If---in the traditional art world---you buy a $35,000 fine art photograph from a limited edition of 10 prints by the photographer, you also trust that the artist will not make a second run of 100 prints. Or if they do, that the second run will be denoted and priced differently, so that the original run retains most of its value.
Thus, its baked into the price; plenty of counterfeits exist, but the "real" one ("this is the one Deadmau5 tweeted about") will be worth the most.
The argument that this is antithetical to the distributed goals of blockchain are missing the point; its a marriage of old-school centralization and new-school peer-to-peer. Centralization is great for some things, like verifiable providence. It's been a negative force in other things, like limiting or taxing access to financial services & marketplaces.
Furthermore, if you're in the camp of "zero centralization"; it's great for that too. Imagine an artist publishing their GPG key, creating an NFT of a piece of art, then signing some part of the content of that NFT with their GPG key.
So, I present GPG signing not really as a novel mechanism for establishing authenticity given a lack of any other method; the NFT itself is the authenticity. Today, zero-trust creators may publish their GPG public key; tomorrow, maybe they publish their address; "the only legit NFTs are the ones minted from this address"; this is cryptographically secure.
But, maybe a creator is more "well known" for their GPG public key, or wants to mint from a large number of addresses for whatever reason. They could sign a phrase which includes the wallet address which minted the NFT; when combined with the verifiable providence blockchain already offers, this is a compelling and secure solution for them.
Blockchain has all the same "zero-trust bootstrapping" problems as GPG does; where does the artist actually broadcast "this is my address", and how can fans know that it was actually the artist who said it? It's something GPG has struggled with for a long time. Ultimately it usually falls back to centralized authority; that doesn't mean GPG doesn't have value beyond the authority who told you "Yeah, this is Deadmau5's public key".
The idea is simply presented more-so as a bridge between the old and the new. Many people here understand what GPG is and why it is valuable, but don't understand how blockchain delivers an extension of that value. GPG is great at asserting authenticity; blockchain extends this and asserts both authenticity and providence ("is it real, and where did it come from?"); this is a critical addition required for a concept of ownership. But blockchain's ability to assert this ends at the blockchain, as you'd expect; the world will still need centralized authorities to jump the gap between the blockchain and a human being.
IF that matters in the context of a given NFT. There are tons of NFTs which created 'virgin value' so to speak; value of thin air. No one cares who minted them; the token itself is what is valuable.
I'm not even saying something like "the artwork is all boring its not unique" or anything, or that someone could copy I it, I mean the seller is literally selling multiple of the exact same artwork.
But if the recipient being unique is all that matters, why have artwork associated with it at all? That's basically just a weird online packaging/box art at that point.
I've just enjoyed watching my Solana go up so that I have a way to make money off of this silliness. Just need to time the exit before the fad goes away.
Also to avoid scams as an investor, you'd typically want to invest in artists with a reputation.
No, you can copy the timestamp as well.
Every token you create gets a unique ID, that only that token has.
So with that in mind, a NFT is as unique as a painting in your example, as a NFT is always "one of a kind".
What is reality anyway? We have a distributed, decentralized database (Ethereum) that people can set/get data in/from. Now we also have a abstraction on top of that that allows us to have unique data. What can we do with this? Fuck should I know, also I don't really care. Think of it what you want.
Have you not heard of this concept? Seems to be a bit of copout to explaining the value of an NFT given an NFT, by it's mere existence, has no bearing on anything outside of a blockchain. But if you are unclear on the concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality
And while it's notable that digital art can be duplicated perfectly and physical art cannot, I don't personally think that matters all that much. People who are buying a Picasso aren't doing so just for the art, they're doing it so they can say they own a Picasso. In the same way you're not buying an NFT for the art itself, you're buying it because it's uniquely identifiable in a way you and others care about.
You own the token as you own an API key for a service, except since decentralized there's no network operator who can revoke your key ("suspend your account") as with, say, centralized SaaS REST APIs.
You're not buying the JPEG, you're buying an API key that happens to be linked to the JPEG.
You can duplicate or send the keys to your house by mail, and if the recipient changes them, you lose physical access.
If a national highway system goes down, your house is still there.
If a digital token network goes down, be it a token-based centralized SaaS company with an API or token-based decentralized blockchain, goes down, your assets go down with it, regardless of legal abstractions.
An NFT is basically like a 'certificate of authenticity' - whether you think it's BS or not depends entirely on who issued it. A item that includes such a certificate from a known reputable source may be extremely valuable to a collector, where-as the regular item may be practically worthless, and that can be true even if nobody can tell the items apart. At the same time, John Doe down the street signing 'certificates of authenticity' doesn't provide any value because nobody cares who John Doe is, in the same way that some random person signing an NFT doesn't automatically make it worth anything since anybody else can just come along an do the same. But if the author of an artwork came by and produced an NFT of it, that's unique in a way that people may care about.
So paintings just “lucked out” and already had a convenient scarce item that interested parties could agree represents the “original act of creation of the work of art,” because the technology to create an exact copy doesn’t exist, and it’s extremely expensive and difficult to create a convincing forgery.
In a similar way an NFT has value based on particular details about the NFT such as the author and database it is in, not just the bytes themselves. You can certainly create the same NFT with a new author, or on a new database, or etc. but it's no longer the same NFT at that point, it's a replica and can be distinguished from the original. And while an NFT published by the author of the art might be a interesting thing to own/control, the same NFT published by a random John Doe doesn't carry the same relevance. And fundamentally you still can't change the properties of the original NFT in the original database.
