Databases encourage centralisation of power to developer/owners, with aggressive bent towards monopoly. Blockchain encouraged opennesss and portability. It’s simply a better social contract.
Databases encourage centralisation of power to developer/owners, with aggressive bent towards monopoly. Blockchain encouraged opennesss and portability. It’s simply a better social contract.
- make money off digital art in a global permissionless market (didn’t exist before) - easily charge royalties in perpetuity for resale of their art
Some aspects of DeFi - the ones that were properly audited and whose function is not a ponzi derivative - work absolutely fine. Compound, AAVE, Uniswap, Curve Finance.
Can they really? The art itself is not recorded on any blockchain. Just the link and/or hash can be stored there because of costs. Both can change without noticeably modifying the art. Thus a working legal system is still required and blockchain does not provide any meaningful benefit over a standard contract.
The art being recorded on a blockchain or not doesn’t matter - what you’re selling in an NFT is a signature not the art. An NFT is a decoupling of the art and the signature, because digital art is infinitely reproducible. The NFT introduces scarcity - but only for an authentic signature (which can’t be faked) not the digital art itself.
And want you’re saying is not necessarily true - my understanding is that some markets do place the art on IPFS, but I’d have to look into it’s exact working to know for sure.
But I believe for the old Hic et Nunc that was the case.
In this particular case - it is better than a standard contract because the previous method of authenticating work is hugely expensive for the artist and has immense gatekeeping. Minting an NFT takes 30 seconds. Getting you work into an art gallery takes months if not years of battling and requires other people to make the decision whether they want your art in their sales space or not. In crypto you can just do it yourself and figure out your own personal authentication method (usually twitter).
There’s a reason NFTs are easy and gallery placements are hard: one has value
As you said NFT is just a signature so how do the NFTs solve the problems of authenticating art?
https://fnftf.io/?results=982ce32629ebcbd7dce30baf2f84adafb5...
So there you have it - dozens of copies of the same art across the same chain and other chains plus dozens of other low-quality "remixes" that don't qualify as an original work. Nothing in the space (other than solutions like mine) do anything to authenticate the content in any form or fashion.
In fact, on FNFTF we make a pretty big deal of searches that only return one result (original and unique content) because it doesn't happen very often:
https://fnftf.io/?results=81cd744ab237b0eb68fbe1702c82db9cdf...
Shameless plug I suppose but there isn't anything else publicly available that shows just how bad and widespread this issue is.
The problem of authenticating art before this, for a digital artist, was that you HAD to have a gallery do it with you in order for it to work. No one trusted anyone, not even the artist, to say that there would only be "10 copies" of that digital artwork, since they couldn't do any follow through if the artist decided to say there were ten copies but sold 10 000. This was an issue with digital art that was previously only solved by the reputation of X art gallery - the art gallery would say - "we certified only 10 copies, and our reputation as a gallery protects this artwork from being certified again".
With NFTs you just do it. The problem was gatekeeping, the need for an "authority" to certify your signatures on digital art, and the process involved. NFTs are a click of a button and a few dollars to mint.
Does that answer your question?
> With NFTs you just do it.
No, you can't. Anybody can go right now and mint their own series of BAYC or any artwork they want. The blockchain will allow it. It won't even care if you mint it against the exact same data, because as far as I know nothing in the blockchain cares that there's more than one NFT pointing to the same URL, or pointing to an URL that resolves to content bit-by-bit identical to something somebody else already minted.
The only guarantee you can have is an extremely weak one, in the form of "this precise collection, with this precise unique ID is set in stone". That's not going to stop anybody from creating another one 5 minutes later.
You can create your own BAYC, scammers do it all the time but they aren’t too successful because it’s trivial to see it came from an unknown wallet.
Sure, you could infringe on the copyright of a non-crypto artist and pretend to be the artist in an NFT marketplace, but then it becomes a normal copyright claim
NFTs don’t replace the legal system, they simply remove the need for the artist to be trusted by a third party (an art gallery, etc) before they can authenticate their own work to a buyer.
Note that the parent seems to be arguing something in the system removes the need to trust in the artist, that it stops the artist from creating more items than they promised. But how? Nothing stops the artist from creating a second wallet, or a second collection.
