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The difference is that a facsimile autograph would inevitably be of worse quality. The phony NFT on the other hand would be indistinguishable from "the real thi

The difference is that a facsimile autograph would inevitably be of worse quality. The phony NFT on the other hand would be indistinguishable from "the real thing". Beyond the payload it's just pseudo-random bits generated by an arbitrary CPU, isn't it?

basch 5y ago
> indistinguishable I am not sure what you mean by this. Are you referring to art being duplicated, or a digital signature? You can verify that its a forgery, or from a different account than the first author. The digital signature isnt something you can replicate. You can print another one, but you cant duplicate the property of "first" itself.
- Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
  I can't replicate the exact numbers, but I don't see how one random string looks more authentic than the other. Whereas a handmade autograph with all its human inconsistencies looks more authentic than one made with a mechanical device. I'm just as good as the most accomplished artist at reading numbers from /dev/random, that's why I don't see why one random-looking string would be more valuable than the other.
  - basch 5y ago
    Because it's timestamped earlier, or its proven to have been generated by a person who exclusively had a certain private key.
    - Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
      > Because it's timestamped earlier That depends on who thought of making the NFT first. Which isn't necessarily the artist. > or its proven to have been generated by a person who exclusively had a certain private key That has the same problem, it's generated by arbitrary pseudo-random numbers, rather than a real, living human hand. Look, I'm not disputing the underlying cryptographic principles. I'm happy they exist, because they are immensely useful for many purposes, like securing communication and financial transactions. I just struggle to see the artistic merit in someone having pulled some numbers out of /dev/random and having done some math on them.
      - basch 5y ago
        It’s not artistic merit. It’s artificial scarcity. It’s printing only five of a rookie baseball card because you can.
mattdesl 5y ago
The NFT is not the image/media - it is the transaction securing a relationship and/or movement of tokens from the artists wallet to the buyers wallet (which may or may not point to a file hash, or some other data). The authenticity of this is easily verified by querying the transaction directly from the on-chain smart contract.
- jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
  How do you verify the person in control of the "artists wallet" is actually the person who created the work (or is authorized by them to create the NFT)?
  - mattdesl 5y ago
    The artist needs to confirm this. For example, many artists selling on Hicetnunc[1] will put their Tezos wallet address as a link in their Twitter bio. If you spot an artwork that looks like theirs minted by a different address, it’s likely a “copymint” (typically seen as worth no value). There are other blockchain/crypto art projects that use the chain itself to store data; such as Autoglyphs[2], which is essentially a first of its kind generative artwork on Ethereum coded entirely within the Solidity smart contract. In this case there is no question about the authenticity; you simply look at that contract address and the tokens it initiated. [1] - https://hicetnunc.xyz/ https://hicetnunc.xyz/ [2] - https://www.larvalabs.com/autoglyphs https://www.larvalabs.com/autoglyphs

basch 5y ago

> indistinguishable I am not sure what you mean by this. Are you referring to art being duplicated, or a digital signature? You can verify that its a forgery, or from a different account than the first author. The digital signature isnt something you can replicate. You can print another one, but you cant duplicate the property of "first" itself.

Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
I can't replicate the exact numbers, but I don't see how one random string looks more authentic than the other. Whereas a handmade autograph with all its human inconsistencies looks more authentic than one made with a mechanical device. I'm just as good as the most accomplished artist at reading numbers from /dev/random, that's why I don't see why one random-looking string would be more valuable than the other.
- basch 5y ago
  Because it's timestamped earlier, or its proven to have been generated by a person who exclusively had a certain private key.
  - Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
    > Because it's timestamped earlier That depends on who thought of making the NFT first. Which isn't necessarily the artist. > or its proven to have been generated by a person who exclusively had a certain private key That has the same problem, it's generated by arbitrary pseudo-random numbers, rather than a real, living human hand. Look, I'm not disputing the underlying cryptographic principles. I'm happy they exist, because they are immensely useful for many purposes, like securing communication and financial transactions. I just struggle to see the artistic merit in someone having pulled some numbers out of /dev/random and having done some math on them.
    - basch 5y ago
      It’s not artistic merit. It’s artificial scarcity. It’s printing only five of a rookie baseball card because you can.

mattdesl 5y ago

The NFT is not the image/media - it is the transaction securing a relationship and/or movement of tokens from the artists wallet to the buyers wallet (which may or may not point to a file hash, or some other data). The authenticity of this is easily verified by querying the transaction directly from the on-chain smart contract.

jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
How do you verify the person in control of the "artists wallet" is actually the person who created the work (or is authorized by them to create the NFT)?
- mattdesl 5y ago
  The artist needs to confirm this. For example, many artists selling on Hicetnunc[1] will put their Tezos wallet address as a link in their Twitter bio. If you spot an artwork that looks like theirs minted by a different address, it’s likely a “copymint” (typically seen as worth no value). There are other blockchain/crypto art projects that use the chain itself to store data; such as Autoglyphs[2], which is essentially a first of its kind generative artwork on Ethereum coded entirely within the Solidity smart contract. In this case there is no question about the authenticity; you simply look at that contract address and the tokens it initiated. [1] - https://hicetnunc.xyz/ https://hicetnunc.xyz/ [2] - https://www.larvalabs.com/autoglyphs https://www.larvalabs.com/autoglyphs