I think you missed the point, someone has issued the certificate and it only matters if you value that person's or entity's opinion. If you don't then it's just a meaningless piece of paper.
For example, PSA grades playing cards. A rare card that is graded highly by PSA will generally make it much more valuable than an ungraded version of the same card. However, if someone send me a card in the mail and I grade it a 10 and send it back, that means nothing because nobody cares about my opinion on cards.
Similarity, if PSA were to issue NFTs, they would have value specifically because it was PSA who authored the NFTs. I could take the exact same data and author an NFT myself, but nobody would care because they specifically want the one that was created by PSA, and that is something that is verifiable and that I cannot duplicate. They don't want it for any real tangible reason, they want it so they can say "I own an NFT from PSA".
Well it has something written on it, but yes pretty much. If the "somebody" is someone you care about though, then that can make it more than just a piece of paper, in the same way that if you care about the issuer of a certificate then it is more than just a piece of paper. I get the distinction you're trying to make, and I don't think it really matters, but perhaps it was a bad example and autographs would have been a better one.
To be clear, I don't own NFTs, I get the idea but they don't appeal to me. But I also don't own any expensive art either for the same reason, so to each his own. I do own a bunch of trading cards, and I'm sure plenty of people would just view them as pieces of paper. Point being, people value plenty of silly things, NFTs are just one of them.
Generally the content is hosted in IPFS and identified by a content hash which was recorded as part of the transaction which minted the NFT in a blockchain, which makes it somewhere between "difficult" and "impossible" for any third party (or first or second party, for that matter) to replace the content.
Maybe if everyone was really "believing" that ownership really originates from the Ethereum blockchain (just like beliving that strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is a basis for a system of government), then the ownership could be recognized socially without any coertion or violence. But so far the only people really beliving in this system of values are elites and crypto enthusiasts, so if you really are one of those people who want NFTs to be a basis for ownership, you've be better off pandering to the government to enact laws to arrest people for right-clicking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ownership
> Ownership is the state or fact of exclusive rights and control over property, which may be any asset, including an object, land or real estate, intellectual property, or until the nineteenth century, human beings.
In light of this
> In current capitalist societies, ownership of property is fully secured by the military (police) and judicial (law) power of the state.
Any examples of non capitalist societies that actually governed more than just a city for more than just a couple of months where there were no enforcement of exclusive rights over anything?
Because if I can think of none, just for example, USSR would get real pissy real fast if you infringed on the exclusive rights which they thought existed over a whole host of things.
Sure, in most non-capitalist societies people had no exclusive rights to their own labor, or their own persons, but there were still many people who had exclusive rights over things that would be enforced by use of force. And the state did have exclusive rights over the person and labor of their subjects, which is a key differentiation from most "capitalistic societies" as you call them.
Yes, I believe that my statement can be expanded into certain non-capitalist societies also, like in previous instances of feudalism and communism (where the state "owned" everything through military coersion). The reason I've brought out capitalism is because it's the environment in which NFTs were born, and therefore its relationship with it should be talked about it. But what you're talking about has absolutely nothing to do with the main discussion (which is, how state power and ownership is crucially interlinked, and NFT's failure to acknoweledge this is the problem).
NFTs are a world 3 construct (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popper%27s_three_worlds) and has no dependency on any economic system or even society to exist and the problem of using them to represent an ownership relation is not limited to any economic system either, but exists due to factors inherent in both the concept of ownership and what NFTs are. NFTs can't reach from world 3 into world 1 by themselves and this is no more or less a problem in any specific economic system.
What I was talking is: the reaching from world 3 to world 1 (in Popper’s terms) in capitalist societies are often enforced with the absolute power of the state, and “free” markets emanate from that power. NFTs don’t add anything more to this current state of society, since it is just another way of bookkeeping, and the actual reaching from world 3 to world 1 is left unsolved (which for me, how to do this without relying on violence and coercion is the most important question of liberalism, and failure of this will lead to its demise). NFTs and crypto are still exchanged in US dollars, and people always talk about it in how many US dollars it represents. So value is ultimately delegated to the dollar, the dollar which holds its global monetary status via the US’s hegemonic military power, so we’re back to our current problem.
So, do you think NFTs can actually change the current status quo? Does it bring anything new to the equation?
No, it does not change the status quo, and brings nothing new to the equation.
To kind of rephrase what you said slightly: All ownership relations exists in world 3, that is their nature, they can't act in world 1. NFTs don't bring anything to the table here, crypto does not bring anything to the table here. With NFTs, ownership relations is still a world 3 thing, and world 3 things still cannot act in world 1. And no enforcement mechanisms we currently have for ownership relations give any special recognition or consideration to NFTs, blockchain or crypto assets.
The only disagreement we have is that I don't think it makes sense to qualify sentences with "capitalist societies" when the claims they make are more broad. It's a bit like saying "all Furry mammals are characterized by the presence of mammary glands which in females produce milk for feeding (nursing) their young", it may be true, but the word "furry" in that sentence adds negative value:
http://www.biomedicaleditor.com/hedging.html
> To strengthen your argument and increase clarity, limit the number of qualifiers in each sentence to only those necessary for accuracy—the remaining qualifiers will then do their job well.