> NFTs don’t replace the legal system, they simply remove the need for the artist to be trusted by a third party (an art gallery, etc) before they can authenticate their own work to a buyer.
I don't see how. How do I know that a given wallet ID is connected to the right person? OpenSea or whoever just takes the place of the gallery, and is effectively in charge of answering takedown requests.
However, it also makes detecting counterfeits trivial. So trivial that the consumer can detect it using their own devices and freely available wallet software. No need for special skills or trust anchors like appraisers (other than the public blockchain and public standards).
This isn’t a complete solution for scams because most people don’t realize how trivial it is to check before they buy. I believe the remaining problems are in usability and education problem. The tech does lower the barrier to achieving a safer ecosystem.
We could have a healthy debate over whether the tech solved the hard side or the easy side of the problem.
Only so long that the authentic source is present. You can detect the authentic BAYC because BAYC has a large presence and everyone knows their wallet ID.
Now let's say I take a photo, and you find a NFT for it on OpenSea. How do you know if it's authentic?
If you do, then I can trivially verify that you are the minter.
Crucially, the person that has the incentive to mint (the artist) also has all they need to establish the provenance of the photo.
No 3rd parties, no specialized tools/skills.
As a buyer I have to have some compulsion to buy. If that is not “I want to buy an authentic piece tied to an artist” NFTs probably aren’t for you.
With NFTs I can start at either the artist or the piece and trivially connect to the other.
NFTs don’t solve for discovery.
Nor do they provide a root of trust for artist identity. At best they can provide information to some sort of identity system but NFTs by themselves are not a complete solution for that.
As an artist who wants to sell an NFT, the onus is on you to broadcast your presence/address so that your buyers can check provenance. Post it on your Instagram maybe. It doesn’t have to be magical.
I don't mean that in a dismissive way, I actually mean why is authenticity important or even desirable when using a medium that allows for infinite copies at near-zero marginal cost?
It's just not the right medium for it. It would be like expecting to be able to digitally transfer a statue.
In short, people care about provenance. NFTs guarantee provenance for data, even if the process of "attaching" it to a jpg or whatever is a bit clunky. I don't understand why people care so much about provenance, but they do, and NFTs provide a partial solution.
No it doesn't. Your claim was that NFTs make authenticating art easier. What you wrote has nothing to do with art authentication.
Basically I can take some digital art made by somebody else and be the first to release an NFT of it. What now? How does an NFT help us here?
Doing that previously required an art gallery to certify the signature. That’s easier in NFTs.
curl https://match.tovera.com/api/v0/stats/nft/storageMethods
[ { "storage": "https", "ratio": "0.39163250000000000000", "counted_at": "2022-08-20T05:55:01.164Z" }, { "storage": "ipfs", "ratio": "0.58654950000000000000", "counted_at": "2022-08-20T05:55:01.164Z" }, { "storage": "unknown", "ratio": "0.00090250000000000000", "counted_at": "2022-08-20T05:55:01.164Z" }, { "storage": "chain", "ratio": "0.01584000000000000000", "counted_at": "2022-08-20T05:55:01.164Z" }, { "storage": "http", "ratio": "0.00507550000000000000", "counted_at": "2022-08-20T05:55:01.164Z" } ]
2% on chain (almost all SVGs), 60% on IPFS, and 40% on HTTPS (total above 100% because I rounded).
Maybe there's some legitimate business happening in the art NFT space, but if so, it's a drop in an ocean of fraud.
I'm hoping a technical solution appears soon for fraud. NFT fraud is no different from a person on the street doing a high quality print of someone else's artwork, and unlike that situation, a technical solution for NFT fraud is conceivable.
An argument that Beeple's huge sale was somehow not legitimate: https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beepl...
Hi. Artist here. I have yet to actually see any example of this occurring with a piece of NFT art. Do you have an example of an NFT that is actively collecting royalties for the artist via resale?
My company is one of the largest NFT companies. This is one of our projects. Millions of dollars in secondaries on OpenSea and our hosted marketplace at https://Nickelodeon.xyz/
We collect all royalties and remit payment to the rights holders which include all artists and creators with residuals on Rugrats, of which there are many. They get their check quarterly along with all the other payments (movies, tshirts, video games, etc.)
