9 ms·
An NFT does not solve or prevent the artist from selling additional editions of their work. They can always create more tokens.
by platz 6y ago
An NFT does not solve or prevent the artist from selling additional editions of their work. They can always create more tokens.
- yellowapple 6y agoRight, but those would be different editions, and would be separate from the original edition. Even if the artist creates millions of tokens, there's probably prestige from having the first to be issued.
- platz 6y agoI realize now that calling it an edition was an error on my part, because in irl an edition is a physical copy of the work itself which can be made scarce, whereas a token is just a pointer with a url to some infinitely-duplicable bits, so the edition metaphor does not hold.
- gnopgnip 6y agoYes the original artist, or anyone else could create NFTs of the same image. And in the same way the artist could come out with a limited series of 10 prints, then make more of the same prints later. But there is no way to create a forgery and duplicate your NFT. The digital provenance is all there on the blockchain. With a physical object anyone could create it later and claim it was an original.
- manigandham 6y agoThe NFT is just a receipt, currently without any legal standing. The digital asset itself is not protected and infinitely copied. Everyone who views the asset has made a copy. There is no original. Physical items cannot be copied perfectly. There is always an original unit that can only be in one location. This fact alone creates intrinsic value that digital items lack.
- adyus 6y agoI'd argue that this limitation is artificial as well. With some painting forgeries, you're getting down to the molecular or brushstroke level of differentiation. It's all about the value that we humans assign to what's considered "an original", and I think that's what's happening with NFTs today. Unlike tangible art, however, I think NFT art is much more volatile and prone to the Beanie Babies effect if its popularity wanes.
- platz 6y ago> what's considered "an original", and I think that's what's happening with NFTs today An original what? Remove everything off-chain from the conversation. All you have left is a small amount text (which itself is *information* !!) in a distributed database. Thats no more original than the particular instance of bootloader code in my desktop computer.
- adyus 6y agoI agree with you. Removing anything off-chain from the conversation, we're left with the equivalent of selling a million pixels on a web page (but at least there was some utility to that, in the form of advertising).
- gnopgnip 6y agoThere is a real cost to creating an NFT(on the ethereum blockchain, by people who have valuable ideas/art), it cannot be copied, and it can be sold. That is all you need to have digital scarcity, to have value for speculation. It doesn't need legal standing or any physical attachment to the real world to be valuable. It's not like people are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on artwork or signed sports memorabilia because of the utlity. You can get a comparable print or a brand new piece of sports gear for far less. There is some grey area on the lower end though, and an NFT has zero utility here.
- platz 6y agoScarcity of precisely what is the question. In this case, a small amount of metadata. That metadata is inherently worthless, because the metadata is just information that can be copied, and a new supposedly "scarce" token can be created with the same metadata.