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That’s it I’ve decided I’m making a post about NFT myth busting. (Not this one but another one) Think about it like this It used to be that when you bought a p

That’s it I’ve decided I’m making a post about NFT myth busting. (Not this one but another one) Think about it like this It used to be that when you bought a painting, if you bought an original, you got a painting + signature showing it’s an original. NFTs are meant to be used for digital art, where the physical object doesn’t exist, and anyone can make their own copy. So think of NFTs as when we “decoupled” the art from the signature. So Before you bought Physical Art Print (limited) + Signature Now you buy Digital copy (one of infinite) + Signature Since the digital art is infinite, you’re mostly really paying for the signature. What you’re getting with an NFT is just the signature. The art, being digital and infinitely reproducible is still out there. Curiously, what we’ve found is that if you make just a Market for digital art, where you sell only the signatures, people will come and trade them and buy them. You might ask - well what the hell is the point of buying just signatures? To what I’ll reply that everyone has their own kink, and that it has solved a big problem for digital artists who can now make money for their art instead of having to shill for brands or make trash to fund what they really love. Think of it as a form of DRM for digital artists, in the actual meaningful form of the term - Rights Management being the operative words here. It used to be that in order to enforce DRM on “legitimate” copies of a film for instance, Netflix runs a bunch of servers, sells you the streaming and reliable delivery of pixels to your screen. But really they are just enforcing DRM over a bunch of pixels. Same thing with indie artists today. They can do something they couldn’t do before, which is to digitally sign X amounts of their artwork and sell it on an permissionless global market. IMO NFTs right now are little more than a good way to fund artists you like by buying digital signatures over their digital art.

viraptor 5y ago
> solved a big problem for digital artists who can now make money Digital artists made and sold art online for a long time. There's a new way to do it, but "can now make money" is a weird way to phrase it.
- chii 5y ago
  the digital "signature" may entice people who previously did not purchase digital art, thus expanding the market. It's indeed a "new" way to make money. You cannot "pirate " this signature. As for whether this signature is indeed worth the price being paid - only time will tell. My bet is that it's not worth anything, but it is possible that it's worth a lot more than i give it credit for.
  - truemotive 5y ago
    “only time will tell” doing some big lifting in that sentence
  - sobkas 5y ago
    > It's indeed a "new" way to make money. You cannot "pirate " this signature. You can't stop anyone else from making different nft pointing at your art and saying their nft is original. So maybe you can't pirate it, but nothing stops you from making as many nft pointing to someone else art as you want. And selling them.
obstacle1 5y ago
So an NFT is a digital signature that is worthless unless it "makes a market for" itself. It is a pointer to an infinitely and freely reproducible resource, meaning the owner of the signature doesn't actually have control over the underlying resource, they just have "proof" that they "own" it. And the owner needs to convince other people that their "owning" the signature has value, so that other people will pay larger sums of money for transferring "ownership", or other people will be recruited into the market to buy more stuff. Let's substitute "digital signature"/"NFT" for "tulip", or "star", or "moon crater", or "beanie baby", or "MLM beauty product". How is the market for NFTs any different from these essentially ponzi-scheme markets? "NFTs allow digital artists to profit from their work!" I mean, sure, but again, they are selling digital signatures with no inherent value that they need to "make a market for". The money they are making isn't because of their art, it is because their sales skills allow them to convince greater fools that inherently worthless digital signatures are actually worth something. Would we say "selling stars enables amateur astronomers to profit from their work"? Or would we rather say selling stars enables scammers to scam people who don't know any better? Or charitably that selling stars enables charitable people to donate money to whoever is selling the "star", both parties to the transaction recognizing that there is nothing of value being exchanged. The latter would be forgivable but it also seems highly unlikely there would be a large market of altruistic donators wanting to provide patronage specifically via NFTs. We have a large and robust financial system that is perfectly capable of facilitating low/no-cost donations. It seems more likely that illegitimate or shady capital needs ways to achieve liquidity and legitimacy. And the whole "supporting artists"/"allowing artists to prosper" narrative is a fantastic (and sufficiently complex) cloak that would achieve that while avoiding scrutiny. tl;dr When a market for an inherently valueless, infinitely reproducible resource pops up out of nowhere and begins to rapidly inflate, it seems likely there's some sketchy stuff going on under the hood.
- kranke155 5y ago
  “The money they are making isn't because of their art...” Yeah you lost me there we must have radically different exposures to NFT art because the stuff i see is magical. Not sure what you’re looking at but you should check out Hic Et Nunc, OBJKt and my fav - FXhash which is a generative art market on Tezos. A lot of things you’ve said can be true and simultaneously we could also have a healthy global digital art market growing under our noses for the first time in human history.
adabaed 5y ago
But you can fund artists already without a blockchain behind... the copyright part, well, the product is valid inside that blockchain. Do we have a way to protect copies of that item in other blockchains?
gexla 5y ago
Digital art seems to be a narrow definition. In the Philippines, people have been making money playing crypto games such as Axie Infinity. Before you can make money, you have to buy 3 Axie toons, which are NFT assets. Because many Filipinos can no longer afford the toons, people have created "scholar" programs where Axie owners can share usage of their inventory in return for a percentage of earnings. I could talk to Filipinos about this all day and the words "art" and "NFT" would even come up. I think it's more correct to simply say that NFTs are simply a record on a blockchain. As with Bitcoin, it's just another application. If you don't understand NFTs, that's fine. Maybe you're not meant to understand them. Maybe you're not the audience. Maybe there's something shady going on. We live in a big world with lots of languages and cultures. You won't understand all of them. Sorry for the rambling reply. Christmas break hangover. ;)
Kaze404 5y ago
> solved a big problem for digital artists who can now make money for their art instead of having to shill for brands or make trash to fund what they really love And created an entirely new one: people selling other people's art for hundreds of thousands of dollars. What a great system.
- kranke155 5y ago
  Forgeries in art are not novel. Digital makes it easier, same way it makes lots of things easier. Technical solutions seem likely.
danbmil99 5y ago
This is the most cogent explanation I've read so far. An NFT token basically serves as a counterfit-proof declaration that artifact X is worth $N, at least to one buyer. It's sort of like Patreon for rich people, with the proviso that there will only be one patron at a time.
- johng 5y ago
  This isn't even true. Because I can own both the selling and buying account and artificially "purchase" said item publicly. Even the price can't be trusted.
  - kranke155 5y ago
    You think fraud in the art world is unusual? It’s a deeply corrupt place. Money laundering is the norm not the exception, even at big auctions of physical art.

