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Yes, you can screenshot the Mona Lisa or print out a signed Mickey Mantle rookie card, but it's not the same thing is it? The verifiable timestamp and record of

Yes, you can screenshot the Mona Lisa or print out a signed Mickey Mantle rookie card, but it's not the same thing is it? The verifiable timestamp and record of account associated with a wallet address (public key) that is known to be associated with the artist that produced the work is the same as establishing physical provenance for a unique item. And as for value goes, NFTs are far more liquid than physical art works because settlement is instant, provenance is simply a matter of inspecting transaction history (no need for counterparties such as Sotheby's), the market is worldwide, it's a composeable asset that can be used with other games, apps, etc., it can be used as an authentication token for exclusive access to software or physical events, etc. But never underestimate the value of liquidity.

amcoastal 5y ago
You wouldn't steal a car would you?
- rudilee 5y ago
  Remind me of this skit https://youtu.be/Fb7N-JtQWGI https://youtu.be/Fb7N-JtQWGI
goodoldneon 5y ago
The painting example isn't valid. There's 1 original painting that only 1 person (or group) can own. Anyone who buys a print has something fundamentally different than I do; I have the painting hanging in my house. With a digital image, there isn't an original: all copies are equivalent (save for compression)
- e_proxus 5y ago
  Actually, that would almost approach some "real" value for NFTs... Let's say you have digital artwork in a lossless format. You then take the world by storm with the compressed version. Everyone loves it. You sell an NFT with a hash/URI/encoding of the original uncompressed version encrypted so only the owner on the blockchain can decrypt it. Needlessly to say, this would only work for digital art that is compressible. The owner could perhaps prove that they really own the original by showing a differently compressed version of it.
  - cr1895 5y ago
    The creator of the lossless one can also just decide to distribute that lossless version after selling an NFT of it. Doesn't that defeat the point of only the NFT owner having control of it?
    - goodoldneon 5y ago
      Yep. DRM can only go so far. Physical goods inherently have scarcity but digital goods don't
cr1895 5y ago
> Yes, you can screenshot the Mona Lisa or print out a signed Mickey Mantle rookie card, but it's not the same thing is it? Obviously not, because those are tangible things. That’s not a valid comparison.
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  But you're not paying for the tangibility. Digital image replication is near perfect. You could have a tangible copy of the Mona Lisa that is physically indistinguishable from the real one. The reason people pay millions for artworks is because of the intangible provenance. If the value was the tangible, then tangible digital replications would sell for the same value as the original.
  - notkaiho 5y ago
    but a digital image is not tangible, i.e. something you can have displayed, in a physical frame, in meatspace.
    - dcolkitt 5y ago
      Half of my Twitter feed is profile pics of NFTs being displayed prominently. In a pre-digital pre-social media world you’re right. But in the modern world where people spend more time socializing online than in meatspace, digital goods become easier to display than physical ones. I think a lot of HN doesn’t get this because they don’t spend much time on social media. But for someone like Steph Curry, putting an ape in his profile pic gets a lot more exposure than a Van Gogh on his living room wall.
      - BEEdwards 5y ago
        >Half of my Twitter feed is profile pics of NFTs being displayed prominently. And I could in 30 seconds, find the most expensive nft, copy the image and use that as my profile picture...
        5y ago
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> The verifiable timestamp and record of account associated with a wallet address (public key) that is known to be associated with the artist that produced the work is the same as establishing physical provenance for a unique item. Not really. In your Mona Lisa example, an NFT would be more like a blockchain based ticket to the Louvre that has a link to a Mona Lisa JPEG. That’s the mismatch in NFT discussions: The believers have been convinced that the NFT is the artwork, but everyone else looks at the NFT and sees a link to a JPEG with no actual rights, possession, or ownership of the artwork. NFTs aren’t the artwork. They’re a fancy crypto receipt that says “I paid X amount to someone and we agreed that transaction had a link to this specific JPEG”. You can technically go into the blockchain and confirm that your receipt was the first, but there’s nothing stopping anyone else from making another NFT of the Mona Lisa and selling it. The blockchain itself can’t even verify that the Louvre sold you the original Mona Lisa NFT, you have to rely on 3rd-party news articles and such to confirm the address was truly associated with the Louvre. We’re already seeing scams where fraudulent NFTs are being produced that claim to be