NFTs are a useful mechanism for the digital art medium, I hope they come to be seen in that light a bit more and a bit less as valuable in and of themselves because of the mechanism.
Take a painting. You have to stand in front of it to truly appreciate it. A pic won't do it.
So the buyer of the painting has an exclusive asset which produces returns in terms of appreciation but also periodic fees when they lend it to museums.
NFTs have nothing of the sort because the enjoyment is essentially the same between owning it and right clicking it. In order to mimic the real world enjoyment you'd have to find a way to immerse the asset in a virtual world in which avatars pay for the privilege of seeing/using that art content.
The NFT maybe here, but the virtual world , not yet.
When buying an NFT you are essentially betting that society would come around to equate "right-clicking" with stealing.
And that would employ the same social and technological resources to prevent right-clickers to do their bidding as it does today to prevent thief from stealing paintings from museums.
Let's be real. AP, AFP, Reuters and Getty try to protect their images by charging for the full resolution pics .
People will gladly use the 580x830 instead of the pricy 5800x8300.
Brands which have been fighting this fight since the 90s such as Ray-Ban, LVMH, Gucci...they all fail to block counterfit physical products from being shipped from China.
What chances does one have to have IP laws be enforced on the internet....
Fraudulently minted NFTs have been taken down (at least from marketplaces) as well.
Stealing the painting = hacking the wallet/private key to transfer the NFT
Taking a picture of the painting = right clicking
Absolutely not.
A pic won't ever provide you the same satisfaction as standing in front of a painting, that's an innate characteristic of paintings.
Right clicking a JPG , saving it on your laptop and looking at whenever you want gives you the exact same satisfaction as paying 100k USD for the work of art.
Matter of fact it gives you way more satisfaction, because you got for free what a fool paid 100K to obtain.
The real world equivalent would be finding a perfectly conserved Banksy in an abandoned barn, keeping it for a while and then selling it.
You get to enjoy it for free and the buyer has to pay you 6 figures.
Thing is you don't have to be extremely lucky to right click, you only have to know how to use your thumb.
In conclusion I'd point out that even without NFTs , there is no market for JPG pictures, exactly because they can be replicated very easily and potentially an infinite amount of times.
The most famous JPG ever is "the Afghan girl" by McCurry. The original sold for 62,000 EUR.
https://tvpworld.com/50367201/iconic-afghan-girl-photo-sold-...
Nobody sane pays for JPGs because they are very easy to replicate.
Paintings , on the other hand are not.
That seems a bit handwavy to me. Apparently some museums don't even put originals on display, only a replica (due to conservation/vandalism concerns). Maybe that means that the "satisfaction" you get is purely placebo? In other words, it's the same painting for all intents and purposes (to your amateur eye), and the "satisfaction" you're getting is some vague notion that this particular painting is the original. Does this start sounding like NFTs to you?
Say a museum has one original and 4 copies of a painting. That's 1:4.
With JPG it can potentially be 1:∞
In other words you have to go to that particular museum to see the painting , and everybody knows that you have to go there, there is a bottleneck in the both the quantity and quality of copies of the original, and it's very tight, matter of fact social, logistical and common sense factors limit the capability of copying the painting in 1:1 fashion just to the museum . That's in order to protect from vandalism and theft.
And the beauty of the physical world is that the copy is never 1:1
It's 1:0,9999999999999 and maybe cannot be picked up, but again: common sense.
As a matter of common sense everybody knows that the physical world can NEVER be exactly replicated in a 1:1 fashion.
With JPG pictures instead everybody knows that they can be copied at will, there is no bottleneck and also for pics (unlike painting) it makes no difference if they are visualized on screens or printed.
Finally everybody can make their 1:1 copy and it's identical . And the whole process can be repeated an infinite amount of times and it will ALWAYS be exactly as the original.
That sounds like a lot of words to justify why viewing that particular painting has value, even though you can see a replica and probably wouldn't notice the difference. All the value of viewing the original in the museum comes from the social clout that you get from being a cultured person that can afford an european vacation to visit the louvre. That sounds a lot like NFTs. Here's a quote from another NFT article:
>“This is a great example of right-clicker mentality,” Midwit Milhouse said on Twitter. “Sure, you can make your own gold-coated steak for 65GBP, but then you don’t have the satisfaction, flex, clout that comes from having eaten at Salt Bae’s restaurant. The value is not in the cost of the steak. Go ahead, make yourself a gold-coated steak at home. Post a picture of it on Instagram. See how much clout it gets you. Salt Bae’s dish costs around 1500GBP because people want to pay 1500 GBP to show off that they can afford to pay that much. It’s all about the flex.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dgzed/what-the-hell-is-righ...
>It's 1:0,9999999999999 and maybe cannot be picked up, but again: common sense.
>As a matter of common sense everybody knows that the physical world can NEVER be exactly replicated in a 1:1 fashion.
Sounds like you're trying to hide behind the 0.00000000001%. In other words, the replica might be 0.99999999999% similar, but people are apparently willing to pay millions for the remaining 0.00000000001%. To me, that's as irrational as placing value in the remaining 0% that NFTs represent.
