6 ms·

You're both correct and underestimating how broken NFTs are. If you buy an NFT that gives you nothing except bragging rights that you "own" this NFT. What owner

by Doxin 5y ago

You're both correct and underestimating how broken NFTs are. If you buy an NFT that gives you nothing except bragging rights that you "own" this NFT. What ownership actually means when devoid of the associated rights is anyones guess. Buying an NFT of a GIF doesn't stop anyone from using that GIF on reddit. No one is going around checking if posted GIFs have a matching NFT out there and enforcing property rights based on that. When you buy an NFT you're not even buying the GIF, you're buying the receipt proving you bought the GIF. What good that is without owning the GIF isn't exactly obvious to me.

jcelerier 5y ago
Not that I support NFTs much, but conceptually, how is that different than you buying a Marilyn Monroe from Andy Warhol and him printing the exact same Marilyn Monroe and selling it to someone else ? Hopefully in 2021 everyone would agree that the two are distinct artworks, even if the physical object is exactly the same to the human eye ; that's not what matters when buying art.
- jljljl 5y ago
  The Marilyn Monroes are still limited by the number that Warhol prints, and you have ownership of the print that you bought. Maybe it’s not as valuable as it would be if there was only 1 Monroe print, but you are paying for a physical object made by Warhol. If I understand correctly, an NFT is like if someone, not necessarily Warhol himself, sold you a note posted on a wall somewhere that said “You own Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe”, without any rights to the underlying work, or any promise that another person might sell another note on another wall that says “Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe”.
  - flarg 5y ago
    Yeah, but what else can you do with digital art? Buy the PC it's sitting on and only share it via webcam of the screen?
    - deepsun 5y ago
      The same as with any other intellectual property (books, movies, songs): buy the legally enforceable copyright. As in "right" and "copy". PS: I'm immensely interested in the process of creating a digital image. It's actually pretty tricky and technical, to apply all those filters in right order and with right settings. I would buy a recording of how the digital art was created.
      - zimpenfish 5y ago
        Not a recording but a deconstruction of the process of creating a digital image - https://rjp.is/blogging/posts/deconstructing-an-image-2/ https://rjp.is/blogging/posts/deconstructing-an-image-2/
      - bart_spoon 5y ago
        Except the legally enforceable copyright is just that: legally enforceable. The legal system is what creates a financial incentive to own the rights to something as opposed to just copying it in some way that might constitute IP theft. With NFTs, there is no legal benefit to actually owning the NFT.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    Fun Fact: Rodin was one of the first sculptors to take advantage of reproduction, as he employed craftsmen in his workshop that could build you a custom thinker that was 2 inches tall for a paperweight or another full sized thinker statue for your public park. These statues had his special patina added. When he died, Rodin destroyed the recipes for his patina but the workshop, run out of an old hotel and eventually becoming the Musee Rodin, continued to make "official" copies. Thus there are 25 full-sized thinkers but only 10 or so have the patina, the rest being made after his death.
    - denton-scratch 5y ago
      > special patina Sounds like standard trade-secrets.
  - klodolph 5y ago
    Warhol mass-produced his prints using silk-screen, and verifying them as authentic is damn near impossible. The real ones may be limited, but he made a lot of them (you can really churn out artwork with silkscreening), and it’s hard to know which ones are the real ones.
    - justincormack 5y ago
      They are also much cheaper than a lot of NFTs eg a late one for $18k https://www.artsy.net/artwork/andy-warhol-marilyn-announcement-118 https://www.artsy.net/artwork/andy-warhol-marilyn-announceme...
  - Igelau 5y ago
    > If I understand correctly The funny thing about NFTs. The emperor has no clothes. Confusion is evidence of understanding -- there's that little substance. No Fscking Thing. > a note posted on a wall somewhere that said “You own Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe” It's basically a pointer. It's not hard to scrounge the sites that track the ETH blockchain, find where a NFT changed hands, and then find the URI for the full res image that anyone can go download. All that's owned is the pointer.
    - Thlom 5y ago
      Does the GIF reside on the blockchain or is it hosted on whatever webserver? What if the webserver is shutdown? Now you "own" a pointer to nothing?
      - user-the-name 5y ago
        It is hosted on some random webserver or on IPFS. If either goes away, it's gone.
  - miracle2k 5y ago
    > If I understand correctly, an NFT is like if someone, not necessarily Warhol himself. No, the point is that the NFT is from the artist themselves.
    - user-the-name 5y ago
      It is not. Nothing about an NFT ensures it is from the artist, and not just from someone random scammer.
      - miracle2k 5y ago
        Correct. This is your job to ensure.
        user-the-name 5y ago
        So why do you say that is the point?
        miracle2k 5y ago
        Because that's the reason people value the NFT. The fact that someone can take a picture of the Mona Lisa and try to sell it as an NFT is not the point; people don't value that NFT, and NFTs are not designed to prevent that from happening. It is a simple ledger entry that records the ownership of an edition released by an artist, and people choose to value it because of that.
        user-the-name 5y ago
        It is none of those things. It does not record ownership, there is no guarantee it is released by an artist... And people do not really value them either, other than people speculating or scamming.