This isn’t exactly rocket science
So tell me, please, exactly how "blockchain" is bringing "decentralization" to the art field. I am all ears.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how all of this works and have a sneering, dismissive affect because this is something you don’t understand embraced by people who don’t care what you think.
FYI I am an author of this standard. It is widely supported across the ecosystem https://royaltyregistry.xyz/
My company doesn’t care where our NFTs travel or trade on. We get our royalty regardless.
So how is this an improvement over what we have right now? If the buyer and the seller may wish to do so, out of the goodness of their hearts, they can always send part of their sale price to the artist. So why are NFTs necessary in any way, if you cannot programmatically enforce it? (And you never can, the reason of which you already know: if I wish to do so I can make a transfer between my two wallets and a sale look exactly the same.)
At which point do these selective, and potentially intentional misleading claims about NFTs go from ignorant to fraudulent? Especially when you may stand to earn a lot by making people believe in your misleading claims?
https://hackernoon.com/enabling-nft-royalties-with-eip-2981
ERC721, 1155 & 2981 together act as a toolkit for the encoding of royalty administration.
For example, if an NFT collection owner only implemented one of Rarible’s royalty distribution schemes mentioned above, another marketplace that’s not aware of that interface can simply call the common registry’s getRoyaltyView function. It tries to query all known royalty interfaces on the token contract and translates any response to a commonly useable result.
Collection owners who haven’t put any royalty signaling scheme into their contract can deploy an extended “override” contract and register it with the common registry. This registration method will ensure that only collection owners (identified by the owner public member) can call it
The Rarible exchange contract supports all kinds of external royalty interfaces, among them two that Rarible defined themselves, being an early player in the NFT space:
For example, if an NFT collection owner only implemented one of Rarible’s royalty distribution schemes mentioned above, another marketplace that’s not aware of that interface can simply call the common registry’s getRoyaltyView function. It tries to query all known royalty interfaces on the token contract and translates any response to a commonly useable result.
Collection owners who haven’t put any royalty signaling scheme into their contract can deploy an extended “override” contract and register it with the common registry. This registration method will ensure that only collection owners (identified by the owner public member) can call it
```function royaltyInfo(uint256 _tokenId, uint256 _salePrice) external view returns (address receiver, uint256 royaltyAmount);```
The interface also completely works off-chain, so marketplaces that trade assets on alternative infrastructure can still query the creator fee without knowing anything else besides the interface signature of the EIP-2981 method.
PaymentSplitters: Sending NFT Royalties To More Than One Receiver.
Open Zeppelin's PaymentSplitter primitive allows setting up individual split contracts that keep funds safe until their payees claim them, and their receive function requires the bare minimum of gas to run. NFT collection builders can create an inline PaymentSplitter containing the wanted list of beneficiaries and their respective share amounts and let their EIP-2981 implementation yield the address of that split contract.
The artist got 0.21 ETH in the transaction despite not actually having a direct role in the sale.
Here is that sale transaction https://etherscan.io/tx/0xcd157ff73439e20903a8573ef2a280571a...
Here is the artist’s wallet https://etherscan.io/address/0x4de5ae339b406a8cd5037e9138a62...
I just picked a random entry, I don’t know this piece or artist. There are a lot of examples easily found on the major markets (opensea is one such market)
if ur a coder go check out the openzeppelin nft contract and find the function used for transfer of ownership. and look up the "payable" and payment functionality in solidity. if not then youll never understand what im saying anyways hahahaha. base concept though is correct. royalties are contractual, settable, and enforced by the contract. no way around them when theyre there
What I mean by “less terrible” is socially, not technically.
Centralised datacenter based development leads to digital feudalism, where the owners of the datacenters take control of the “digital land” and build moats around them (often fake, imaginary - see how text messaging has no interoperability anymore when 10 years ago it did)
In blokchain / decentralised databases development this is not possible - people can always access the data that’s on chain, and they can extend your code, see it, change it (depending on the license even copy it and just make a slightly different product, a la Uniswap V2 and Sushi Swap). This leads to a real free market for applications, instead of the digital feudalism that naturally results from centralised data centers.
Doesn't that have heavy privacy implications? Or is this a solved problem the solution to which doesn't get much publicized?