This is wrong. People (as in regular people) aren't willing to pay millions, they are willing however to spend 20/50/100 dollars to go an see it in person at the museum vs. googling an image of it. All for that 0.0000000000001%
Consumers decided that for some pieces of art it is worth to spend some amount of dollars to go and see it once, in person and get that final 10th decimal place.
This is what in turn gives the painting value , and then wealthy individuals and institutions are willing to pay millions, because the painting produces revenues for the museum.
Sometimes it's owned directly by the museum, while sometimes it has a private owner who lends it to the museum and takes a cut.
"regular people" aren't paying hundreds of thousands for NFTs either.
>they are willing however to spend 20/50/100 dollars to go an see it in person at the museum vs. googling an image of it. All for that 0.0000000000001%
>Consumers decided that for some pieces of art it is worth to spend some amount of dollars to go and see it once, in person and get that final 10th decimal place.
Are they really ascribing value to the remaining 0.0000000000001%, or just to the vague notion that the painting in the museum is the original? I alluded to this before, but the alternate explanation is that they're not going to the museum because it offers the best fidelity, they're doing so for other reasons (eg. social clout). See also: people going to concerts, even though listening at home has superior fidelity (for one, there aren't hundreds of people screaming in the crowd).
>This is what in turn gives the painting value , and then wealthy individuals and institutions are willing to pay millions, because the painting produces revenues for the museum.
This totally fails to explain paintings that are in private collections. Why do rich people pay millions for original paintings, just to hang inside their house?
What % of social media posts are museum oriented? We are talking 0 percent.... it's only a matter of seeing what's the first decimal point.
Regardless, it seems to me that there is a lack of common sense among the NFT crowd, and you seem to be somehow on the same wavelenght.
The vast majority of people who right-click an NFT image have subsequently no desire to acquire said NFT. And if a museum were to start charging for an NFT collections, people would not pay to get in.
The vast majority of people who right-click an image of the Mona Lisa do have a desire to one day go out and see the painting in person as they think it would be a cool thing to do and would pay for it.
There is a clear difference, at least for people who have common sense.
Given that museums have existed for hundreds of years and have generated trillions of dollars in revenues, the burden of the proof is on NFTs, not the other way around.
When NFTs museums (either virtual or real) will open up then it will be possible to make a comparison.
I don't go on social media so I can't really comment on that. That said, I do see a lot of people taking pictures of paintings (mostly famous ones) at museums. What gives? If they wanted the best fidelity recreation of the picture, they'd be better off going to wikimedia commons and getting something that a professional photographer took. Maybe they're after the sentimental value, in both the case of going to the museum in person, and taking the picture. It's definitely not for the remaining 0.0000000000001%, especially when you consider that you need x-rays or radiocarbon dating to tell a fake from the original.
>Regardless, it seems to me that there is a lack of common sense among the NFT crowd, and you seem to be somehow on the same wavelenght.
What's your point? That because I'm "somehow on the same wavelenght" as "the NFT crowd", that I have "lack of common sense" by association?
>The vast majority of people who right-click an image of the Mona Lisa do have a desire to one day go out and see the painting in person as they think it would be a cool thing to do and would pay for it.
>There is a clear difference, at least for people who have common sense.
>Given that museums have existed for hundreds of years and have generated trillions of dollars in revenues, the burden of the proof is on NFTs, not the other way around.
So your point is... that NFTs are a bad investment if you plan to start a museum and charge patrons? I don't think that's really controversial, or anywhere close to what we were discussing. Are you trying to use "can charge people to see it" as a proxy for "has value"? While I do agree that's one way to objectively value works of art, it isn't hard to see that's not the only source of value. Like I mentioned before, private collections goes totally against this.
No. I said "wavelenght", not "same as".
It seems to me you are looking at the price action of some NFTs, the price action of the ETH token and the volumes on the auctions houses built on top of Ethereum, plus the social hype being generated. And using those as your starting point you are trying to walk your way backwards towards pointing at some sort of underlying value.
I honestly don't think you'd be trying to find value in NFTs if not for the price action and volumes going amber red to bring the phenomenon to your attention.
It's FOMO-lite, the same that had Stanley Druckenmiller buy the very top of the Nasdaq in 1999, back when he was running Soros' Quantum Fund.
Sometimes no matter how hard you look there is no underlying value beneath the price action, there is no reason or rhyme as to why people become maniac about stuff, and feel like they MUST have it.
Tulips, beanie babies, NASDAQ in 1999, NIKKEI in 1997, Real Estate in 2007...
...like people paying millions for an original painting rather than getting a replica made for $100k (or whatever) for their private collection? My point isn't that NFTs have underlying value (whatever that means), just that they're valuable in approximately the same way that original paintings have value over replicas. I'll quote an earlier comment here:
>But you still paid a few million more for the original painting, even though it's virtually indistinguishable from a replica. It's more helpful to think of an original painting as a bundle of two things:
>Original painting = thing that looks like a painting + bragging rights
>An NFT is just the "bragging rights" part of the original painting, and the JPG that anyone can access is the "thing that looks like a painting ".
