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Perhaps my understanding of NFTs is lacking, but what prevents someone from pulling a scam like in The Producers and simply selling multiple NFTs for the same w

• tshaddox 5y ago
  I imagine it’s no different than an artist selling a painting they claim is one of a kind but isn’t.
  • lottin 5y ago
    Well, a painting is of one a kind. It can't be replicated with exact fidelity, unlike an abstract sequence of 1s and 0s.
    • lalaland1125 5y ago
      NFTs are technically one of a kind too since they have an exact timestamp ordering creation. A second copy would have a different timestamp.
      • lottin 5y ago
        > A second copy would have a different timestamp. No, you can copy the timestamp as well.
    • capableweb 5y ago
      NFTs are based around the idea that you create a new cryptocurrency for each object you want to sell on a chain, for example Ethereum. When you do this "creation of a non-fungible token", your token gets an address that is essentially an "ID" for the token you've created. Every token you create gets a unique ID, that only that token has. So with that in mind, a NFT is as unique as a painting in your example, as a NFT is always "one of a kind".
      • lottin 5y ago
        No, the ID is not unique. It might be unique in a particular database, where the software enforces such uniqueness, but that doesn't mean the ID unique. Anyone can make an exact copy of the ID, which will be undistinguishable from the original, or they can copy the entire database, any number of times, at a negligible cost. You can't do that with a physical object.
      • zohch 5y ago
        And what value does this unique NFT have if it has no enforceable or enforced relation to reality?
        • capableweb 5y ago
          Not sure how this is relevant to the discussion at hand. Either you think it's valuable, or you don't. I happen to think NFTs are not as valuable as others seemingly think, but they do have some use cases (apparently). What is reality anyway? We have a distributed, decentralized database (Ethereum) that people can set/get data in/from. Now we also have a abstraction on top of that that allows us to have unique data. What can we do with this? Fuck should I know, also I don't really care. Think of it what you want.
          • zohch 5y ago
            > What is reality anyway? Have you not heard of this concept? Seems to be a bit of copout to explaining the value of an NFT given an NFT, by it's mere existence, has no bearing on anything outside of a blockchain. But if you are unclear on the concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality
            • capableweb 5y ago
              We seem to differ on the definition as I'd call blockchains and cryptocurrencies real (part of reality), but you somehow don't.
        • DSMan195276 5y ago
    • danpalmer 5y ago
      You're not even buying the "1s and 0s" with an NFT either. You're buying a record in a proprietary (albeit public) database that says you "own" it. There can be many records in many propriety databases claiming the same thing and none has any more legitimacy than any other technically speaking
      • maxwell 5y ago
        Why the quotes on "own"? You can hold it, trade it, or destroy it—curious what other factors you see as necessary for "full" ownership of a digital token?
        • NikolaeVarius 5y ago
          Right Click -> Save As
          • deleted 5y ago
            [deleted]
          • maxwell 5y ago
            NFTs aren't digital media, they're digital tokens. You own the token as you own an API key for a service, except since decentralized there's no network operator who can revoke your key ("suspend your account") as with, say, centralized SaaS REST APIs. You're not buying the JPEG, you're buying an API key that happens to be linked to the JPEG.
        • Joeboy 5y ago
          You own the token, but only "own" the art.
          • yayitswei 5y ago
            By that logic, you only "own" your house.
            • 5y ago
    • tshaddox 5y ago
      It can be replicated in such a way that you cannot apply a test to determine whether it is original, unless you’re one of a very few experts who can distinguish highly skilled forgeries from original paintings. Historically there have been forgeries that have fooled all experts and thus the entire art world for some time. This is a much more difficult and less reliable process than checking a digital signature in a public database.
    • DSMan195276 5y ago
      The fact that something is or isn't one of a kind doesn't make it valuable though. If value only came from the art itself then whether something was one of a kind shouldn't matter - especially so if a reproduction is close enough that they are visually identical. For expensive paintings the value of the painting is completely separate from the art itself - I think we can agree that a Picasso would sell for a lot less if you didn't tell people it was painted by Picasso. That's despite the fact that who painted something is not a physical aspect of the painting. An NFT is basically like a 'certificate of authenticity' - whether you think it's BS or not depends entirely on who issued it. A item that includes such a certificate from a known reputable source may be extremely valuable to a collector, where-as the regular item may be practically worthless, and that can be true even if nobody can tell the items apart. At the same time, John Doe down the street signing 'certificates of authenticity' doesn't provide any value because nobody cares who John Doe is, in the same way that some random person signing an NFT doesn't automatically make it worth anything since anybody else can just come along an do the same. But if the author of an artwork came by and produced an NFT of it, that's unique in a way that people may care about.
