H=N and the Merits of Decentralized “Web3” Art Markets

mattdesl.substack.com

3 points·mattdesl··3 comments

What if objkt.com goes down some day? Problem with decentralization is that you cannot completely decentralize everything. Someone will need to host the media, the web front end etc. Even if the artists were to host the media themselves, if someday they go offline or disappear, what happens to the NFT? Even with IPFS, someone will have to store the file. You are relying on the benevolence of strangers to store your files for you.

If objkt.com goes down, it is the same effect as Hicetnunc.xyz going down (as is now the case), i.e. nothing changes to the data/assets. Neither platform is "hosting" this data; it is more accurate to say that the community of artists and collectors bear the burden of its maintenance.

There are two facets to the data: one is the token (which holds provenance, ownership, pointers to IPFS hashes), and this is stored rather reliably by the distributed ledger of the blockchain, and likely to survive & continue to be usable as long as Tezos cryptocurrency continues to be used and validated. The other facet is the media (metadata JSON, PNG, etc), which is hosted in a distributed fashion, typically by the artist and/or their collectors.

Of course this system is not perfect, and within the next couple decades I have no doubt that most of the media will be lost. :) But some may survive, if it is deemed culturally relevant, as has been the case with traditional art continuing to find stewardship in public & private institutions many years later.

Love this, perfect UI too. Wondering if theres any similar project out there for physical / analogue artwork?

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