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I'm not sure how to respond to this. Yes? Like, trivially yes. When you buy a piece of traditional art you get a physical piece of art. Likewise artists having

I'm not sure how to respond to this. Yes? Like, trivially yes. When you buy a piece of traditional art you get a physical piece of art. Likewise artists having been selling digital art for ages too either in the form of prints or high res files. NFTs don't achieve anything as far as I can tell, they're effectively a receipt with extra steps. And when the thing you're buying is publically available to everyone else anyway, what use is a receipt?

berberous 6y ago
"I still cannot fathom why people think buying a certificate of authenticity authenticated by nobody, whose supply can be arbitrarily increased by the seller at any time, is an interesting exercise." This is what I was responding to. Here is a photograph by Andy Warhol for $95,000: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/andy-warhol-marisa-berenson-and-young-man https://www.artsy.net/artwork/andy-warhol-marisa-berenson-an... The website states that: Signature: Stamped by artist's estate, Stamped on the verso by the Estate of the Artist and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Foundation … Certificate of authenticity: Included What is to prevent the artist (other than the fact this one is dead) from "arbitrarily increasing" supply, other than the fact that he has committed not to? Let's compare this with a unique audiovisual NFT: http://deafbeef.com http://deafbeef.com Here, you have a work limited to 128 pieces, which the artist has committed to cap the series at. The work can be authenticated as an original based on the blockchain, and the NFT proves the provenance. The crowd here may intuitively dislike NFTs, but it's arguments are trivially applicable to may other kinds of traditional art.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  > The crowd here may intuitively dislike NFTs, but it's arguments are trivially applicable to may other kinds of traditional art. Your example isn't the same thing - you're buying the photograph and the certificate of authenticity. An authentic photograph. With NFTs, you're only buying the certificate of authenticity. Literally nothing else. I don't believe there's anywhere on earth a certificate of authenticity in isolation is worth more than the paper its printed on. Nobody's paying anything for a certificate of authenticity that says the Mona Lisa was painted by Leonardo da Vinci - alongside a museum map with a big red circle around where you can find it - when the art itself remains firmly in the Louvre. The NFT doesn't prove provenance of the art, only of itself. It has no connection to the art other than the connection you ascribe to it. Remember, blockchains only meaningfully encapsulate concepts wholly represented on the blockchain. Art is not such a concept. NFTs are. But they're not connected to the art in any way.
  - berberous 6y ago
    And what if the media is stored on chain as part of the NFT? How is that different than buying a photo?
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      Barrier to entry for duplication, honestly. Anyone can copy-paste a JPEG. Duplicating a Da Vinci requires time, money and skill. Further, digital art is reproducible at 100% fidelity, whereas any duplicates of physical art will be distinctive not just in their provenance but also in their physical characteristics. I guess my question to you is: how is this any different than a watermarked JPEG signed with a PGP key?
jasonhansel 6y ago
IIRC the vast majority of these art buyers don't put their art on display anywhere, even in their own residences; the artwork ends up hidden away in private collections to preserve it for resale (or to enhance the owner's reputation). The actual, physical piece of artwork is almost entirely redundant already; the NFT business just makes it more obvious.
- stephen_g 6y ago
  They still have legal rights over something (whether tangible or intangible). NFTs don't actually confer any rights to anything by default, only ownership of the NFT itself. To have any actual rights recognised by law, you'd need some kind of physical legal contract conferring those rights on the owner of the NFT, in which case you may as well just have the contract and no NFT...
  - berberous 6y ago
    I don't know what you mean by "physical legal contract", but yes, you need a license of some sort. That can be embedded on the Blockchain though, e.g. see: https://feralfile.com/docs/artist-collector-rights https://feralfile.com/docs/artist-collector-rights The NFT allows the art to have proven provenance, scarcity, transferability, composibility with DeFi projects (e.g. it can be fractionalized, insured, borrowed against, staked, etc., all on-chain). If you don't see value in that, I don't think you're looking very deeply at it.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      The legal right is not a chain concept and requires the cooperation and enforcement of your local government, and is something anyone can do at any time. And does implicitly and explicitly when they create art. But we're not talking about art when we talk about NFTs, we're talking about certificates of authenticity of art issued by whoever which have no real-world connection. The provable scarcity is funny, each is unique so each one has a scarcity of 1, but the concept it represents can just be duplicated at will by the issuer or literally anyone else. Say you bought the beeple. Beeple didn't give up the right to sell the exact same thing to someone else, and remains perpetually able to debase your investment at their sole discretion. The scarcity argument holds zero water when compared to for instance Bitcoin, which has a hard-coded quantity. Not that, you know, exchanges can't oversell coins if they wanted to, so long as there's no systemic bank run. Scarcity notwithstanding, the idea that you can fractionalize, insure and borrow against NFTs in an automated, trustless and decentralized way is pretty weak - to put it mildly. Since each token is unique, there's no consistent bid-ask for you to determine its worth. It's a super duper low liquidity market, and its going to get lower liquidity on a per-NFT basis the more NFTs exist. All you know is what the last person paid, whenever they paid for it - years ago even. Just because someone at peak mania bought a beeple or whatever for $69 million dollars today doesn't mean you can borrow $10 against it a few years from now. If they tried to resell that NFT today, I can't imagine they'd get more than a few thousand already haha. That's exactly why art is used for money laundering. That's exactly why NFTs are used for money laundering.