      • tshaddox 5y ago
        It all comes down to technology. If we had the technology to create an atom-by-atom replica of a painting, then this justification would need to change. People would probably say “but these atoms are still the original ones.” Of course the only way to verify that at this point would be to have evidence of a chain of custody, which would likely be very difficult to establish with any confidence. So paintings just “lucked out” and already had a convenient scarce item that interested parties could agree represents the “original act of creation of the work of art,” because the technology to create an exact copy doesn’t exist, and it’s extremely expensive and difficult to create a convincing forgery.
      • lottin 5y ago
        An NFT cannot be a certificate of authenticity, because the content is hosted by a third party. The third party can replace the supposedly original content with a non-original copy at any time.
• bodge5000 5y ago
  If I'm understanding you right, you can and its extremely common. I don't even think its a scam or frowned upon
  • nkrisc 5y ago
    If that’s true, then it leaves me even more confused than before.
    • snarf21 5y ago
      No, because it is a fake scarcity scam. People are selling art they don't even own. It is all a pump and dump scheme.
    • bodge5000 5y ago
      Same here, I only found out about it last night. I thought the whole point is that your buying something totally unique, apparently not
      • rhn_mk1 5y ago
        You are buying something unique, but what you're buying is not art. Instead it's more like... a receipt? A signed copy?
        • throwaway744678 5y ago
          A certificate of ownership.
          • rhn_mk1 5y ago
            That's my point though - it's not ownership of the artwork. It has no legal power, and multiple can exist, made by anyone. Ownership of what then? Of a receipt or a signature.
        • bodge5000 5y ago
          I mean the hash is unique, but the piece of artwork that hash is associated with isnt. I'm not even saying something like "the artwork is all boring its not unique" or anything, or that someone could copy I it, I mean the seller is literally selling multiple of the exact same artwork. But if the recipient being unique is all that matters, why have artwork associated with it at all? That's basically just a weird online packaging/box art at that point.
• cyber_kinetist 5y ago
  In current capitalist societies, ownership of property is fully secured by the military (police) and judicial (law) power of the state. NFTs provide you with neither of these (not even copyright protection), so yes: there's no one stopping from doing a right-click on your image. Maybe if everyone was really "believing" that ownership really originates from the Ethereum blockchain (just like beliving that strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is a basis for a system of government), then the ownership could be recognized socially without any coertion or violence. But so far the only people really beliving in this system of values are elites and crypto enthusiasts, so if you really are one of those people who want NFTs to be a basis for ownership, you've be better off pandering to the government to enact laws to arrest people for right-clicking.
  • zohch 5y ago
    For context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ownership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ownership > Ownership is the state or fact of exclusive rights and control over property, which may be any asset, including an object, land or real estate, intellectual property, or until the nineteenth century, human beings. In light of this > In current capitalist societies, ownership of property is fully secured by the military (police) and judicial (law) power of the state. Any examples of non capitalist societies that actually governed more than just a city for more than just a couple of months where there were no enforcement of exclusive rights over anything? Because if I can think of none, just for example, USSR would get real pissy real fast if you infringed on the exclusive rights which they thought existed over a whole host of things. Sure, in most non-capitalist societies people had no exclusive rights to their own labor, or their own persons, but there were still many people who had exclusive rights over things that would be enforced by use of force. And the state did have exclusive rights over the person and labor of their subjects, which is a key differentiation from most "capitalistic societies" as you call them.
    • cyber_kinetist 5y ago
      I wasn't talking anything at all about non-capitalist societies, don't understand where you're coming from.
• lapetitejort 5y ago
  You don't need to defraud people when you can just sell one with a primary color of #e0b0ff and another with #e0b0fe.
• afoot 5y ago
  The marketplaces verify the collections. So if you're buying from a famous artist on OpenSea, you know the NFT is the one from that artist. There are copycat collections but it's no different from someone trying to flog a fake Banksy a the local shopping mall.
