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Comment by web4 | Hacker News Reader

> Art certificates, both physical and digital have existed for… ages?

and they are generally pretty crap? easily lost, forgeable, destroyed, manipulated, unrecognized.

typical certs require a centralized "Certificate Provider" who upholds their value, for example a major auction house might distribute a cert when selling a painting. in crypto art there is no centralized authority that maintains the veracity of the tokens as the provenance and ownership lies in the distributed ledger.

for those who wish to achieve similar goals as a digital cert but with more cryptographic robustness and less reliance on a centralized actor, NFT is a fine approach. that it has sales and market mechanisms built in is a bonus and probably the reason for its booming success as a new digital art market.

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> easily lost, forgeable, destroyed, manipulated, unrecognized.

How are NFTs, or any crypto assets, better in that regard?

The independance from a centralized auth (house auction, bank, law court) is rather moot, because that's what you need to have to investigate, solve and guarantee dispute resolutions (lost, stolen, forged, impersonated assets, unfaithful transactions, illegal transactions, etc.).

Moreover, cryptos exchanges today _do_ act as few centralized points of control.

You still can lose NFTs, lose control on them. You can still have your own artwork being minted by someone else, even against your own will (and to control against that abuse, you will need some sort of central authority somewhere).

You can still forge or impersonate artists.

You can manipulate people on their actual value versus the value of the thing they represent (that is, owning an NFT on an artwork today provides no guarantee of owning any right on the artwork itself).

And that's not even taking into account the energy burnt into it.

you can forge a cert or a painting by copying it. a good forgery can be very convincing and requires expert investigation. see Salvator Mundi in which the authenticity of the painting is still not clear despite years of investigation by countless art historians and conservationists.

if you try to copy a token you will end up with a new cryptographic hash and a new history of transactions associated with it. there are countless clones of crypto punks for example, but the only one that has any real traction is the one that has a clear history of transactions associated with its contract hash. anybody who can tell the difference between two strings of characters can detect whether a token is a forgery or not, it does not take an expert.

yes obviously centralized exchanges are centralized, they are not the ones upholding the ledger or crypto art certs. even crypto art platforms like Foundation and opensea do not own or uphold the certs being issued and indexed by their platforms. it is more like the way that google indexes search results, it doesn't own the websites on its search results.

yes impersonation is possible but often easy to detect on-chain. if a supposed notable artist is suddenly minting new work from a public key different than the address they've used in the last two years, suspicion would be warranted.

> anybody who can tell the difference between two strings of characters can detect whether a token is a forgery or not, it does not take an expert.

Yes, but the value is not in the token, it's in the art itself. You don't own anything but the NFT itself, not the artwork it refers to. Artwork that goes public domain 50/75 years+ after the artist death anyway (and is way easier to replicate than physical artwork/copies).

As for exchanges. Banks and auctions do not uphold things either, they're the same kind of operators of principles they don't write, they are merely applying the rule of law and use their credentials for that purpose.

As for impersonation, NFTs-as-certificates are of no impact for notable artists, who already have teams and networks that do this work for them (with old or new techs). Easy/manageable/controllable art certificates really have an impact when available first to small and emerging artists (because that's the crucial when and where they do need this kind of foundations and support for their living).

the value is in the limited edition asset signed and distributed by an artist. you can verify this by taking the Beeple PNG and re-minting it yourself to see if others value it the same way. or you can take any popular artist's or photographer's signed print like Damien Hirst and create a copy without a signature to see if people value it.

banks and CEX both have nothing to do with the topic of certification of art. neither a bank or CEX upholds the cert.

interesting that you say NFT-as-certs have no impact for notable artists yet there are a variety of notable artists using NFT-as-certs. see: Hirst, Koons, Pace gallery all using NFT. the nice thing is that this tech is available to all, whether you are a notable artist like Hirst or just an illustrator or pixel artist, such as @jmw327.

https://twitter.com/jmw327

In less than a century, your Beeple PNG and Hirst photograph will be in the public domain. Free to copy, reuse, whatever, without exclusivity.

But, yes, you will still have an exclusive, costly certificate. Just a certificate.

In less than a century, the public domain art will still have admirers, remixers. The certificate itself will hold no value to no one. It's literally a depreciating speculative asset.

See: today, who cares as much about whoever funded it and how, than about Mozart's Requiem?

Would this have been funded through an exclusive certificate at the time, apart from being a museum artefact of a bygone era, it would not be worth much. The music is still studied, performed, derived, listened to.

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