The potential dystopia is that crypto can lead to something like a digital society that’s completely naked to the nation state and everyone knows what everyone else has done, forever, always. Every transaction, movement and digital app usage would be in a transparent public ledger with everyone’s IDs attached to it.
It’s not a good scenario and which is why I feel like any idea that CBDCs are a good idea seem delusional.
Note that I'm not referring to the "morals" of doing this, my question is pragmatic.
- Why will say, a Facebook do this with "decentralized data"? - How do they pay their bills, what monetization structure do you envision? - Will people pay for something they have always had for free? It won't be a nominal amount since they have to bear the costs of running the service, there's no subsidization.
On monetisation structures - no idea, the only thing blockchain does is build a permissionless system where people will be able to experiment wildly with different models. Like Jobs said when he launched the iPhone “I’m excited about the stuff we don’t know about” more than what’s out there now (Ethereum being at best now a rough Beta project).
Certainly the monetisation of digital art has changed a lot of what some of my favourite 3D artists have been doing - they no longer compete for likes on Instagram (worthless) but actively promote their NFTs from which they can make good money out of. They are producing the exact same kind of output - digital art - but NFTs are quietly taking over the whole space and changing the whole economic structure.
People pay for inherently worthless NFTs with inherently worthless tokens, so they're not making good actual money unless they happen to cash out on an upswing.
How do you figure? Skilled developers have struggled to efficiently scale an application from one to two rack servers connected with Infiniband, never mind a hodgepodge of heterogeneous hardware and WAN interconnects running a distributed VM. There is nothing in blockchain (nor immutability generally) that actually addresses the underlying issues here, and if anything I would expect the requirement to cryptographically validate all data committed to the chain to make inefficiencies related to synchronization orders of magnitude worse, not better.
I agree of course it makes order of magnitude slower. The point is - how long until this slow is good enough to perform immensely useful things, with a better distribution of wealth generation than the current datacenter model?
I would say in the next 5 years we’ll start seeing breakthrough apps.
Like I said above I don’t expect everything ever to go on chain in the near future, you can have very useful apps that only touch on chain for the truly necessary. Even doing the “truly necessary” was painful until very recently, but now with Ethereum Layer 2 solutions, Algorand, Polkadot and Solana, it’s becoming more and more accessible over time.
We're nearing the limits of physics already. I do expect hardware to get much faster still, but not forever and not as fast as now.
> I agree of course it makes order of magnitude slower. The point is - how long until this slow is good enough to perform immensely useful things, with a better distribution of wealth generation than the current datacenter model?
I think really never. Because the rest of the world doesn't sit idle, and most anything can be done the traditional way.
You could pay huge $$$ to create a smart contract on ETH, or you could get more power than any normal person could afford on the Ethereum blockchain on the AWS EC2 free tier. If you think paying amounts with a few zeroes in them is a sensible thing, then you have far more computing power available.
I think the only reason to use the blockchain is if you really need the blockchain. And the vast majority of computing doesn't. And as we're seeing, the blockchain is very much vulnerable if the world wants to push it around badly enough.
I agree with you we will use blockchain where it’s necessary, but I suspect that’s a decent percentage of our future digital world.
That's highly arguable. It's a superior social solution if you buy into a very, very specific kind of "social", and are happy with systems that operate within a very limited realm.
Eg, if you like the existence of things like chargebacks, then the blockchain isn't the kind of solution you want.
And you also need for the entire problem to reside inside the blockchain ideally. Blockchains lose any power if they have to interact with the outside world. You can make guarantees around how ETH moves from A to B, but if say, a physical product is involved then the blockchain can't do anything about it.
Right now BendDAO is in trouble because nobody really cares about NFTs anymore, they can't sell the ones they got as a collateral, and already ran out of funds.
Artists on FXhash are selling out editions of 200 in 15 minutes. It’s an incredibly vibrant market and the whole concept of FXhash is a revolution in generative art.
NFTs are not dead.
Here are 3 real artists selling NFTs right now.
Deeway Kwon
https://twitter.com/deekaymotion?s=21&t=ipDuaTxacsrVG2ZqS5Nb...
Kato https://objkt.com/profile/tz1LA28RxLyzg4iV9jxDLrmzgC6WwCHT2f...