        jljljl 5y ago
        The problem is that anyone can mint an NFT. Verifying that an NFT is actually minted by the artist would likely require some sort of external certification that you can trust. This is done for paintings and other collectibles as well. What I don’t understand is: Once you have an external certifying authority, why have blockchain based NFTs at all? Couldn’t you save a lot of energy and complexity by tracking purchases in a database?
- slg 5y ago
  Having ownership of the physical print is a pretty big differentiator. I guess you could have always bought that same print from someone who created it illegally rather than Warhol himself, but that is where the vague "supporting the artist" reasoning comes in to play. Since NFTs don't provide that physical object, all that is left is the "supporting the artist" angle. If that is central to NFTs, why is the secondary market such a big aspect of the community? To extend your analogy, that would be like me buying the Warhol print for $10, turning around and selling it for $100, and claiming that $90 in my pocket is supporting Warhol.
  - miracle2k 5y ago
    Warhol is dead, yet people still value authorized prints much higher than fakes.
  - Grustaf 5y ago
    Why would "supporting the artist" be relevant at all? Apart from NFTs whose smart contract gives the minter a share of resales, I have never heard anyone say that. And definitely not in relation to the $90 profit.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Doxin 5y ago
  Of course there's a difference between the original and a print. An NFT is not an original though. At best an NFT comes with an URL to an image you can use to make a print. But guess what? anyone can make that print. If you buy an NFT you don't buy an original. You buy proof that you bought the original. It's like buying the receipt to the Mona Lisa. Doing so doesn't gain you anything. It doesn't even gain you the original Mona Lisa. Unless people are ceding the point that NFTs are art in and of themselves I don't see the point. And I hardly see a receipt as a form of art.
- tauntz 5y ago
  If you buy the Marilyn Monroe print then you can legally put it up on your wall at home and other people can see it. If you buy an NFT (which is just an URL to somewhere that might have a picture today but might be a 404 tomorrow or an ipfs hash if you're lucky) then you can not (in most cases I've seen) legally put that picture that's behind the link in the NFT up on your website and show it to others. Heck, in some countries this doesn't even grant you the right to store that picture itself on your own computer. (Most) NFT's don't give the owner of the NFT any rights for the linked art itself - you can't copy it, distribute it, present it etc. You can do all of that with the NFT but _not_ the actual art piece.
- yodsanklai 5y ago
  I would say it's not different and it's a great analogy that shows how NFTs are ridiculous. It could be even more extreme than your example. The piece of art could be entirely reproductible by anyone and still only some versions would be considered valuable. See the $150,000 banana. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so8sB25IL4o&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so8sB25IL4o&t=1s
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  This is exactly why very little art is valuable until the artist is dead, and even those rare artists who can sell while still alive see the value of their work skyrocket when they die. Andy Warhol definitely can't make a copy of anything you own that he created and he has verifiably been unable to since 1987.
Jyaif 5y ago
I think you underestimate how important bragging rights are. That's the reason people purchase Rolex watches! And because you can't show off your Rolex watch in the online world, instead you'll use an NFT as a profil pic. I think it's hard for people that don't care about bragging rights / status symbols to understand NFTs. Conversely, I think that status symbols are a very important part of the lives of the people that understand and advocate NFTs.
- Doxin 5y ago
  I understand bragging rights, but it's pretty hard to brag with something noncorporeal. That profile pic? Anyone can use that, whether or not they own the NFT or not. Makes for some pretty poor bragging material if you ask me.
  - Jyaif 5y ago
    > That profile pic? Anyone can use that, whether or not they own the NFT or not. Currently yes, but that's a fixable problem. For instance Twitter could start preventing users from having profile pics that look similar to NFTs that were minted earlier.
    - gitfan86 5y ago
      Except copyright and trademark laws exist. The Washington Redskins lost their trademark. You can create as many NFTs of their logo as you want. But you cannot stop me from putting that logo on my website.
      - Jyaif 5y ago
        Showing NFTs on your website will not increase your status, because nobody will know if you paid for them or not. Showing NFTs on your profile on a website that only accepts verified NFTs (see my previous message for what I mean by that) will increase your status.
- Sargos 5y ago
  >That's the reason people purchase Rolex watches But people can just make fake Rolex watches and wear those too! Watches are a scam /s
smaryjerry 5y ago
As someone pointed out already in the baseball card example. NFTs do not give you copyright over the images. You may buy a baseball card but that doesn’t let you sell or license the image displayed on the baseball card. NFT is exactly the same in that sense. It is purely a collectible not explicit ownership of a likeness.
barrenko 5y ago
You're married. You don't own him / her, but people still brag about it and it's a frequent rite.
- bart_spoon 5y ago
  The NFT equivalent of marriage would be getting married, and your spouse continuing to live with their old roommates, date around, keeping a separate bank account, going on other people's family vacations, and starting multiple families other than yours. If that's how marriage worked, people wouldn't get married either.

