Comment by tomasien | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomasien | Hacker News Reader

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Rare Digital Art / Crypto Collectibles are "assets" on the Bitcoin or Ethereum blockchain that have two qualities:

- They are rare

- They have meta data that associates them with something we would consider "art". That could be a music file, movie, but is most often an image or a "card".

People buy and trade them either to collect them because they think they're cool or to "play" them if they're associated with a game. Some artists create extra incentives involved in owning their art - for example one I know keeps a locked playlist on Soundcloud that only people that own his token can listen to. In all cases, any assets you buy will end up in a "wallet" that you can think of like a trading card binder. This wallet is public, so anyone can see what you own and prove that you own it.

Rare Digital Art takes a lot of forms and is an exploding medium. Rare Art Labs (rareart.io) helps traditional artists make RDA, Spells of Genesis is a card game using RDA, Crypto Kitties is like tamagachis on the blockchain, Rare Pepe Wallet takes the "rare pepe meme" concept from Reddit and makes it real, etc.

I might see how this could work with a movie or music file, but not an image. The premise behind the value is the exclusive ownership of the image. But you can just screenshot it. I don't understand how any notion of "ownership" factors in here.

There are thousands of Van Gogh paintings as digital images on the web. The original is the one with value.

I still don't understand how this creates digital scarcity or rarity. I'm not messing, I really want to understand exactly how 1 copy of a bunch of bits could be worth more than 0.

There are a scarce number of digitally/cryptographically signed copies on the blockchain. The art itself is still infinitely replicable, owning the signed "authentic edition" is not. That does not mean something to everyone but means a lot to collectors and passionate fans.

Yeah but the real one is tangible and not copyable in the same way. Digital copies are exactly the same as each other. The "rarity" is completely artificial and pointless. Everyone has the same desktop picture, but oh boy, I own the digital signature!

Q: In what sense does the "real" Van Gogh painting differ from a good forgery?

A: Otherwise pointless authenticity.

Q: So why do people spend so much effort identifying forgeries?

A: Because people, for some terrifying reason, value otherwise pointless authenticity.

Why assign value to anything other than food and shelter? It's enjoyable, people like it. If that terrifies you the world must be a scary place.

Nailed it - I'm not sure video will be a good use case for RDA although I think there will be some interesting instances.

For example: Sweepers Clock is a video sold as a limited edition art asset today, using a paper contract and traditional auction houses. It's very hacky and buyers often are worried they'll just "print" more copies, but it still sells and has value. I think rare digital art would be perfect for this kind of thing, less so a Hollywood film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXNT4T56EmM

Were you implementing the ERC-721 token standard? This(digital art auctions) was the first application I thought of when I first heard of non-fungible token standards.

That's a complex answer but the easy answer is there are various standards for digital collectibles and based on the type of collectible we'll implement the appropriate standard. ERC-721 is appropriate for "collections" of 1of1 assets.

Follow up if you don't mind, obviously some works of digital art are rather large in terms of file size, iirc tokens are rather limited in the amount of data they're allowed to contain, how are you pairing tokens to assets?

IPFS hashes are stored on chain and the file is stored on the IPFS network as long as someone is swarming it. As a backstop in case no one else is swarming the file, Rare Art Labs keeps a swarm running of all RARE Network assets.

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