authorized by legal owners of the artwork but are actually just scammers selling NFTs of someone else’s artwork. But the funny part is that discovering these frauds has zero impact on the blockchain because the NFT was already minted and owned and you can’t undo that. We just have to look off-chain to websites to tell us what these tokens are supposed to be thought of, ignoring the actual blockchain NFT contents and trusting the non-blockchain NFT sources. They might be valuable to other members of the NFT believers group in the same way that rare baseball cards are valuable to other baseball card collectors, but the rest of us just aren’t interested in trading digital baseball cards of JPEGs. There’s also a huge problem with wash trading: Someone can make their NFT or NFT collection look arbitrarily valuable by trading it between multiple wallets they own. From the outside it looks like the NFT is “sold” for huge amounts of money, but really it’s just someone moving their own money and NFTs around on the blockchain. In the real art world this is much less practical because someone would be paying huge tax bills and auction fees on each sale. With blockchain, someone can simply wash trade with themselves across wallets and nobody would ever know. NFT values are definitely being pumped up by this scam because it’s too obvious and easy to ignore.
- theshadowknows 5y ago
  That makes a lot of sense, and thanks for the detailed answers. The age old "this isn't for you" is applicable here...I don't see the value personally, but I understand the motivation behind it..sort of like how I don't mind streaming music vs "owning" a digital copy of it as .mp3 or whatever.
Winsaucerer 5y ago
Screenshotting the Mona Lisa or printing out a signed Mickey Mantle card is not a good analogy to copying an NFT. In the case of the NFT, the exact same bytes can be on my system as the 'owner' has. How can I get a Mona Lisa copy that has the exact same physical makeup? Or a duplicate signed Mickey Mantle with the same ink strokes? Digital assets can be easily duplicated identically. The only thing you're missing is some stamp on a chain that says you're the owner.
- koonsolo 5y ago
  You can see it as the "signature" of the creator. Everybody owns the photograph, but only 1 person owns the signed photograph.
  - Winsaucerer 5y ago
    It seems to me more analogous to a certificate, since there's nothing like a signature embedded in the image itself that only one person has. Anyone can have the thing itself (an identical digital copy), but only one person has the certificate provided by the original creator.
notkaiho 5y ago
People continue to misunderstand even the above, and think that it's somehow actually conferring them the rights to all the bytes, and the results are hilarious: https://twitter.com/JackShawhan/status/1457951413368016899 https://twitter.com/JackShawhan/status/1457951413368016899
- carnitine 5y ago
  That’s obviously not someone being serious.
  - IntelMiner 5y ago
    How can you definitively prove that?
NicoJuicy 5y ago
Comparing a digital cartoon of a monkey ( as usual) with a painted and original Mona Lisa is just wrong. NFT's are mostly here to sell you avatar's of tech-minded people who create ( and even generate) as much as possible avatars.
BTCOG 5y ago
Chrisco255 - This is precisely the rub of the scam. You bought it, hook, line, and sinker. But this is 100% incorrect. An NFT owner does not own the artwork. You are just scammed into thinking you bought a free and downloadable to all JPEG image.
- barnabee 5y ago
  This statement doesn’t really make any sense. It’s like saying a car doesn’t have 4 doors because some cars don’t have four doors. An NFT is a basic, fundamental piece of technology that represents unique digital tokens (token A is distinct from and not exchangeable with token B, unlike money and stocks and most tokens before them that are interchangeable with others of the same kind), usually on a public blockchain (though that’s not technically required). If the artist signs a contract assigning all rights to the artwork to whoever holds the NFT they minted (and some do), sure they own the artwork! If a domain name system is programmed to let whoever owns an NFT device where it points to, then the NFT holder owns that domain as much as you own any domain you purchase in the traditional way (especially if that system itself is verifiably immutable). On the other hand if all the NFT signals is that you bought a limited edition token linked to a piece of art from its creator and that you donated a lot of money to a certain charity, some people want to be known for that kind of thing and see value there too, that’s ok! And yes, if you buy something with no rights, perhaps not even from the creator of the art because you didn’t check, because you think it might go up in value… maybe you got scammed. Technology helps people do more, and that includes scammers. The presence of scammers is irrelevant and unrelated to the presence and possibility of interesting, useful, or fun use cases. The fact you don’t find them interesting, useful, or fun doesn’t make the technology itself a scam or everyone involved a scammer, it just means your preferences lie elsewhere.

