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It's a simulacrum, in the post-modern sense. For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, a simulacrum is a copy of something that has itself become hyper-re
by nostrademons 6y ago
It's a simulacrum, in the post-modern sense.
For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, a simulacrum is a copy of something that has itself become hyper-real and usurped the reality of the original. The canonical example is Disney World, which is a copy of Disneyland, which is itself a copy of many elements of Americana (Louisiana Bayou, the frontier West, Main Street USA, etc.) Disney World has eclipsed Disneyland in visitors, which itself has eclipsed visits to various small town main streets or the Louisiana bayous. You plan a family vacation to Disney World, you don't plan a trip to Bumfuck, Wyoming. Even though it's a copy of a copy (and a poor one at that), its reality has eclipsed that of the original, just because the original is hard to get to and kind of boring.
Similar with NFTs. Yes, you can make an NFT of the Mona Lisa and claim that you have the only one. Yes, you're a lying swindler and probably a bad person. But your copy is much easier to trade, move around, and store than the actual Mona Lisa. And just as there's only one original Mona Lisa, there's only one original NFT of the Mona Lisa, so your copy still has the same scarcity. As more capital comes onto the blockchain, your NFT is likely to acquire its own hyper-reality and become the Mona Lisa, and the original painting will be hidden away in a museum somewhere and disappear from trading.
- Judgmentality 6y ago> And just as there's only one original Mona Lisa, there's only one original NFT of the Mona Lisa I apologize if I'm misunderstanding, but can't you create as many NFTs of the Mona Lisa as you want? What's to stop someone from just creating a second one, even the original owner of the Mona Lisa? You can't copy the Mona Lisa (at least not in such a way as to call it the original), but you can make another NFT of the real Mona Lisa and...as far as I can tell it's just as good. I realize you can't copy the chain that's already descended from the first NFT, but why does that matter? You can still say this is a genuine NFT for the real Mona Lisa, and the problem is you can make as many of those as you want. Or at least that's how I understand it. Copying something digital is very different from copying something molecular. A digital copy is as good as the original. A molecular copy is almost certainly possible to distinguish, and if you can't you may as well not have an original.
- nostrademons 6y agoMy understanding is that the NFT also contains a hash of the work that it represents, so there really is only one of a given digital work. You can create another NFT of a different digitization, but there's still distinguishing factors between them that would make one "better" than the other (higher resolution, maybe, or more ubiquitous file format). Also over time a particular digitizations' status of being the first gives it its own legitimacy, unless the environment changes in a way that makes competing ones significantly more convenient. It's sort of like the forking problem for cryptocurrencies in general. Anyone can fork the Bitcoin code and say they made a new cryptocurrency, and many people have done exactly that (Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, Bitcoin ABC). In practice, the fork tends to die out, because much of a cryptocurrency's value is in who agrees that it's valuable, and there's a big first-mover advantage there.
- bko 6y ago> My understanding is that the NFT also contains a hash of the work that it represents, so there really is only one of a given digital work I've never heard that before. Can someone confirm this is true? Is it solving for a hash of the original digitization of the work or something?
- clpm4j 6y agoMy understanding is that John can take a picture/jpg of the Mona Lisa, mint an ERC-20 token and sell his picture/jpg on a NFT marketplace. Jane can also take a picture/jpg of the Mona Lisa, mint an ERC-20 token and sell her picture/jpg on a NFT marketplace. I think the difference shows up when Jack Dorsey mints a screenshot of his first tweet and sells it, it's worth $2m because it's sold by Jack. Whereas I could screenshot Jack's first tweet, mint it and sell it for $0.01 because it's sold by me. Very happy to be corrected if this is incorrect.
- Judgmentality 6y agoThis is also my understanding, and my point was (in this example) Jack Dorsey can just do it a second time, and a third time, and so on. And it's not like Monet making more paintings, because each painting is unique. This is an identical digital copy from the same person, with no guarantee of its longevity.
- notahacker 6y ago"Sod going to an art gallery to look the actual paint committed to canvas by the legendary artist over 500 years ago, we can queue up to look at this PNG copy and admire the uniqueness of the cryptographic token some anonymous programmer attached to it recently" said literally nobody ever. Rollercoasters and Mickey Mouse make pastiches of common things more interesting; creating an inferior copy of a famous thing and trying to compensate for its inferiority and inauthenticity with a cryptographic string has the opposite effect.
- okareaman 6y agoWhat if you had a human model (or robot) who looked liked Mona Lisa, dressed like Mona Lisa and was certified as the only recognized copy of Mona Lisa and by purchasing the NFT you were the only one who could have s.e.x with her?