by Doxin 5y ago

jcelerier 5y ago

Not that I support NFTs much, but conceptually, how is that different than you buying a Marilyn Monroe from Andy Warhol and him printing the exact same Marilyn Monroe and selling it to someone else ? Hopefully in 2021 everyone would agree that the two are distinct artworks, even if the physical object is exactly the same to the human eye ; that's not what matters when buying art.

jljljl 5y ago
The Marilyn Monroes are still limited by the number that Warhol prints, and you have ownership of the print that you bought. Maybe it’s not as valuable as it would be if there was only 1 Monroe print, but you are paying for a physical object made by Warhol. If I understand correctly, an NFT is like if someone, not necessarily Warhol himself, sold you a note posted on a wall somewhere that said “You own Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe”, without any rights to the underlying work, or any promise that another person might sell another note on another wall that says “Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe”.
- flarg 5y ago
  Yeah, but what else can you do with digital art? Buy the PC it's sitting on and only share it via webcam of the screen?
  - deepsun 5y ago
    The same as with any other intellectual property (books, movies, songs): buy the legally enforceable copyright. As in "right" and "copy". PS: I'm immensely interested in the process of creating a digital image. It's actually pretty tricky and technical, to apply all those filters in right order and with right settings. I would buy a recording of how the digital art was created.
    - zimpenfish 5y ago
      Not a recording but a deconstruction of the process of creating a digital image - https://rjp.is/blogging/posts/deconstructing-an-image-2/ https://rjp.is/blogging/posts/deconstructing-an-image-2/
    - bart_spoon 5y ago
      Except the legally enforceable copyright is just that: legally enforceable. The legal system is what creates a financial incentive to own the rights to something as opposed to just copying it in some way that might constitute IP theft. With NFTs, there is no legal benefit to actually owning the NFT.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  Fun Fact: Rodin was one of the first sculptors to take advantage of reproduction, as he employed craftsmen in his workshop that could build you a custom thinker that was 2 inches tall for a paperweight or another full sized thinker statue for your public park. These statues had his special patina added. When he died, Rodin destroyed the recipes for his patina but the workshop, run out of an old hotel and eventually becoming the Musee Rodin, continued to make "official" copies. Thus there are 25 full-sized thinkers but only 10 or so have the patina, the rest being made after his death.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    > special patina Sounds like standard trade-secrets.
- klodolph 5y ago
  Warhol mass-produced his prints using silk-screen, and verifying them as authentic is damn near impossible. The real ones may be limited, but he made a lot of them (you can really churn out artwork with silkscreening), and it’s hard to know which ones are the real ones.
  - justincormack 5y ago
    They are also much cheaper than a lot of NFTs eg a late one for $18k https://www.artsy.net/artwork/andy-warhol-marilyn-announcement-118 https://www.artsy.net/artwork/andy-warhol-marilyn-announceme...
- Igelau 5y ago
  > If I understand correctly The funny thing about NFTs. The emperor has no clothes. Confusion is evidence of understanding -- there's that little substance. No Fscking Thing. > a note posted on a wall somewhere that said “You own Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe” It's basically a pointer. It's not hard to scrounge the sites that track the ETH blockchain, find where a NFT changed hands, and then find the URI for the full res image that anyone can go download. All that's owned is the pointer.
  - Thlom 5y ago
    Does the GIF reside on the blockchain or is it hosted on whatever webserver? What if the webserver is shutdown? Now you "own" a pointer to nothing?
    - user-the-name 5y ago
      It is hosted on some random webserver or on IPFS. If either goes away, it's gone.
- miracle2k 5y ago
  > If I understand correctly, an NFT is like if someone, not necessarily Warhol himself. No, the point is that the NFT is from the artist themselves.