Jose Gasparian https://objkt.com/profile/gasparian/created
Most of “web3” is scams, ponzis and foolishness. But NFTs are changing the lives of digital artists everywhere.
Bizarrely this seems to be something that most people at HN are completely alienated from. But NFTs work.
The fact that not everyone is making millions anymore is irrelevant - as a working artist in a cheaper country you can make a decent living if you develop a community. It can also be a very healthy second income.
kato is being followed by 43 people, Jose Gasparian by 24. That's "nobody cares" territory. I've seen not particularly amazing furry artists sign up for a new site and gather 200 watchers in a single day by just posting a couple decent pictures. Both of those people seem to have been around for about a year.
If you look at the lists you posted, nobody's offering anything. kato has a single picture with "offer = 0.30". Gasparian has a single picture with "offer = 5.0".
Okay, let's see what fancy stuff those people own instead:
https://objkt.com/profile/gasparian/owned?sort=lowest_ask:de...
https://objkt.com/asset/hicetnunc/768355
Oh look, in the history they all sold for 3, and now somebody is trying to sell their copy for 500.
Now for kato:
https://objkt.com/asset/KT1C6ikdV1dCEdzfqG1wevsfMtZbP5zr1Tuh...
Same shit, bought a thing for 1.5 trying to resell for 1000.
Look at activity: https://objkt.com/asset/fxhash/1110428
In a single day, a NFT goes from creator through half a dozen owners. Yeah, I don't think those people even look at what they buy, and lots of people own lots of random crap, like barely distinct pictures from the same series.
I don't know what this is, but it's not an art market, because it certainly never occurred to me to buy a picture and then put it for sale again on the same day for a couple dollars more. That's more like using NFTs as money. It could be money laundering, or payments for services, or wash trading, but whatever it is, it doesn't much like an art market to me.
Kato has 4000 followers on twitter https://twitter.com/TrofimovaKato
Jose has 2300 on twitter https://twitter.com/josegasparian
The place where people meet and follow each other on the NFT space is twitter, not OBJKT. OBJKT is just where the art is sold.
Jose has just recently sold out his first piece on FXhash - 200 editions at 2xtz - 400$ - in 15 min.
It's a art market, even if you don't want to see it. I just took two random artists out of a hat that I like.
You're also of course conveniently ignoring DeeKay because he doesn't fit your pattern - he just had a piece recently sell for 1$ million.
Still very, very small potatoes
> It's a art market, even if you don't want to see it. I just took two random artists out of a hat that I like.
No, it's not. It's an art market used as a proxy for something else. I like art. I get reselling it. But when you buy a bunch of stuff and immediately put it back for sale for a few bucks more, that's not art appreciation. In the best case it's arbitrage, in the worst case it's something more sinister.
> You're also of course conveniently ignoring DeeKay because he doesn't fit your pattern - he just had a piece recently sell for 1$ million.
It's very much an outlier yes, so probably something very different.
I don't really buy that this piece makes somebody feel anything worth paying $1M for. Come on, we've been doing this theme for ages. Here's an ad based on that concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brsI6z13Su8 -- it's from 2002.
If somebody has $1M to spend on a single picture, why would they? They could hire a dozen artists for a year. Have them safely work on some sort of masterpieces, or have them at the patron's beck and call to make any random ideas the patron has.
There are reasons to spend $1M on a single art piece, but pretty much none of them have anything to do with the art.
People buying and selling something constitutes a market in general definition but you seem to make the effort to redefine it - in any way that makes it so NFTs will never count.
It's either wash trading, or a scam, or something. I don't understand why you're jumping through all these hoops to convince yourself that this isn't real when I am presenting you evidence that it is, but you seem impossible to convince so I won't try.
Suffice to say I buy and sell art in NFTs using my own money, I have my own NFT collection, and I don't scam people nor do I buy from scammers. That to me constitutes a market.
My views aren't particularly weird and complicated. Let's see, resuming:
* Crypto has very limited applications if any outside of the financial area, and limited even there. We won't be doing general computing on blockchains, we'll be doing extremely limited subset of financial problems, if anything.
* NFTs are a mostly stupid idea.
* NFTs are not about art. They're about money. Art is an excuse and the art attached to a NFT has very little importance.
