Ask HN: What's the Opposite of an NFT? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's the Opposite of an NFT?

15 pointspkdpic43 comments

I'm an artist / dev, not sure what to make of NFT's but after reading through a lot of this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29159693) I feel like they're problematic at best / yet another boring pyramid scheme at worst.

In any case I'm just wondering if someone (hypothetically) hated NFT's but wanted to make some art, what type of art would represent the polar opposite of an NFT?

Dumb question maybe but just a thought experiment.

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Andrew Plotkin just posted about selling fake NFTs. They're not that much different for the uninformed end-user than a normal NFT, and much better for the environment. https://twitter.com/zarfeblong/status/1458140086030061576

Oh and there was some art that did something pretty similar to NFTs, but using a normal contract instead of a "smart" contract. https://dangiordan.wordpress.com/2010/02/05/a-tool-to-deceiv...

Excellent links thank you!

I don't really hate NFTs but I'm very critical to (a) the way models of digital scarcity is introduced to digital artist by the blockchain (maximalist) tribes effectively making the whole thing very similar to pyramid schemes as you suggested, (b) carbon emission footprint of Proof of Work.

But to your question, I suppose any work in digital media which is fungible could be reluctantly considered as "polar opposite of an NFT". One could even do better than that and release the artworks under an open license like CC.

Oh that's a fantastic idea, I need to read up more on how an open license could apply to a physical artwork. If anyone has any further reading suggestions on that let me know.

First thought is maybe drawings / paintings / collages that are optimized for universal 8x11 printing where there is no original available and all copies are equal. Or maybe the same thing for a high-quality / printable 3D scan of a sculpture?

Seriously inspiring thought, thank you!

An ugly embarrassing asset that you don't want to have. When you own it, you agree to a smart contract that drains away some of your currency every day. If someone gives you one, the only way to rid yourself of it is to give two copies to two other people, resulting in it become more and more common and hated. Kinda like Gremlins, Velvet Elvis, and a chain letter rolled into one.

Lol, I love it. It strikes me as pretty solid conceptually and it definitely works on some kind of anarchist poetic level too. Also love / hate that it would triple-down on the burning-the-rainforest NFT issue too :^)

Sounds a lot like a timeshare.

A fungible token!

Contrary to what many would believe, something like Bitcoin is not fungible. Instead a coin without history can be regarded as fungible. For example Monero is a strong privacy coin with good fungibility.

Technically that's true, but as an economic asset, it would be considered fungible, as it can be exchange for another token (which again, is technologically non-fungible) and it would possess the same 'abilities', so to say.

I'm still trying to understand frangibility, as a word, so correct me if I'm off target.

I feel like when I think about it too hard anything thats "worth" anything starts to seem fungible. Which would make NFTs fungible? I mean I get the distinction but still...

Old-school xerox fanzine traded through the mail for stamps and sase.

Excellent, that's something I could start on right now to counteract my screen burnout from work. Now all I need is a not-sketchy way to get physical addresses from folks on HN.

Send me a zine and I'll send you some of mine. I'll set up a throwaway email if you're interested in communicating.

I'm 100% down, I'd love the excuse to finish up some zine stuff I've been messing around with!

Do you have an email address I can send a message to?

A few years ago I read an article about some students at Harvard doing research in Houghton's zine collection as a kind of historical research. I could weep. Maybe it is time for a resurgence of zine culture.

It definitely seems like they're increasingly pertinent on multiple levels. The zine events I was going to before Covid hit we're feeling super vibrant, but there's a weird domination of blue-chip gallery art-book / zine fests that shut a lot of people out, are super expensive to attend or participate in and really don't feel very democratic or open at all in my limited experience.

Yeah why not? I did a one-shot zine in senior high and it was loads of fun. Zines could still prove relevant as an offline alternative in today’s hyperconnected world.

Zine culture has already made its resurgence !

Any direction you can point to here to connect with some part of the resurgence? Zinefests are my only inroad and a lot of them are pretty exclusionary these days in my experience...

Im younger than most of the crowd on here but I find them in my social media circles mostly from independent artists/bands/fashion mutuals. Next time I run across an interesting one if I remember I'll link it.

There was a service posted here a few days ago, but I can’t find them now.

I think the gist was, “get things delivered to you without giving away your address”. Which was effectively mail forwarding.

Maybe someone else remembers it.

Someone needs to reboot Factsheet 5.

Yes! Wondering what it would look like if a similar project were tweaked to be more scalable. Or maybe that would ruin the point?

My beginner understanding of NFTs leads me to think the polar opposite would achieve the goals of:

1. No ownership / everyone owns it

2. No limits to copying/editing/republishing

3. No royalties or payment of any kind

So maybe just posting your digital art online with an open-source license of some kind (usually that is for code) that indicates anyone can use it, copy it, do whatever they want with it and pay you no money/royalties.

People have pointed out that the actual art isn't in the NFT. This means anyone that knows how to capture a screenshot can duplicate anything they see online. This makes me think of stock photography sites. How do they enforce people aren't just copying/pasting the photos? Is this even enforceable/preventable? How would NFT's solve enforcement/prevention?

Since this is partly a thought experiment... one way for enforcement/prevention is for the digital artwork to be only used in closed source systems where validation with an NFT marketplace could be used. Websites are open source, maybe not legally but in essence you can copy anything that shows up on your screen, download images, etc. Closed source systems where people are paying to enter, like old school installable Enterprise software, could prevent or at least make copying extremely difficult and easier to trace. Another closed source system is video games - heavy on the artwork and lots of (much hated) micro-transactions to purchase cosmetic items.

That is a very good analogy. Stallman was right.

Thanks for the well thought out / well written response! I definitely agree. And the closed source / walled garden examples are super on point.

It feels like a reminder that anti-scarcity / universal access / unrestrained reproducibility really seems like its at the heart of the web and maybe just digital information technology in general. We do so much work to fight it on different levels even with things as simple as user auth but its a never ending battle. Oddly though it feels now like openly sharing things in a way that will reach anyone is a similarly difficult fight against all the corporate entities with so much financial incentive to fight the webs natural stateless state.

In any case your comment makes me want to keep it simple and start just posting art on unsplash :^p

The opposite of a non fungible token is a fungible one, a normal token / coin.

You're emphasizing too much on the art aspect. It's simply a mechanism to tie ownership to a digital asset.

That's an excellent point, I like the notion of disconnecting them from art entirely. Maybe there really isn't much of a need for anything about NFTs to be thought of as art. The use of the word token (NFTs) rather than art (NFAs), duh...

Excuse my ignorance, but on what basis it is an actual ownership of a digital asset and what is actually the asset? From what I understand NFT is a blockchain record that contains a URL. This URL may point to different resources at different times, no?

Thats my understanding of them, although I'm sure its more complicated on some level. It was what made me pretty uninterested from the offset.

nfts are about proving ownership and binding a protocol to the transfer of the ability to prove that ownership in an attempt to secure it, so i would call the opposite a public declaration that a piece of art or property belongs to everyone and is in the public domain.

“Buildings made with fungi could live, grow — and then biodegrade”

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/what-on-earth-mycelium-fungi...

My 1901 United States Liberty Dollar, minted in New Orleans would be a good example of the opposite of an NFT. It's fungible, a token, and hardly unique. It also makes a nice "twing" when you flip it with your thumb.

Perhaps something that makes energy instead of wasting it

Omg thats such an excellent thought! I need to ponder on that one...

A fungible token?

Like a dollar

Like a dollar with the serial number scratched off :^)

A fungible non-token

Yessss :O

make it non-commercial and don't tokenize it

so basically like 99% of the art on the internet

ERC-20

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