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    It is not. Nothing about an NFT ensures it is from the artist, and not just from someone random scammer.
    - miracle2k 5y ago
      Correct. This is your job to ensure.
      - user-the-name 5y ago
        So why do you say that is the point?
        miracle2k 5y ago
        Because that's the reason people value the NFT. The fact that someone can take a picture of the Mona Lisa and try to sell it as an NFT is not the point; people don't value that NFT, and NFTs are not designed to prevent that from happening. It is a simple ledger entry that records the ownership of an edition released by an artist, and people choose to value it because of that.
        user-the-name 5y ago
        It is none of those things. It does not record ownership, there is no guarantee it is released by an artist... And people do not really value them either, other than people speculating or scamming.
        jljljl 5y ago
        The problem is that anyone can mint an NFT. Verifying that an NFT is actually minted by the artist would likely require some sort of external certification that you can trust. This is done for paintings and other collectibles as well. What I don’t understand is: Once you have an external certifying authority, why have blockchain based NFTs at all? Couldn’t you save a lot of energy and complexity by tracking purchases in a database?
slg 5y ago
Having ownership of the physical print is a pretty big differentiator. I guess you could have always bought that same print from someone who created it illegally rather than Warhol himself, but that is where the vague "supporting the artist" reasoning comes in to play. Since NFTs don't provide that physical object, all that is left is the "supporting the artist" angle. If that is central to NFTs, why is the secondary market such a big aspect of the community? To extend your analogy, that would be like me buying the Warhol print for $10, turning around and selling it for $100, and claiming that $90 in my pocket is supporting Warhol.
- miracle2k 5y ago
  Warhol is dead, yet people still value authorized prints much higher than fakes.
- Grustaf 5y ago
  Why would "supporting the artist" be relevant at all? Apart from NFTs whose smart contract gives the minter a share of resales, I have never heard anyone say that. And definitely not in relation to the $90 profit.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Doxin 5y ago
Of course there's a difference between the original and a print. An NFT is not an original though. At best an NFT comes with an URL to an image you can use to make a print. But guess what? anyone can make that print. If you buy an NFT you don't buy an original. You buy proof that you bought the original. It's like buying the receipt to the Mona Lisa. Doing so doesn't gain you anything. It doesn't even gain you the original Mona Lisa. Unless people are ceding the point that NFTs are art in and of themselves I don't see the point. And I hardly see a receipt as a form of art.
tauntz 5y ago
If you buy the Marilyn Monroe print then you can legally put it up on your wall at home and other people can see it. If you buy an NFT (which is just an URL to somewhere that might have a picture today but might be a 404 tomorrow or an ipfs hash if you're lucky) then you can not (in most cases I've seen) legally put that picture that's behind the link in the NFT up on your website and show it to others. Heck, in some countries this doesn't even grant you the right to store that picture itself on your own computer. (Most) NFT's don't give the owner of the NFT any rights for the linked art itself - you can't copy it, distribute it, present it etc. You can do all of that with the NFT but _not_ the actual art piece.
yodsanklai 5y ago
I would say it's not different and it's a great analogy that shows how NFTs are ridiculous. It could be even more extreme than your example. The piece of art could be entirely reproductible by anyone and still only some versions would be considered valuable. See the $150,000 banana. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so8sB25IL4o&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so8sB25IL4o&t=1s
nonameiguess 5y ago
This is exactly why very little art is valuable until the artist is dead, and even those rare artists who can sell while still alive see the value of their work skyrocket when they die. Andy Warhol definitely can't make a copy of anything you own that he created and he has verifiably been unable to since 1987.

