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.
- 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