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Comment by DevKoala | Hacker News Reader

> But there are a few drawbacks with this.

> Without a published chain of transactions, there is no guarantee that the artist hasn't sold the same item multiple times.

Then it doesn’t handle the most basic case.

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The piece goes on to say that the same can be true for NFTs.

An artist could just sell an identical work multiple times.

I like this idea, it has the exact amount of usefulness of NFTs without the ecological issues.

I don’t think the piece is accurate.

An NFT is uniquely addressable by its contract address. Copying it would produce a new address, and it would be obvious the artist is trying to sell the same work again. This is why it is “non-fungible” and what makes it uniquely different from mere files, receipts and signatures.

So you have two unique NFT's claiming ownership of the same piece of art or tweet or whatever. Maybe on different blockchains, maybe not. Now what? Which one is the "real" one that conveys said ownership? How do you prove which one is the "real" one?

Usually whichever came first, or is still in circulation (hasn’t been burned), or whichever the distributor/artist says is the real one.

Similar to a signed and authenticated physical artwork - if a newer copy turns up, which one is the authentic?

When it comes to fake artwork you at least need to be skilled enough to produce a convincing fake, which isn't trivial. In the NFT world anyone can trivially mint an NFT for anything, at any time, so there's no way to prove that "the first one" is the "real" one without relying on a trusted authority outside the blockchain. Thus any need for a blockchain is completely obviated.

Hence “or whichever the distributor/artist says is the real one.”

This does not prove copyright; it merely proves ownership of a token. It still requires a strong social consensus that the token and its addressable hash was indeed distributed by the artist (as in the case of most NFTs that are trading for any significant sum). This is very much like a certificate of authenticity of an artwork as it also requires social consensus (fwiw, a cert is far easier to forge than, say, a CryptoPunk).

Sure. My point being that the blockchain adds nothing useful. Social consensus does all the heavy lifting, the cryptographic signature is an implementation detail, and the blockchain is wholly unnecessary.

The entire point of the distributed ledger is to help secure a stronger social consensus and build a traceable record of value transfer.

Forking or copying a CryptoPunk (or Fidenza, to use an art related comparison) will not do much to sway the consensus that has formed around its contract address and transaction history.

You don't need the distributed ledger to build a traceable record of value transfer though, the PGP NFT itself can be signed with an amendment documenting each transfer.

Eventually you will need a public ledger (to support hundreds of thousands of these signatures), and the choice of making it centralized (mutable) or decentralized (very difficult to change). This is how you end up with a public distributed ledger aka blockchain.

If the first one wins, that would mean that if an artist produced something, someone else makes an NFT even though they don’t actually own the art, then sometime later the artist wants to create their NFT, they’d be shit out of luck.

Example solution:

You assume that the UI/marketplace you're viewing the NFT in doesn't do this for you. If something is sufficiently famous (ie the artist is well know to the UI) it's trivial to validated that an NFT is made by one of those artists and have the equivalent of a twitter blue checkmark.

For stuff that's not sufficiently famous, then the question of duplicates is probably not a real problem. Who cares if someone copies a <$1 digital asset. And if the artist ever becomes famous and is back-filled into the UI's known list, then all their previous works gain the blue checkmark.

These UI's will probably have a few centralized winners (which is why VC's fund crpyto startups) but there can be a long-tail of decentralized UI's as well. How much you care about authenticity will guide you to which UI's your willing to use.

So you make another layer of PGP file where you first make a token/id that indicates you created the file (which ID doesn’t change between transactions).

The problem is it still wouldn’t be obvious because nobody can verify anything.

I’m sure you can generate a unique token for a non-unique artwork.

I mean, I can just make an NFT now with a screenshot of someone else’s NFT.

Yep - I can make an NFT of a CryptoPunk, but since the addressable hash of my contract will be different, probably nobody would see value in acquiring my tokens. Social consensus (and, by extension, tooling and network effects) have built around the original crypto punk contract address, which seems to give it value over any other copy contracts that might be deployed after the fact.

So the real value of an NFT isn’t in the mechanism at all.

The mechanism is extremely simple, see [1].

The value lies in the token which - much like art - is worth whatever somebody is willing to pay for it.

[1] https://gist.github.com/mattdesl/c1eff283039b73a093c7777d112...

So it’s replicating the worst thing about the art market — the speculation and nonsensical pricing. But without the best thing about the art market — actually owning a piece of art.

With a thin veil of technobabble.

That may be one view. Another view is that it allows artists across the globe a digital-first mechanism to distribute and earn revenue on their digital artwork. See Hicetnunc for example.

This view is wrong. The NFT isn't the artwork. Distributing an NFT of the artwork achieves nothing in terms of distributing the artwork. Meanwhile getting paid in return for nothing is called "a donation", and you don't need an NFT for that either.

You can argue the same about a signed print of a digital illustration, photograph, etc. See here:

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

The entire premise of this article is that a digital signature is analogous to a handwritten signature on a photograph print, in that it turns a mass-produced print into a unique (i.e. non-fungible) object. This is wrong. Digital signatures are themselves fungible, since they are made of digital information. You cannot attach something fungible to something that is also fungible and expect that the result will be non-fungible. A digital signature is like a rubber stamp, not like a handwritten signature.

You seem very certain that a cryptographic signature can never replace a handwritten pencil scribble to enable scarcity and provenance (and non-fungibility). Artists using this technology are less certain. We will see what happens over time.

I have no evidence that most people using this technology are artists.

Everything is worth whatever somebody is willing to pay for it.

Generally (with NFTs), the supposed 1-1 mapping of art piece (or other artifact) and token happens on meta-level, right? So for sure, an artist can issue many tokens that represent the same art piece (and don't tell me the token is a hash of the image or whatever; it still can be sold on a different technology, or noise can be added to the image, et cetera). Because of this object-/meta-level mix up, it seems that NFTs guarantee pretty much nothing, they are just great at facilitating speculation, because the whole thing takes so little effort...

If the person/entity minting them commits to only using a particular address/public-key when minting (such that only ones from that address would be regarded as legitimate), then one can still check all the transactions they’ve made, and, well, if they mint tokens for other files which you don’t know what those files are, and have no way to retrieve them, then yes, you could be uncertain as to whether or not those are essentially the same image but with some noise added.

If there is a list of what all those files are though (maybe the files are all available for download on the author’s website? Doesn’t have to be the author’s, just any source providing each file. Doesn’t need to be a trusted source either.), you could check that none of them are essentially the same.

Though, the reliance on all the images being publicly available, does go against what it seems like the way many seem to want to use NFTs,

and so for the use cases which are completely incompatible with all the images being publicly available (e.g. people who want to be the only person who has access to an image), your point is entirely valid, and there is presumably no way to achieve the use-case that those people seem to want.

As for “what about on other technologies” I think this fits under the “the author should just make well-known all the [address+chain combos] they issue from, and instruct people to treat as illegitimate any which is issued from a [chain+address combo] that is outside of this well-known list as illegitimate” thing.

It doesn’t seem like that serious of an issue?

That being said, I don’t see much point to tokens like these. I’m just talking about "what can be done under different goals + assumptions" .

He argues just a few sentences further down that the same is true for on-chain NFTs.

No, he is mixing up two distinct things. One is trusting the artist (to be honest and manage their career, in the widest sense).

The other is trusting that out of hundreds of people who owned this artwork before, everyone deleted their signature file.

This model does not track ownership and therefore does not solve the usecase that an NFT is solving.

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