berberous 6y ago

"I still cannot fathom why people think buying a certificate of authenticity authenticated by nobody, whose supply can be arbitrarily increased by the seller at any time, is an interesting exercise." This is what I was responding to. Here is a photograph by Andy Warhol for $95,000: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/andy-warhol-marisa-berenson-and-young-man https://www.artsy.net/artwork/andy-warhol-marisa-berenson-an... The website states that: Signature: Stamped by artist's estate, Stamped on the verso by the Estate of the Artist and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Foundation … Certificate of authenticity: Included What is to prevent the artist (other than the fact this one is dead) from "arbitrarily increasing" supply, other than the fact that he has committed not to? Let's compare this with a unique audiovisual NFT: http://deafbeef.com http://deafbeef.com Here, you have a work limited to 128 pieces, which the artist has committed to cap the series at. The work can be authenticated as an original based on the blockchain, and the NFT proves the provenance. The crowd here may intuitively dislike NFTs, but it's arguments are trivially applicable to may other kinds of traditional art.

arcticbull 6y ago
> The crowd here may intuitively dislike NFTs, but it's arguments are trivially applicable to may other kinds of traditional art. Your example isn't the same thing - you're buying the photograph and the certificate of authenticity. An authentic photograph. With NFTs, you're only buying the certificate of authenticity. Literally nothing else. I don't believe there's anywhere on earth a certificate of authenticity in isolation is worth more than the paper its printed on. Nobody's paying anything for a certificate of authenticity that says the Mona Lisa was painted by Leonardo da Vinci - alongside a museum map with a big red circle around where you can find it - when the art itself remains firmly in the Louvre. The NFT doesn't prove provenance of the art, only of itself. It has no connection to the art other than the connection you ascribe to it. Remember, blockchains only meaningfully encapsulate concepts wholly represented on the blockchain. Art is not such a concept. NFTs are. But they're not connected to the art in any way.
- berberous 6y ago
  And what if the media is stored on chain as part of the NFT? How is that different than buying a photo?
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Barrier to entry for duplication, honestly. Anyone can copy-paste a JPEG. Duplicating a Da Vinci requires time, money and skill. Further, digital art is reproducible at 100% fidelity, whereas any duplicates of physical art will be distinctive not just in their provenance but also in their physical characteristics. I guess my question to you is: how is this any different than a watermarked JPEG signed with a PGP key?

jasonhansel 6y ago

IIRC the vast majority of these art buyers don't put their art on display anywhere, even in their own residences; the artwork ends up hidden away in private collections to preserve it for resale (or to enhance the owner's reputation). The actual, physical piece of artwork is almost entirely redundant already; the NFT business just makes it more obvious.

stephen_g 6y ago
They still have legal rights over something (whether tangible or intangible). NFTs don't actually confer any rights to anything by default, only ownership of the NFT itself. To have any actual rights recognised by law, you'd need some kind of physical legal contract conferring those rights on the owner of the NFT, in which case you may as well just have the contract and no NFT...
- berberous 6y ago
  I don't know what you mean by "physical legal contract", but yes, you need a license of some sort. That can be embedded on the Blockchain though, e.g. see: https://feralfile.com/docs/artist-collector-rights https://feralfile.com/docs/artist-collector-rights The NFT allows the art to have proven provenance, scarcity, transferability, composibility with DeFi projects (e.g. it can be fractionalized, insured, borrowed against, staked, etc., all on-chain). If you don't see value in that, I don't think you're looking very deeply at it.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    The legal right is not a chain concept and requires the cooperation and enforcement of your local government, and is something anyone can do at any time. And does implicitly and explicitly when they create art. But we're not talking about art when we talk about NFTs, we're talking about certificates of authenticity of art issued by whoever which have no real-world connection. The provable scarcity is funny, each is unique so each one has a scarcity of 1, but the concept it represents can just be duplicated at will by the issuer or literally anyone else. Say you bought the beeple. Beeple didn't give up the right to sell the exact same thing to someone else, and remains perpetually able to debase your investment at their sole discretion. The scarcity argument holds zero water when compared to for instance Bitcoin, which has a hard-coded quantity. Not that, you know, exchanges can't oversell coins if they wanted to, so long as there's no systemic bank run. Scarcity notwithstanding, the idea that you can fractionalize, insure and borrow against NFTs in an automated, trustless and decentralized way is pretty weak - to put it mildly. Since each token is unique, there's no consistent bid-ask for you to determine its worth. It's a super duper low liquidity market, and its going to get lower liquidity on a per-NFT basis the more NFTs exist. All you know is what the last person paid, whenever they paid for it - years ago even. Just because someone at peak mania bought a beeple or whatever for $69 million dollars today doesn't mean you can borrow $10 against it a few years from now. If they tried to resell that NFT today, I can't imagine they'd get more than a few thousand already haha. That's exactly why art is used for money laundering. That's exactly why NFTs are used for money laundering.