amcoastal 5y ago

You wouldn't steal a car would you?

rudilee 5y ago
Remind me of this skit https://youtu.be/Fb7N-JtQWGI https://youtu.be/Fb7N-JtQWGI

goodoldneon 5y ago

The painting example isn't valid. There's 1 original painting that only 1 person (or group) can own. Anyone who buys a print has something fundamentally different than I do; I have the painting hanging in my house. With a digital image, there isn't an original: all copies are equivalent (save for compression)

e_proxus 5y ago
Actually, that would almost approach some "real" value for NFTs... Let's say you have digital artwork in a lossless format. You then take the world by storm with the compressed version. Everyone loves it. You sell an NFT with a hash/URI/encoding of the original uncompressed version encrypted so only the owner on the blockchain can decrypt it. Needlessly to say, this would only work for digital art that is compressible. The owner could perhaps prove that they really own the original by showing a differently compressed version of it.
- cr1895 5y ago
  The creator of the lossless one can also just decide to distribute that lossless version after selling an NFT of it. Doesn't that defeat the point of only the NFT owner having control of it?
  - goodoldneon 5y ago
    Yep. DRM can only go so far. Physical goods inherently have scarcity but digital goods don't

cr1895 5y ago

> Yes, you can screenshot the Mona Lisa or print out a signed Mickey Mantle rookie card, but it's not the same thing is it? Obviously not, because those are tangible things. That’s not a valid comparison.

dcolkitt 5y ago
But you're not paying for the tangibility. Digital image replication is near perfect. You could have a tangible copy of the Mona Lisa that is physically indistinguishable from the real one. The reason people pay millions for artworks is because of the intangible provenance. If the value was the tangible, then tangible digital replications would sell for the same value as the original.
- notkaiho 5y ago
  but a digital image is not tangible, i.e. something you can have displayed, in a physical frame, in meatspace.
  - dcolkitt 5y ago
    Half of my Twitter feed is profile pics of NFTs being displayed prominently. In a pre-digital pre-social media world you’re right. But in the modern world where people spend more time socializing online than in meatspace, digital goods become easier to display than physical ones. I think a lot of HN doesn’t get this because they don’t spend much time on social media. But for someone like Steph Curry, putting an ape in his profile pic gets a lot more exposure than a Van Gogh on his living room wall.
    - BEEdwards 5y ago
      >Half of my Twitter feed is profile pics of NFTs being displayed prominently. And I could in 30 seconds, find the most expensive nft, copy the image and use that as my profile picture...
      - 5y ago

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> The verifiable timestamp and record of account associated with a wallet address (public key) that is known to be associated with the artist that produced the work is the same as establishing physical provenance for a unique item. Not really. In your Mona Lisa example, an NFT would be more like a blockchain based ticket to the Louvre that has a link to a Mona Lisa JPEG. That’s the mismatch in NFT discussions: The believers have been convinced that the NFT is the artwork, but everyone else looks at the NFT and sees a link to a JPEG with no actual rights, possession, or ownership of the artwork. NFTs aren’t the artwork. They’re a fancy crypto receipt that says “I paid X amount to someone and we agreed that transaction had a link to this specific JPEG”. You can technically go into the blockchain and confirm that your receipt was the first, but there’s nothing stopping anyone else from making another NFT of the Mona Lisa and selling it. The blockchain itself can’t even verify that the Louvre sold you the original Mona Lisa NFT, you have to rely on 3rd-party news articles and such to confirm the address was truly associated with the Louvre. We’re already seeing scams where fraudulent NFTs are being produced that claim to be authorized by legal owners of the artwork but are actually just scammers selling NFTs of someone else’s artwork. But the funny part is that discovering these frauds has zero impact on the blockchain because the NFT was already minted and owned and you can’t undo that. We just have to look off-chain to websites to tell us what these tokens are supposed to be thought of, ignoring the actual blockchain NFT contents and trusting the non-blockchain NFT sources. They might be valuable to other members of the NFT believers group in the same way that rare baseball cards are valuable to other baseball card collectors, but the rest of us just aren’t interested in trading digital baseball cards of JPEGs. There’s also a huge problem with wash trading: Someone can make their NFT or NFT collection look arbitrarily valuable by trading it between multiple wallets they own. From the outside it looks like the NFT is “sold” for huge amounts of money, but really it’s just someone moving their own money and NFTs around on the blockchain. In the real art world this is much less practical because someone would be paying huge tax bills and auction fees on each sale. With blockchain, someone can simply wash trade with themselves across wallets and nobody would ever know. NFT values are definitely being pumped up by this scam because it’s too obvious and easy to ignore.

