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What does “fake” even mean in this context? An NFT minted by someone who doesn't hold the rights to the digital asset it is supposed to represent. NFTs were a

• LightG 5y ago
  That last point seems to be overriding problem with anything in this space beyond basic bitcoin. I keep coming back to it with anything to do with smart contracts. Can someone explain at least what the theoretical solution to this is? Otherwise the whole thing just sounds like a scam.
  • rmah 5y ago
    There is no theoretical (technical) solution. Ownership is a legal construct, not a natural phenomenon. To wit, someone only owns something because a legal jurisdiction is willing to recognize that he does. No blockchain tech can surmount this.
    • anticristi 5y ago
      Basically it all comes back to monopoly on violence. If you steal my painting, police will crack open your home and take it back.
      • tialaramex 5y ago
        Also consensus. The thief may think they should get to keep the painting, but if most people don't agree, police or no police they'll have trouble keeping that painting. In that case to keep it they will most likely have to hide it, and then what's even the point? A notional monopoly on violence is important, but even in a police state it just isn't enough. You must achieve a broad consensus that, even if this isn't good, it's better than the alternative, and if that ceases to be true in the minds of a great many people their alternative is going to assert itself right quick.
        • thfuran 5y ago
          >even in a police state it just isn't enough. You must achieve a broad consensus that, even if this isn't good, it's better than the alternative, and if that ceases to be true in the minds of a great many people their alternative is going to assert itself right quick. You think most people living under an oppressive regime think that there's nothing the government could do to be better? Such a state doesn't need broad consensus that there's no better alternative, it just needs to avoid the consensus that the personal cost of attempting to achieve the better alternative is worth it. That's where the monopoly on violence really helps.
          • tialaramex 5y ago
            I think we're on the same wavelength, but perhaps I didn't explain myself very well.
      • wpietri 5y ago
        That's not the heart of it. Imagine a government just said, "Ok, this blockchain solution is what defines true ownership." Theft would be rampant, but now police reports would be met by, "Sure, it used to be your house, but the blockchain says it's his now, so we're kicking you out. He stole it fair and square." That hasn't happened because blockchains are a bad match for how people think of ownership.
      • jollybean 5y ago
        No, it comes down to people cooperating and agreeing on stuff.
    • jcpham2 5y ago
      Furthermore contracts - in the context that a human being wants to be rewarded for their labor - also a legal construct. Meaning smart contracts aren’t very smart at all when they go wrong and reward the wrong party through unintended glitches or computer mis-interpretation of the contract. Or straight forgery. No there’s no solution. Not until we all fully operate in a legal realm (the/a metaverse) that validates the contract and rewards the humans who created the contract to cover their own ass. If the contract doesn’t follow the _legal_ language and intent it’s not smart at all and yes it’s totally a solution in search of a problem. this NFT stuff is doomed to failure until we all operate in the same realm validating the identity of the contract owner, validating the legal intent of the contract, because that’s what a contract is in meat space
    • asimpletune 5y ago
      Ownership used to be by virtue of possessing something. Sure you could steal something, which is why people protect the things they own, because possession is in fact a huge part of who owns what. Intellectual property is another thing entirely, and not as easy to enforce, especially in the digital age.
    • stjohnswarts 5y ago
      I can't agree. If say the US government established a central authority say "The National Federal Thingy" authority perhaps and had a registry of NFTs (or could register a decentralized blockchain ID) then it could happen as there is value in guaranteeing something is “the original” promoted by artist, twitterer, etc. However, I don't see that happening as even as such, it seems like kind of a joke and I don't see lawmakers wanting their name on something so associated with grifting.
  • alfiedotwtf 5y ago
    > Can someone explain at least what the theoretical solution to this is? For this to work, a blockchain needs to access something outside the chain i.e an Oracle... now you have two problems.
  • verve_rat 5y ago
    Just spitballing here. Maybe some kind of legal framework. Some legislation that controls who is allowed to create NFTs for a work. Something that judges and courts can use to enforce the right to sell an NFT. Something that bans anyone but the original creator from distribution of the work the NFT is for. Because a "fake" NFT is any NFT that doesn't control the work it is attached to, right? But NFTs are just a thing on a block chain, so we need a contract to link the NFT to the work. And we will need the same contract to be enforced by the courts. So, we need a contract to link an NFT to a work. That contract should also spell out all the things the NFT holder can do (maybe the creator didn't want to, or isn't allowed to, sell all rights). So contract the says who owns a work and what they can do with it, enforced by a legal framework and the courts. That us all you need to make NFTs make sense, I don't see what the problem is. What's that? If you have the contract, why do you need an NFT? Well, what scrub would buy a paper contract with bitcoin? It's not even on a block chain!
    • bostonsre 5y ago
      I think a large majority of the population just think this stuff is silly and I highly doubt anyone would want to put legislation through to help these companies that arguably don't contribute much to society. I also don't think it would be popular to spend lots of tax dollars enforcing this stuff.
      • verve_rat 5y ago
        If it wasn't clear, I am part of that population that thinks this is all very silly. The point of my rambling was to point out that the solution to NFT/blockchain problems boil down to contracts and lawyers and courts. Things that we already have and can use without NFT/blockchain bullshit. We have courts and lawyers and contracts. We need to use those to make NFTs work, so why are NFTs valuable again?
