The very idea of NFTs aren't a scam, but many of the current manifestations could be described as scams.
It's basically just a next-gen version of the star registry scam that's been going on for decades. [1]
The latter is not extrinsic at all - it's all in the contracts on the blockchain.
I will grant it is slightly possible if we have a data destruction period between now and the 27th century. Claims to property after the nazis were overthrown could often be made by jewish residents with very little proof due to the fact that all the real proof was intentionally destroyed. But even those could end up extremely contentious. You can read up on Jewish Restitution[1] and you'll see a lot of really difficult cases that had to be dealt with.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_claims_for_restitution...
The existence of your stock ownership depends on a legal and social framework to exist. If the government was overthrown and you were exiled tomorrow, you have nothing. If an asteroid destroyed half the earth tomorrow, and you survived, you still have nothing.
You take for granted the systems in which you live and function in. There are many things we "own" and cannot touch, yet they are as real as anything. The money in your bank account is an example of that. It has value, you own it, but if we are stranded on a deserted island with no electricity or wifi, it ceases to exist to us.
That's true for most things we own these days, and it works quite well.
That's a great metaphor, but the issue is that NFTs are an order of magnitude more fake than stocks, money, etc.
Oh, that's the sports collectibles trading card industry.
NFTs on blockchains solve the problem of provenance and permanence.
You need to do a bit of effort and think about why anything is worth anything at all. Why is the Mona Lisa worth millions but a forgery worth nothing, even if they are indistinguishable from one another?
How much is a museum map from the Louvre with directions from the entrance to the current location of the Mona Lisa, signed the museum attendant worth haha.
They are of course distinguishable. One was actually physically created by the artist.
The images the URLs point at are 100% exactly identical, and you do not have the right to the image in question. You may not even have the right to display it to anyone.
You're just buying the plastic sleeves the baseball cards come in without the card itself.
> NFTs on blockchains solve the problem of provenance and permanence.
[edit] Not really no. After all the provenance is on faith that the person who originally sold the NFT is both the original creator of the work (or authorized to sell it) and that they have the legal right to do so, probably, who even knows.
Trust me, the judge is the judge of that, not the blockchain. Blockchains only actually work for concepts wholly encapsulated by the blockchain. Art is not that.
And as for permanence, no, it's just a URL. The contents may disappear, even in IPFS.
Art is represented and encapsulated by data.
The judge of provenance is society: whatever the buyer deems necessary to prove legitamacy is what sets value. An old rolex with papers is worth more than one without. A rolex that can't be identified as authentic by anyone is worth nothing.
An old Rolex with papers is worth more than without, but the papers without the Rolex are worth nothing. In this case you're just buying the papers.
Yes, you're starting to get it. You're not buying art, you're not buying legal rights. If the data was written directly to the blockchain, then it is permanent. But even if it points to some temporary host, big deal, the file itself wasn't the valuable part. Data can endlessly be replicated and rehosted.
It is the genuine provenance of an artist that was bought and traded. It is proof representing a work, whatever that artist declares it to be. They could simply resell it again for all anyone knows, but that would hurt them and devalue all their future work.
All value is abstract.
The papers without the Rolex can be worth anything anyone wants to pay for it. Following that rule I suppose fake papers can even be worth something, but most likely not.
Your blockchain will not be there in the future. Permanence? Not so much.
It is a decentralized network that has faced the test of government, natural disaster, organizational and technical risk, etc.
So no, maybe blockchains won't last "forever", but neither of us enough information to confirm either way. My bet is on blockchains outliving everyone typing on this forum.
Except that nothing about the asset is actually stored on a blockchain.
The Tate is the owner of the following certificate of ownership by Sol Le Witt:
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/lewitt-a-wall-divided-v...
Are they the victim of a scam?
Instead, draughtsmen will simply recreate it according to the instructions of the artist, as given in the diagram, at a new location.
See for example https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/lewitt-wall-drawing-113...:
"Wall Drawing #1136 can be installed, removed, and then reinstalled in another location, as many times as required for exhibition purposes. As such, there can also be periods of time in which the work does not exist in physical form."
For starters, let's take the Autoglyphs (https://www.larvalabs.com/autoglyphs): the smart contract gives a list of instructions for each piece that you can use to draw the final output.
Cool concept or scam?
How is the mode of ownership of this wall drawing different? The physical piece can change or disappear. What matters is who is recognised as the owner of the artwork an immaterial sense, as evidenced by the certificate.
The owner cares about the piece of paper but not because the typography is so sweet. The piece of paper is not the artwork. The piece of paper is a token.
"A glyph can be created by anyone who is willing to donate the creation fee of 0.20Ξ ($769) to our chosen charity, 350.org."
No, the glyph can be created by anyone who runs the code. And the code is publicly available. The "donation" is completely unrelated to the glyph, yet they try to trick you into thinking that both are connected.
