NFT royalties were never built into the blockchain, on the way out | Hacker News Reader

NFT royalties were never built into the blockchain, on the way out

axios.com

2 pointsiudqnolq5 comments

Has the usual cryptobabble like "If the coolest creators stop making cool stuff, interest in the NFT scene could dry up. That extreme scenario is unlikely..." but it is new to me that the royalties paid to creators when an NFT changes hands is optional instead of mandatory. That was one of the unique things about NFTs and if they can't do that... What's the point?

No wonder I didn't really understand the NFT concept, nowhere was it told (to me at least) that "...A part of the popular narrative around NFTs was that royalties were built into the operation of the blockchain. This was never true."

It seemed that nobody who wrote an article about them really understood them?

The question I always had was why wouldn't the original author simply create new NFTs out of the same artwork? What would stop them? Or just sell a slight variation of the artwork after running it through a color-filter etc. ?

I mean if selling an NFT was valuable, why wouldn't I just sell more and more of them? Other than that I could pretend and give the impression that there was scarcity when in fact there wasn't. I could stop not selling more of them when I needed more money.

Speculative questions might be answered by looking at the history of signed limited editions?

"One of the main reasons for the development of printmaking [in the 19th century] was the desire of artists to make more money from their work by selling multiple copies"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edition_(printmaking)

There are famous artists that basically ran/run art factories of "assistants" which sounds to me kind of like counterfeiting your own work. I haven't read about it more than superficially, but I think Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons are examples.

P.S. the Wikipedia page above contains the claim that some states regulate limited editions of artwork...

Warhol made silkscreens and had other people pull the prints (not unusual) and was honest about what they were. (Prints Warhol pulled himself are thought on average to be worse quality than those pulled by his staff.)

You can buy a Warhold today for about $100 and that is remarkable for an artists of his stature but he is almost as imitable as Barbara Krueger and even I make wall art that mashed up Warhol with anime characters.

On the other hand, Warhol was known to hire an actor to make public speeches in his name.

I think graphic artists create the original art-work on a metal plate or something and then make 100 prints and then destroy the plates or at least promise never to use them again.

There is some proof of work there. Maybe part of the same idea works with NFTs as well, you must do some work to register your NFT etc.

I wonder if what we need is a block-chain for the actual development of the art. Pieces of art typically don't just appear out of thin air but take many stages to develop. Those stages could be saved into a block-chain and then the whole chain could be sold.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com