Comment by web4 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by web4 | Hacker News Reader

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the blockchain allows anybody to publish nfts that point to any media, so naturally there is a lot of spam and copy-minting. anybody can publish to OpenSea a Picasso NFT but this does not mean it will be valued by the market as a Picasso. the same is true of an impersonator trying to mint a new Pak or Beeple or whoever you think is a popular nft artist.

almost all of these "thefts" come in the form of social engineering and impersonation rather than forging the token itself. and if you look at the data, 99% of these copy-mints are not actually selling and are not making any impact in the market.

a copy-mint of crypto punks is trivially easy to discern as a fake because its contract hash will be uniquely different than the crypto punks contract, which has a long and clear historical trail associated with it on chain. if a copyminter starts to post new work that resembles a popular artist like Beeple, it will be under a new public key hash or address, and also easy to discern.

compare this crypto art copy-minting to paintings like Salvator Mundi which countless experts have been investigating for years and still are not able to discern the authenticity of the painting despite its $450 million price tag.

> does not mean it will be valued by the market as a Picasso

There are innumerable examples of digital art being sold on OpenSea without any knowledge of the original authors, but presented as if it was from the original authors.

> almost all of these "thefts" come in the form of social engineering and impersonation rather than forging the token itself.

It literally doesn't matter if the token is forged. The theft is there, and NFTs (and blockchains in general) have literally no mechanism to prevent it.

> a copy-mint of crypto punks is trivially easy to discern as a fake because its contract hash

You keep pretending that stealing art is the same as stealing/forging the token that points something

> compare this crypto art copy-minting to paintings like Salvator Mundi which countless experts have been investigating

Who. Cares.

There's an irrefutable fact: NFTs provide literally zero protections against art theft. It's gotten so bad that sites like DeviantArt now have automated tools to find stolen art on sites like OpenSea and report it to original artists.

- NFT art sales are booming. Just without some artists' permission: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/nft-art-sales-are-boom...

- Site Sells Famous Songs as NFTs Without Permission https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkpqyy/site-sells-famous-son...

- An artist died. Then thieves made NFTs of her work https://www.wired.co.uk/article/nft-fraud-qinni-art

But sure. Keep trying to derail the discussion with Salvator Mundi

you are right: it is trivially easy to publish any media file and assign an NFT to it and then list it for sale, and there is a lot of copyright infringement as a result.

all of these articles claim widespread theft and stolen work, but a surprising lack of data on how much of that is actually sold considering all of those payments should be publicly traceable on the blockchain.

imagine putting a Damien Hirst image on OpenSea only for nobody to purchase it. is this a complex form of art forgery and art theft? in some cases this process is automated by bot-scripts scraping DeviantArt, and the end result is like spam mail. maybe there is a buyer naive enough to purchase your Hirst image thinking it is authentically from the artist, and in that case I sympathize just as I do when an unsuspecting user falls for an email scam.

it is also trivially easy to look at these scam tokens and realize they are not from the authentic collection they claim to be, or that the minter does not match the artist's public address, or that the artist is not even claiming to make nfts and therefore a nft of their work is unlikely to be authentic.

if you look at art forgery in traditional media, not only is it rampant but it actually accounts for millions of dollars per year, and many high value paintings do not have a clear provenance and authenticity as this information is easily lost and altered over the course of history.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/fake-art-...

> all of these articles claim widespread theft and stolen work, but a surprising lack of data on how much of that is actually sold considering all of those payments should be publicly traceable on the blockchain.

Payments, yes. But not provenance. Because you'd have to find all the artists, then all their work, then sift through all the listings at OpenSea, and cross-reference that. Because the following statement from you is a blatant lie:

> it is also trivially easy to look at these scam tokens and realize they are not from the authentic collection they claim to be

No. It's impossible to say whether something is from a legitimate artist or not.

> if you look at art forgery in traditional media, not only is it rampant but it actually accounts for millions of dollars per year

NFT scams are significantly more rampant because stealing a digital image trivial. As is pretending someone you're not.

Quote:

"DeviantArt has sent 90,000 alerts about possible fraud to thousands of their users since then, company executives said. It’s now scanning for fraud across 4m newly minted NFTs each week. The number of alerts doubled from October to November, and grew by 300% from November to mid-December." [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/global/2022/jan/29/huge-mess-of-...

> Because the following statement from you is a blatant lie ... It's impossible to say whether something is from a legitimate artist or not.

lol, have you ever looked at the chain? if an artist has been minting work for 1 year on the same public address and then suddenly somebody purchases a lookalike token from a different public address there is a high likelihood it is a copymint. you can avoid this by comparing the addresses, it does not take an art history expert to detect this form of copyminting.

many platforms will show attribution based on address and username. so if the artwork is attributed to b33ple.eth instead of beeple.eth then it is likely a copymint.