The certificate will still be valuable even if the copyright on the work expires. If the artist would work with say WeWork to reproduce this work across their offices, the certificate still has value. The Tate is still able to resell that certificate.
It's actually not clear to me that Sol Le Witts estate could enforce a copyright claim on an "unauthorized reproduction", since describing a drawing in words is not the same thing as actually drawing it. But regardless, the copyright question is entirely incidental.
There is a reason why the guy didn't just drew the damn lines himself, and why his such an influential figure in art history. It's precisely because he intended to interrogate some of these ideas.
Note that even if we suppose your way of thinking about this, in terms of a license grant that will move over to any would-be buyer of this certificate, is the correct one, that means this certificate shown above either a) grants such a license implicitly, or b) a separate license grant is communicated somehow. In both cases, this is still exactly like an NFT, where artists often communicate licenses to buyers of NFT certificates.
https://images.ctfassets.net/662nae7q8cm6/38DaHNDnz0epPreBMr...
That's a signed statement, from the artist, stating that the drawing in question was created in accordance with the instructions.
Does such a certificate have value of its own? It depends on whether somebody is willing to pay for a certificate stating that a particular drawing (which may no longer exist) was created according to the instructions. So, maybe yes, maybe no. I don't know why you think this is important though.
Does a certificate of authenticity make sense in the case of a digital image? No, because we can verify the authenticity ourselves by calculating the MD5 sum of the copy and comparing it to the MD5 sum of the original. We don't need to pay a trusted third party to do that for us, we can do it ourselves for free.
You misinterpret the practical workings there a little bit. The Tate will not need to buy another certificate if they choose to exhibit the drawing once again, by hiring draughtsman to paint it on a wall once more. It doesn't refer to a specific installation. The number of the wall drawing on the certificate refers to the design, not the physical object.
Nevertheless, even with your interpretation, you could ask why a museum would want to pay for an artist to provide this kind of certification.
I'm writing this from Frieze Art Fair. There are a number of video pieces here which you can buy. They'll give you a USB drive. They will pinky swear to only sell one of those, to you. And they'll give you a certificate of authenticity. Its supposed to certify that this isn't just a copy of the video that you made. Which isn't to say that you can't make a copy and give it to your friend. She will own the same bits. But only yours is authentic, because you have that certificate. That is what is meant by authenticity.
It's a system the art world has experimented with for a while. These kinds of certificate-based works don't sell that easily either. Much easier to sell a painting. But it's the same system as an NFT and not more or less scammy than that.
A certificate of authenticity does make absolute sense in the case of physical art (provided that it actually certifies the authenticity of the work, of course), because physical copies are all slightly different. Therefore people may want to tell those that are original, i.e. made by the artist or under their supervision, apart from those that are not. By contrast, there is no such thing as an original copy of some digital information, because a piece of digital information isn't put together by any individual that could claim to be the author of the copy. Even if they could (which they definitely cannot), all copies are identical and impossible to tell apart one from another. Then, what would a certificate of authenticity be certifying exactly? Nothing. It's just a ploy.
A ploy that all actors willingly are signing on to - artists, galleries, and collectors. No one is misunderstanding what is going on. People are selling the certificate on the artificial assumption that it represents the art somehow, but you are buying the piece of paper.
W
> The way The Currency works is that collectors will not be buying the physical artwork immediately. Instead, they will pay $2,000 for the NFT and then have a year to decide whether they want the digital or the physical version. Once the collector selects one, the other will be destroyed.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90657113/damien-hirsts-the-curre...
They agreed that the current manifestation (signed URLs to JPEGs) are scammy, but that is one use of the NFT concept. In gaming, NFTs can represent in-game items with utility and unique attributes that change as you use them. They can be used across multiple games and sold/traded on an open marketplace.
I hear this a lot, but it really makes no sense to me.
An in-game item is really only suited for the game in which it exists. What good is a CoD FN FAL with certain balance, certain damage, certain bullet velocity, certain balance - in Minecraft? Anywhere else really?
Game creators go to extreme lengths to make their games balanced and fun and engaging. Opening up the ability for people to port in legendary weapons from unrelated games seems like the last thing game creators would want, and certainly, it's the last thing I'd want as a player.
Am I missing something? What's the draw?
Then if there's only one source for items, and only one place to use those items, you've got what we call a centralized system. Why would the game creator then want to give away the revenue from such a marketplace to "the blockchain" when they can just do it themselves and have a far more lucrative business model?
I don't think the point is that this is settled and will definitely work, but there are interesting applications for NFTs and games.
More generally, has anyone built an application which accepts, in some nontrivial sense, NFTs generated using another application?
What are the incentives a publisher/developer has for putting anything on a blockchain?
Company B wants nothing to do with Company A's digital assets, and Company A does not want to make transitioning away from their own game easy.
NFTs will never be used in gaming, outside of gimmicks (and all the current attempts talk more about the NFTs instead of any form of actual gameplay.)