viraptor 5y ago

> solved a big problem for digital artists who can now make money Digital artists made and sold art online for a long time. There's a new way to do it, but "can now make money" is a weird way to phrase it.

chii 5y ago
the digital "signature" may entice people who previously did not purchase digital art, thus expanding the market. It's indeed a "new" way to make money. You cannot "pirate " this signature. As for whether this signature is indeed worth the price being paid - only time will tell. My bet is that it's not worth anything, but it is possible that it's worth a lot more than i give it credit for.
- truemotive 5y ago
  “only time will tell” doing some big lifting in that sentence
- sobkas 5y ago
  > It's indeed a "new" way to make money. You cannot "pirate " this signature. You can't stop anyone else from making different nft pointing at your art and saying their nft is original. So maybe you can't pirate it, but nothing stops you from making as many nft pointing to someone else art as you want. And selling them.

obstacle1 5y ago

So an NFT is a digital signature that is worthless unless it "makes a market for" itself. It is a pointer to an infinitely and freely reproducible resource, meaning the owner of the signature doesn't actually have control over the underlying resource, they just have "proof" that they "own" it. And the owner needs to convince other people that their "owning" the signature has value, so that other people will pay larger sums of money for transferring "ownership", or other people will be recruited into the market to buy more stuff. Let's substitute "digital signature"/"NFT" for "tulip", or "star", or "moon crater", or "beanie baby", or "MLM beauty product". How is the market for NFTs any different from these essentially ponzi-scheme markets? "NFTs allow digital artists to profit from their work!" I mean, sure, but again, they are selling digital signatures with no inherent value that they need to "make a market for". The money they are making isn't because of their art, it is because their sales skills allow them to convince greater fools that inherently worthless digital signatures are actually worth something. Would we say "selling stars enables amateur astronomers to profit from their work"? Or would we rather say selling stars enables scammers to scam people who don't know any better? Or charitably that selling stars enables charitable people to donate money to whoever is selling the "star", both parties to the transaction recognizing that there is nothing of value being exchanged. The latter would be forgivable but it also seems highly unlikely there would be a large market of altruistic donators wanting to provide patronage specifically via NFTs. We have a large and robust financial system that is perfectly capable of facilitating low/no-cost donations. It seems more likely that illegitimate or shady capital needs ways to achieve liquidity and legitimacy. And the whole "supporting artists"/"allowing artists to prosper" narrative is a fantastic (and sufficiently complex) cloak that would achieve that while avoiding scrutiny. tl;dr When a market for an inherently valueless, infinitely reproducible resource pops up out of nowhere and begins to rapidly inflate, it seems likely there's some sketchy stuff going on under the hood.

kranke155 5y ago
“The money they are making isn't because of their art...” Yeah you lost me there we must have radically different exposures to NFT art because the stuff i see is magical. Not sure what you’re looking at but you should check out Hic Et Nunc, OBJKt and my fav - FXhash which is a generative art market on Tezos. A lot of things you’ve said can be true and simultaneously we could also have a healthy global digital art market growing under our noses for the first time in human history.

adabaed 5y ago

But you can fund artists already without a blockchain behind... the copyright part, well, the product is valid inside that blockchain. Do we have a way to protect copies of that item in other blockchains?

gexla 5y ago

Digital art seems to be a narrow definition. In the Philippines, people have been making money playing crypto games such as Axie Infinity. Before you can make money, you have to buy 3 Axie toons, which are NFT assets. Because many Filipinos can no longer afford the toons, people have created "scholar" programs where Axie owners can share usage of their inventory in return for a percentage of earnings. I could talk to Filipinos about this all day and the words "art" and "NFT" would even come up. I think it's more correct to simply say that NFTs are simply a record on a blockchain. As with Bitcoin, it's just another application. If you don't understand NFTs, that's fine. Maybe you're not meant to understand them. Maybe you're not the audience. Maybe there's something shady going on. We live in a big world with lots of languages and cultures. You won't understand all of them. Sorry for the rambling reply. Christmas break hangover. ;)

Kaze404 5y ago

> solved a big problem for digital artists who can now make money for their art instead of having to shill for brands or make trash to fund what they really love And created an entirely new one: people selling other people's art for hundreds of thousands of dollars. What a great system.

kranke155 5y ago
Forgeries in art are not novel. Digital makes it easier, same way it makes lots of things easier. Technical solutions seem likely.

danbmil99 5y ago

This is the most cogent explanation I've read so far. An NFT token basically serves as a counterfit-proof declaration that artifact X is worth $N, at least to one buyer. It's sort of like Patreon for rich people, with the proviso that there will only be one patron at a time.

johng 5y ago
This isn't even true. Because I can own both the selling and buying account and artificially "purchase" said item publicly. Even the price can't be trusted.
- kranke155 5y ago
  You think fraud in the art world is unusual? It’s a deeply corrupt place. Money laundering is the norm not the exception, even at big auctions of physical art.