4 ms·

Quite often that 'permissionless marketplace' is happening without the permission of the artists.

kranke155 5y ago
This is a shame but technical solutions are possible and being worked on. A quick verification can also be done in any of the major markets to determine the art is being sold by the artists, which is something I always do.
- ShamelessC 5y ago
  What's the technical solution? That seems intractable.
  - kranke155 5y ago
    intractable? how? If it's possible to detect fakes in the real world, it's possible to detect duplicates in digital art. Eventually some sort of image scraping through all the major art networks - Artboard, Behance - will be integrated into NFT platforms to prevent most of this.
    - ShamelessC 5y ago
      That all sounds very hypothetical. Content-based de-duplication is an unsolved problem facing many known tradeoffs that can't satisfy the demands of all digital artists in a fair way. The use of sheer automation for this task will fail - humans need to be in the loop. If you're positing a solution with deep learning - again, you're going to have false positives/negatives and humans will need to be in the loop. As in - humans with eyeballs visually examining and verifying claims made by NFT platforms using automated tools. I am not saying any of this is uncertain. But assuming it as a guarantee (unless you are personally working to help create this tech, which I gather you are not) is naive.
      - kranke155 5y ago
        The system in the real world requires a lot of humans in the loop as well. What's your point? We just need to make it harder for people to do it, you will never be able to make it impossible. That's holding the digital world to a far higher standard than meatspace, where fraud happens. Youtube has a huge problem with re-uploading of videos where multiple accounts will download and re-upload a video of anything they can get away with. Does that make Youtube useless?
        ShamelessC 5y ago
        My point is that a system which claims to be highly decentralized ultimately has similar flaws to existing implementations when it becomes dependent on centralized trust in the real-world e.g. "humans manually verifying things". I'm aware of YouTube's specific issues and almost brought it up as a point against NFT's. YouTube is not useless, no. But, its automated copyright system is draconian and serves elites and lawyers more than it does individual content creators (who it often actively harms). This issue arises specifically because YouTube operates at massive scale and because Google refuses to hire enough people to deal with content moderation and copyright complaints _properly_ and would prefer to automate things as much as possible. I don't think NFT's would present these exact problems; but I guarantee you similarly horrible inequities surface in NFT markets. I don't believe currency should be less regulated. I believe financial regulation should be drastically increased as e.g. tax loopholes is one method that the ultra-wealthy use to remain that way - at the expense of everyone else. I would be _substantially_ more interested in cryptocurrencies if institutions were up to the task of regulating it to prevent abuse. I've seen a bit of this lately but it's honestly not enough.
        kranke155 5y ago
        I’m afraid you’re right. I’m not a crypto utopian - I think the dystopian outcome for crypto is equally likely. In fact it’s likely that both utopian and dystopian outcomes will all happen simultaneously. I do like NFTs as a way to support digital artists and I think they’ve gotten a really bad rap in the press. But they’re not going to empower some kind of utopia. They just allow digital artists to profit from their work directly in a novel way. That’s good to me. The fact that they have problems doesn’t stop them from being an innovative solution with real usage. The decentralisation aspect of it is only interesting from my POV insofar that it’s allowed this market to exist.

This is a shame but technical solutions are possible and being worked on. A quick verification can also be done in any of the major markets to determine the art is being sold by the artists, which is something I always do.

ShamelessC 5y ago
What's the technical solution? That seems intractable.
- kranke155 5y ago
  intractable? how? If it's possible to detect fakes in the real world, it's possible to detect duplicates in digital art. Eventually some sort of image scraping through all the major art networks - Artboard, Behance - will be integrated into NFT platforms to prevent most of this.
  - ShamelessC 5y ago
    That all sounds very hypothetical. Content-based de-duplication is an unsolved problem facing many known tradeoffs that can't satisfy the demands of all digital artists in a fair way. The use of sheer automation for this task will fail - humans need to be in the loop. If you're positing a solution with deep learning - again, you're going to have false positives/negatives and humans will need to be in the loop. As in - humans with eyeballs visually examining and verifying claims made by NFT platforms using automated tools. I am not saying any of this is uncertain. But assuming it as a guarantee (unless you are personally working to help create this tech, which I gather you are not) is naive.
    - kranke155 5y ago
      The system in the real world requires a lot of humans in the loop as well. What's your point? We just need to make it harder for people to do it, you will never be able to make it impossible. That's holding the digital world to a far higher standard than meatspace, where fraud happens. Youtube has a huge problem with re-uploading of videos where multiple accounts will download and re-upload a video of anything they can get away with. Does that make Youtube useless?
      - ShamelessC 5y ago
        My point is that a system which claims to be highly decentralized ultimately has similar flaws to existing implementations when it becomes dependent on centralized trust in the real-world e.g. "humans manually verifying things". I'm aware of YouTube's specific issues and almost brought it up as a point against NFT's. YouTube is not useless, no. But, its automated copyright system is draconian and serves elites and lawyers more than it does individual content creators (who it often actively harms). This issue arises specifically because YouTube operates at massive scale and because Google refuses to hire enough people to deal with content moderation and copyright complaints _properly_ and would prefer to automate things as much as possible. I don't think NFT's would present these exact problems; but I guarantee you similarly horrible inequities surface in NFT markets. I don't believe currency should be less regulated. I believe financial regulation should be drastically increased as e.g. tax loopholes is one method that the ultra-wealthy use to remain that way - at the expense of everyone else. I would be _substantially_ more interested in cryptocurrencies if institutions were up to the task of regulating it to prevent abuse. I've seen a bit of this lately but it's honestly not enough.
        kranke155 5y ago
        I’m afraid you’re right. I’m not a crypto utopian - I think the dystopian outcome for crypto is equally likely. In fact it’s likely that both utopian and dystopian outcomes will all happen simultaneously. I do like NFTs as a way to support digital artists and I think they’ve gotten a really bad rap in the press. But they’re not going to empower some kind of utopia. They just allow digital artists to profit from their work directly in a novel way. That’s good to me. The fact that they have problems doesn’t stop them from being an innovative solution with real usage. The decentralisation aspect of it is only interesting from my POV insofar that it’s allowed this market to exist.