The official art market action amounts to 50B/yr. Of the aforementioned figure the vast majority of that is then sent on loan to museums and thus produces revenues for the museum and passive income for the owner.
Let's say 5B is the amount that people pay yearly for paintings they intend to keep in their private collection.
Let's further say the average amount that a collector spends in a year to enrich their private collection is 5M.
5B/5M = 1000 individuals.
Of course we are 8 billion humans, you'll always find 1000 individuals who behave in a way that you cannot explain logically or whose actions leave you scratching your head.
> Original painting = thing that looks like a painting + bragging rights
> An NFT is just the "bragging rights" part of the original painting, and the JPG that anyone can access is the "thing that looks like a painting "
A person with common sense would not even think about splitting the experience and the bragging rights, or even re-arrange something as self evident and self-explanatory as watching a painting in a museum.
You are trying to come up with this explanation in order to justify NFTs and their price action, pretending to know what goes on in the minds of people who buy them, to further reverse-engineer the value that they see in them.
NFTs buyers not only aren't doing all the above reasoning, but they hardly know why they buy them.
In conclusion, there are some things that are just self evident, and need not to be explained. Even in the case of a person spending millions for paintings which will never be sent to museums.
If a common sense person is invited to some rich person mansion and are shown a private collection of real paintings worth millions the thought that come up is inevitably: "A hard working rich person who likes expensive stuff and is not afraid to spend to enjoy life"
If on the other hand a common sense person is invited to some crypto-rich person mansion and are shown a collection of hashes and blockchain transactions pointing to a JPG on twitter or imgur....the thought that comes up is inevitably: "A stoner cryptobro who won the lottery and now is wasting away their money paying 6 figures for some monkeys JPGs"
Source? Moreover, considering that museums need donations/government subsidies to stay afloat, I doubt "making money" is the primary reason people/institutions buy art.
>5B/5M = 1000 individuals.
>Of course we are 8 billion humans, you'll always find 1000 individuals who behave in a way that you cannot explain logically or whose actions leave you scratching your head.
So your point of contention is that NFTs have too many people relative to the amount of people buying expensive original art?
>A person with common sense would not even think about splitting the experience and the bragging rights, or even re-arrange something as self evident and self-explanatory as watching a painting in a museum.
I'm seeing a lot of words devoted to dismissing my comment, but many words being devoted to explaining why my comment is incorrect. Declaring "self evident and self-explanatory" does not make for an argument. I don't see how "a person with common sense" would buy your explanation of people paying millions for the imperceptible 0.000000001%, so they can enjoy it more.
>In conclusion, there are some things that are just self evident, and need not to be explained. Even in the case of a person spending millions for paintings which will never be sent to museums.
>If a common sense person is invited to some rich person mansion and are shown a private collection of real paintings worth millions the thought that come up is inevitably: "A hard working rich person who likes expensive stuff and is not afraid to spend to enjoy life"
>If on the other hand a common sense person is invited to some crypto-rich person mansion and are shown a collection of hashes and blockchain transactions pointing to a JPG on twitter or imgur....the thought that comes up is inevitably: "A stoner cryptobro who won the lottery and now is wasting away their money paying 6 figures for some monkeys JPGs"
The thing that ties both of them is spending money on a non-productive asset, which serves as a costly signal[1] of your wealth. Old paintings definitely have more awareness than NFTs, I'm not going to dispute that. However, all that means is that old paintings are more mature than NFTs, not that paintings are valuable and NFTs are completely worthless. Before archeology was a thing, ancient artifacts probably had zero value beyond scrap, but nowadays there's a thriving market for it. Maybe NFTs will turn out to be like beanie babies, but maybe they'll turn out to be like artifacts?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory#Human_honest...
For a common sense person only an expensive painting serves as tool to signal one's wealth.
An expensive NFT is a tool to signal one's foolishness. For all practical purposes it's like paying 6 figures for some bottled air sampled in Times Square and trying to use it as a way to impress people.
You'd get a huge minus both in your wallet as well as your social status. You could be living in Versailles but if you get to the last room and show people your collection of hashes....then you throw all the other 1000 gold plated rooms straight into the bin and your guests will laugh at you.
That is of course unless you preselect people who hang out in /r/NFTs and only ever invite them over. There's only 237k of them.
Let's say 25% would endorse spending 6 figures for an NFT and still think highly of you. So that's 60k people.
You have to preselect among 60k people on the planet, whereas the expensive paintings would get you the admiration of each and every of the 8.2 billion people. No preselection needed.
Again: Common sense.
People who collect them can explain to you what they see in them, and you can agree that you also see it or you don't.
There's little to no point in continuing beyond that.
The physical world simply cannot be replicated 1:1 .
It can be 1:0,99999999999 but it cannot ever be 1:1
Also it very costly to replicate a painting, whereas saving a JPG is essentially free and can be done infinite amount of times.