forged in such a way that the original becomes very difficult if not impossible to detect.[2]

[1] - https://etherscan.io/token/0xb47e3cd837ddf8e4c57f05d70ab865d...

[2] - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/art-pranksters-sel...

EDIT: The Banksy example you gave is one of impersonating the artist, rather than forging an artwork, and depends on the artist's accounts or website becoming compromised. It's not something NFT as a technology prevents; and, of course, the same problem could have occurred had it been a physical print sale distributed via the website.

> How do you know a signed print is really from the artist?

you don't, that's partly why they are cheaper, that and there are more of them.

> If the provenance of that artefact can be reliably tracked over the years, then you can also be fairly certain.

This is why auction houses are a thing, its also why eBay are spending loads of cash with their verification services. They have provenance tracers, and "experts" who try to assert that something is "real"

> Obviously, a signed inkjet print can be forged more easily than a NFT,

Apart from looking at the specs, you can only embed the URL in the NFT: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721 so the only thing thats really guaranteed is the URL and metadata. as soon as you download the NFT, it ceases to be the NFT anymore.

Signed prints are not necessarily cheap—see Ansel Adams prints going for nearly $1M USD[1]. It becomes a matter of what price society (or, perhaps just a handful of buyers) is willing to place on the artefact.

One of the great things with provenance on the blockchain is that it is not solely dependent on private for-profit auction houses like Christie's and Sotheby's to track provenance of the art we are creating.

By the way, NFT is programmable: it can define whatever you are willing to upload & embed onto the blockchain.

I'd recommend [2] if you are curious to understand this topic a little deeper.

[1] - https://www.dpreview.com/news/4925755857/iconic-ansel-adams-...

[2] - https://jackrusher.com/journal/what-does-it-mean-to-buy-a-gi...

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