theshadowknows 5y ago
That makes a lot of sense, and thanks for the detailed answers. The age old "this isn't for you" is applicable here...I don't see the value personally, but I understand the motivation behind it..sort of like how I don't mind streaming music vs "owning" a digital copy of it as .mp3 or whatever.

Winsaucerer 5y ago

Screenshotting the Mona Lisa or printing out a signed Mickey Mantle card is not a good analogy to copying an NFT. In the case of the NFT, the exact same bytes can be on my system as the 'owner' has. How can I get a Mona Lisa copy that has the exact same physical makeup? Or a duplicate signed Mickey Mantle with the same ink strokes? Digital assets can be easily duplicated identically. The only thing you're missing is some stamp on a chain that says you're the owner.

koonsolo 5y ago
You can see it as the "signature" of the creator. Everybody owns the photograph, but only 1 person owns the signed photograph.
- Winsaucerer 5y ago
  It seems to me more analogous to a certificate, since there's nothing like a signature embedded in the image itself that only one person has. Anyone can have the thing itself (an identical digital copy), but only one person has the certificate provided by the original creator.

notkaiho 5y ago

People continue to misunderstand even the above, and think that it's somehow actually conferring them the rights to all the bytes, and the results are hilarious: https://twitter.com/JackShawhan/status/1457951413368016899 https://twitter.com/JackShawhan/status/1457951413368016899

carnitine 5y ago
That’s obviously not someone being serious.
- IntelMiner 5y ago
  How can you definitively prove that?

NicoJuicy 5y ago

Comparing a digital cartoon of a monkey ( as usual) with a painted and original Mona Lisa is just wrong. NFT's are mostly here to sell you avatar's of tech-minded people who create ( and even generate) as much as possible avatars.

BTCOG 5y ago

Chrisco255 - This is precisely the rub of the scam. You bought it, hook, line, and sinker. But this is 100% incorrect. An NFT owner does not own the artwork. You are just scammed into thinking you bought a free and downloadable to all JPEG image.

barnabee 5y ago
This statement doesn’t really make any sense. It’s like saying a car doesn’t have 4 doors because some cars don’t have four doors. An NFT is a basic, fundamental piece of technology that represents unique digital tokens (token A is distinct from and not exchangeable with token B, unlike money and stocks and most tokens before them that are interchangeable with others of the same kind), usually on a public blockchain (though that’s not technically required). If the artist signs a contract assigning all rights to the artwork to whoever holds the NFT they minted (and some do), sure they own the artwork! If a domain name system is programmed to let whoever owns an NFT device where it points to, then the NFT holder owns that domain as much as you own any domain you purchase in the traditional way (especially if that system itself is verifiably immutable). On the other hand if all the NFT signals is that you bought a limited edition token linked to a piece of art from its creator and that you donated a lot of money to a certain charity, some people want to be known for that kind of thing and see value there too, that’s ok! And yes, if you buy something with no rights, perhaps not even from the creator of the art because you didn’t check, because you think it might go up in value… maybe you got scammed. Technology helps people do more, and that includes scammers. The presence of scammers is irrelevant and unrelated to the presence and possibility of interesting, useful, or fun use cases. The fact you don’t find them interesting, useful, or fun doesn’t make the technology itself a scam or everyone involved a scammer, it just means your preferences lie elsewhere.