• 015a 5y ago
  Ultimately the system will evolve toward more centralized entities which can verify the providence of items. Whether that's an auction house, or a twitter verified badge. The sites which allow "viewing" and "transacting" the NFTs will display this "chain of authenticity". Thus, its baked into the price; plenty of counterfeits exist, but the "real" one ("this is the one Deadmau5 tweeted about") will be worth the most. The argument that this is antithetical to the distributed goals of blockchain are missing the point; its a marriage of old-school centralization and new-school peer-to-peer. Centralization is great for some things, like verifiable providence. It's been a negative force in other things, like limiting or taxing access to financial services & marketplaces. Furthermore, if you're in the camp of "zero centralization"; it's great for that too. Imagine an artist publishing their GPG key, creating an NFT of a piece of art, then signing some part of the content of that NFT with their GPG key.
  • logiczero 5y ago
    This idea of combining NFT and GPG to demonstrate both ownership and authenticity is very intriguing. Would the artist's public GPG key have to be something similar to a verified Twitter account, i.e. some kind of due diligence by a third party that the key actually belongs to a specific person/artist? How would the artist "sign" the artwork with the private GPG key in such a way that the signature wasn't simply duplicated when the digital artifact was copied? Is there a way to combine some identifier from the NFT with the GPG key such that there was a way to cryptographically demonstrate authenticity?
    • 015a 5y ago
      All NFTs have a verifiable chain of providence baked-in; you can see the wallet address of the account which minted it. So, I present GPG signing not really as a novel mechanism for establishing authenticity given a lack of any other method; the NFT itself is the authenticity. Today, zero-trust creators may publish their GPG public key; tomorrow, maybe they publish their address; "the only legit NFTs are the ones minted from this address"; this is cryptographically secure. But, maybe a creator is more "well known" for their GPG public key, or wants to mint from a large number of addresses for whatever reason. They could sign a phrase which includes the wallet address which minted the NFT; when combined with the verifiable providence blockchain already offers, this is a compelling and secure solution for them. Blockchain has all the same "zero-trust bootstrapping" problems as GPG does; where does the artist actually broadcast "this is my address", and how can fans know that it was actually the artist who said it? It's something GPG has struggled with for a long time. Ultimately it usually falls back to centralized authority; that doesn't mean GPG doesn't have value beyond the authority who told you "Yeah, this is Deadmau5's public key". The idea is simply presented more-so as a bridge between the old and the new. Many people here understand what GPG is and why it is valuable, but don't understand how blockchain delivers an extension of that value. GPG is great at asserting authenticity; blockchain extends this and asserts both authenticity and providence ("is it real, and where did it come from?"); this is a critical addition required for a concept of ownership. But blockchain's ability to assert this ends at the blockchain, as you'd expect; the world will still need centralized authorities to jump the gap between the blockchain and a human being. IF that matters in the context of a given NFT. There are tons of NFTs which created 'virgin value' so to speak; value of thin air. No one cares who minted them; the token itself is what is valuable.
• brightball 5y ago
  Nothing. Literally nothing. I've just enjoyed watching my Solana go up so that I have a way to make money off of this silliness. Just need to time the exit before the fad goes away.
  • tata71 5y ago
    Consider flipping it into Loopring, which strives to (and seems to be succeeding in) serving a much wider market, with custody staying on ETH network in case Loopring network eats shit.
    • brightball 5y ago
      I'll check it out.
• nikk1 5y ago
  Artists can already sell multiple NFTs for the same work of art. But this is information the buyer already knows. Also to avoid scams as an investor, you'd typically want to invest in artists with a reputation.
  • tata71 5y ago
    Or sell the NFT and then put the painting through a grinder, like Banksy!
• bravura 5y ago
  This is not unique to NFTs, and is based upon the trust you have for the artist / gallery that is selling the work. If---in the traditional art world---you buy a $35,000 fine art photograph from a limited edition of 10 prints by the photographer, you also trust that the artist will not make a second run of 100 prints. Or if they do, that the second run will be denoted and priced differently, so that the original run retains most of its value.
  • nkrisc 5y ago
    Yeah, I understand that. That’s why I was wondering if NFTs solve that, if the uniqueness of an NFT provides any value.
    • tata71 5y ago
      Does phone/watch/card tap&pay provide any value over running a small chunk of plastic through a grinder on top of carbon paper....?
  • stjohnswarts 5y ago
    It's a lot harder to fake and fool people with the Mona Lisa than a fake of the original jpg of the yelling lady/cat meme.