* NFTs are falling in popularity.
* Crypto and NFT markets are chaotic, full of scams, money laundering and wash trading and in general not worth getting into.
* Pretty much nobody buys NFTs for the art value.
Yeah, there's going to be an exception here and there. But I don't for a second believe that paying a million to claim ownership of a quite banal animation is something that shows art appreciation. I think it's far more likely that account A wanted to transfer $1M to account B.
And geez, why do it on NFT sites if you're in for the art? Buy something from an artist on DeviantArt or FurAffinity or something. You can get amazing art for not very much money at all.
- I agree it will be used on a subset of problems, but I think the digital world will move in that direction. I don't agree that it will only be financial problems, NFTs proved that.
* NFTs are a mostly stupid idea.
Opinion.
* NFTs are not about art. They're about money. Art is an excuse and the art attached to a NFT has very little importance.
Opinion.
* NFTs are falling in popularity.
True, but only because a significant subset (perhaps the majority) of users are only in it for the money (I agree with you there). The ones who are in it to buy art have not left.
* Crypto and NFT markets are chaotic, full of scams, money laundering and wash trading and in general not worth getting into.
This is true.
* Pretty much nobody buys NFTs for the art value.
Not my experience.
That's about all I can say. I hope one day you change your mind. Perhaps when one of your favourite artists drops an NFT? Anyway, glad to have had a civil conversation.
Well, of course it's an opinion. But on the art part there are good reasons to believe I'm right. Do you really think Gasparian's blobs are worth paying for? Why would it even matter who owns which? They all look about the same. I think it's plausible that they're too simplistic to be copyrighted, even.
> That's about all I can say. I hope one day you change your mind.
Why? Why would my opinion matter at all? If the important bit is giving artists recognition and money, why would it matter how I do it?
Now if the important bit is propping up the crypto system, then that makes sense, but then it has nothing to do with the art.
> Perhaps when one of your favourite artists drops an NFT? Anyway, glad to have had a civil conversation.
Why would I buy a NFT from an artist? What does that get me?
If I simply want to view the work, it's already out there. What do I care who it supposedly belongs to?
If it's about giving the artist money, I'd much rather buy a commission, which is far more personal, or just contribute money directly.
If I want the rights to use their work, then I'm much better off doing it the old fashioned legal way. Because that way there's no doubt about what I bought, and I can't lose it if somebody scams or hacks me.
On the topic of Gasparian’s “blobs” the whole point of FXhash is that it’s a generative market - the actual artwork is code, and it generates the blobs according to some rules + some randomness function that’s part of the code - some “blobs” are rarer, some are more common. He’s made them into a limited edition of 200, so there are some rarer than others. But the artwork is not “blobs” but the result of generative code that outputs a result every time you mint an NFT. For generative artists, it’s sort of a way new avenue to explore. I find it really interesting.
This is Gasparian’s work but there are a lot of really interesting examples - generative cityscapes, canyons. I like Gasparian’s work so I bought as many “blobs” as I could. It didn’t cost me much, and yes I think he deserves the money and recognition. I find his work beautiful.
Outside of that I can’t say much!
That's what caused the monkey picture hubbub. Since apparently the monkey made its own picture, nobody has the copyright of that, and it's in the public domain. This was even though the artist tried to make the case that they engineered the situation itself by placing camera equipment such that a selfie was likely to happen.
It's also well established that collection of facts and works devoid of human creativity are not copyrightable. So for instance an alphabetical list of businesses in a given city, or feeding a classical painting through a scanner are not copyrightable.
So there's a very plausible argument to be made that unless a human is heavily involved in generating the specific artwork, it's just in the public domain. The actual code would be protected, but the randomly generated results are extremely likely to be in the public domain.
Now this is still an area in doubt and I think it's plausible that some of them are copyrightable. If you spent 3 hours trying to get Dalle2 to spit out the exact thing you want, and tweaked stuff a hundred times, that might be enough human input and you might own the copyright of that. But that's just a guess, and so far nobody knows how it will go, and what requirements a court dealing with this issue will devise.
So IMO for the time being artists shouldn't put rely too much on selling generative artwork, because it could well turn out that it'd be completely legal for me to use all the images on FXhash for any purpose I wish without paying a cent for it.