Jyaif 5y ago

I think you underestimate how important bragging rights are. That's the reason people purchase Rolex watches! And because you can't show off your Rolex watch in the online world, instead you'll use an NFT as a profil pic. I think it's hard for people that don't care about bragging rights / status symbols to understand NFTs. Conversely, I think that status symbols are a very important part of the lives of the people that understand and advocate NFTs.

Doxin 5y ago
I understand bragging rights, but it's pretty hard to brag with something noncorporeal. That profile pic? Anyone can use that, whether or not they own the NFT or not. Makes for some pretty poor bragging material if you ask me.
- Jyaif 5y ago
  > That profile pic? Anyone can use that, whether or not they own the NFT or not. Currently yes, but that's a fixable problem. For instance Twitter could start preventing users from having profile pics that look similar to NFTs that were minted earlier.
  - gitfan86 5y ago
    Except copyright and trademark laws exist. The Washington Redskins lost their trademark. You can create as many NFTs of their logo as you want. But you cannot stop me from putting that logo on my website.
    - Jyaif 5y ago
      Showing NFTs on your website will not increase your status, because nobody will know if you paid for them or not. Showing NFTs on your profile on a website that only accepts verified NFTs (see my previous message for what I mean by that) will increase your status.
Sargos 5y ago
>That's the reason people purchase Rolex watches But people can just make fake Rolex watches and wear those too! Watches are a scam /s

smaryjerry 5y ago

As someone pointed out already in the baseball card example. NFTs do not give you copyright over the images. You may buy a baseball card but that doesn’t let you sell or license the image displayed on the baseball card. NFT is exactly the same in that sense. It is purely a collectible not explicit ownership of a likeness.

barrenko 5y ago

You're married. You don't own him / her, but people still brag about it and it's a frequent rite.

bart_spoon 5y ago
The NFT equivalent of marriage would be getting married, and your spouse continuing to live with their old roommates, date around, keeping a separate bank account, going on other people's family vacations, and starting multiple families other than yours. If that's how marriage worked, people wouldn't get married either.