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).