> DeviantArt has sent 90,000 alerts about possible fraud to thousands of their users since then, company executives said

it’s clear copyright infringement, but easily detectable to the point that DeviantArt is able to automate their search, and not a sophisticated form of forgery. still you are not able to provide evidence of significant funds being consistently lost here despite it being so prevalent, especially when you compare to trad art forgery where you can easily find evidence of millions of dollars per year being mistakenly spent on forged artworks.

it is like Nigerian prince email scams. part of the protocol that some unfortunate and naive users might fall for, but most users will learn to recognize and avoid this problem in time.

> lol, have you ever looked at the chain?

Yes, I have

> if an artist has been minting work for 1 year on the same public address

No ifs. There artists right now whose work is sstolen and sold without their knowledge

> many platforms will show attribution based on address and username. so if the artwork is attributed to b33ple.eth instead of beeple.eth then it is likely a copymint.

Ah yes. And you know the exact addresses and the exact attribution for all hundreds of thoudands of digital artists, right.

> it’s clear copyright infringement, but easily detectable to the point that DeviantArt is able to automate their search

No. It's not "easily detectable". It's detectable because DeviantArt hosts some digital artists, and they still have to lookup, download and analyse 4 million OpenSea submissions a day, and match them against 350 million images in the DeviantArt database.

And that is a tiny fraction of all the digital art in the world. Besides, if it was so easy, show me a single NFT marketplace that automatically takes down stolen art.

> naive users might fall for, but most users will learn to recognize and avoid this problem in time.

And how exactly are they going to recognize the problem? E.g. someone sells NFT of an image that you like. What are the exact steps to find out if it's legitimate? Keep in mind that there are hundreds of thousands of people producing millions of images across hundreds of thousands of websites and platforms.

you are making it seem like it is difficult to tell a David Hockney NFT is a fake. step one: does the artist have a clear history of minting associated with an address? if no, and the artist is not making any claims to making nfts, then most likely it is a fake. if yes, and the artist is promoting the nft at that address, it is probably not a fake.

in the case of Hockney as he has been expressly against nfts and has never publicly made one, a fake is easily detectable. in the case of Beeple who has been expressly for nfts, it is easy to authenticate as it will be associated with his address.

> like it is difficult to tell a David Hockney NFT is a fake

No idea who David Hockney is

> does the artist have a clear history of minting associated with an address

What the hell does this mean? If I don't know who David Hockney is, how can I tell if a particular thing "has a history of minting"?

> in the case of Hockney as he has been expressly against nfts and has never publicly made one, a fake is easily detectable.

How is it easily detectable?

---

To put it simply:

- DevianArt has more than half a billion images and 61 million regitered users [0]

- 4 million images are uploaded to Instagram every hour [1]

- As early as 2016 there were 3000 images per second uploaded to Twitter [2]

So, given all that, tell me in a few steps to tell if an image on OpenSea is fake, or is being sold without the author's permission

---

We can make it even simpler. I honestly came across it by pure accident

Here's a page by Polina Climova at OpenSea, https://opensea.io/collection/polina-climova

Here's a page by Polina Climova at Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/polinaclimova/

Do these pages belong to the same person?

---

[0] https://www.deviantart.com/about/

[1] https://earthweb.com/how-many-pictures-are-on-instagram/

[2] http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/4/20/how-twitter-handle...

> Do these pages belong to the same person?

what does your gut tell you?

despite knowing so little about art market and art history that you’ve never heard of the world’s most influential and highest sold living artists, you can probably still make a rational guess that this NFT collection is a copymint. perhaps the fact that the artist never once mentions or links to the collection from their Instagram profile acts as a hint.

this is what I mean by “trivially easy” compared to art forgeries in the real world, which do take professional art historians and years of study, and yet still leaves many of them fooled.

it’s worth noting that the collection has not sold, and very likely never will.

> despite knowing so little about art market and art history that you’ve never heard of the world’s most influential and highest sold living artists, you can probably still make a rational guess that this NFT collection is a copymint

Demagoguery

> perhaps the fact that the artist never once mentions or links to the collection from their Instagram profile acts as a hint.

So, you're basically saying that you have no idea whether either Instagram or OpenSea page actually belong to the artist and it's impossible to find out if they do or do not.

The argument "they didn't sell anything" is moot because, again, there are hundreds of thousands of digital artists producing millions of images, and not all of them are "famous minting more than a year and you know what they say about NFTs off the top of your head"

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