  • jkhdigital 5y ago
    NFTs can only really accrue value from the terms of their issuance. This is actually true for Bitcoin as well—issuance is provably tied to the real economic cost of computation. As with traditional artwork, the story of the work is what accrues value, not the work itself. You can create a largely undetectable forgery of a Picasso, but you cannot forge the historical record that traces the true work back to Picasso’s paintbrush. NFTs can make this historical record cryptographically secure, at least for the token itself, but whether that means the token should accrue value or not is up to the market.
    • prox 5y ago
      Would it be possible to store the creation of the artwork as I create it? So say I paint in procreate, could it accrue its value step by step?
      • cuteboy19 5y ago
        Unless the problem is NP, it would be trivially easy to fake these steps. If you follow this line of reasoning you would eventually discover proof of work/waste
        • prox 5y ago
          I see, so there is no silver bullet to make it work, as long as you can fake it.
      • smorgusofborg 5y ago
        Can't I just replay the steps you save with a later starting point and sell a new work that was also incrementally made with a lot of "effort"?
    • Retric 5y ago
      Bitcoin issuance is ultimately linked to to time not effort. Receiving those coins takes an investment indirectly tied to their hypothetical value at time of creation via a lottery. The difference is subtle, but it is meaningful on edge cases such as around reward halving.
  • heliodor 5y ago
    There is no solution as far as crypto goes. People keep pretending NFTs are art. They're just a digital certificate that has no further blockchain implications. The rest of the "contact" is outside the blockchain and is as typical and problematic as all other contacts and promises in the past.
    • heliodor 5y ago
      Somehow I swiped "contact" instead of "contract" multiple times and didn't notice!
• libertine 5y ago
  >NFTs were advertised as a way for creators of digital content to monetize their work, but without some authority that verifies that the seller owns the copyright, the system cannot work... If only there was a system, or an authority, like an independent body, that would do it's due diligence and verify the provenance of things... oh wait.
  • anticristi 5y ago
    This. Are we done solving all problems of the world, that we started solving non-problems?
    • JaimeThompson 5y ago
      New middle men wanted to take a cut of things so they keep popping up in the Crypto space. It isn't about getting rid of current middle men, it is about becoming the new middle men.
      • mledu 5y ago
        Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
  • binibus 5y ago
    I'm tired of saying that NFTs are not a tool to verify the original property, which can't be done inside the blockchain, but to prove that the following transactions are legitimate.
    • dralley 5y ago
      Which is basically useless in the face of how trivial the initial conditions are to violate.
      • binibus 5y ago
        Then the issue is in the aforementioned institutions. What's the point in blaming the techonlogy that solves part of the problem?
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• PretzelPirate 5y ago
  NFTs we’re originally created with the idea of the NFT itself would have utility (ex: the NFT itself is the game license or the TCG card), and not just point to some off-chain asset. If the NFT isn’t accepted by the intended on-chain contracts then it’s not authentic. In this context ‘authentic’ means that it will be usable for its intended utility, and contracts will identify whether tot hit has utility in their system based on which address created the NFT. Instead of looking at the creator’s address all the time, incorporating Decentralized Identity can make the process more human-friendly.
  • eropple 5y ago
    Alternatively, we can go buy a print from an artist and hang it on the wall. Then we have inconvenienced a single tree (-ish) and not burned through the power consumption of an American home for a week to have a thing to look at that we like.
    • miracle2k 5y ago
      How can I print a gif?
      • eropple 5y ago
        You can't own it on a blockchain in any way respected by any government that you'd care about, so that's pretty immaterial.
      • anonymousab 5y ago
        By using a Lenticular printing format.
• mattdesl 5y ago
  Not unlike signed art prints, or really any work distributed by an artist. Often these are certified by the artists themselves. For further reading, see [1]. [1] - https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/eUrK8MrRfKFJYVKTwi5F4mCIBJEBOYkZ1qaAiDNblIs https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/eUrK8MrRfKFJYVKTwi5F4mCIBJEB...
• dgellow 5y ago
  An NFT is a pointer. Anyone can create as many pointer as they want, you don’t need rights over the thing pointed to.
  • yebyen 5y ago
    An NFT is a Non-Fungible Token. This just means it's sufficiently different from others in the set to be told apart. If I give you this one, and I get another one to replace it, they're different. Minting pointers to art projects is one use of NFTs. You can have an NFT of the number 37 for example – it doesn't have to point at anything. It just needs to follow EIP-721 (a subset of ERC-20), or any similarly-worded standard. > This standard is inspired by the ERC-20 token standard and builds on two years of experience since EIP-20 was created. EIP-20 is insufficient for tracking NFTs because each asset is distinct (non-fungible) whereas each of a quantity of tokens is identical (fungible).
    • SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
      An NFT is a unique pointer, but the pointee doesn't have to be unique. You can have any number of NFTs pointing to the same object, NFTs don't inherently guarantee uniqueness of anything other than themselves. The token is non-fungible, the item the token is "for" can be fungible or non-fungible.
    • dgellow 5y ago
      I’m perfectly aware of what NFTs are and nothing in your comment is in contradiction with what I said. Abstractly speaking an NFT work like a unique pointer, the thing it points to can be whatever you want (like the number 37 in your example).
      • yebyen 5y ago
        In one case the number 37 is an address that represents control over a subsection of a global network. So it is actually important that the owner of it has rights to the thing pointed at (the network, not the number 37 abstractly, but the addresses with 37 in the most significant bits are allocatable by whoever holds 37. Enforced by the smart contract and a consensus rule in the software that it supports... one could fork the software and point the consensus rule at a different smart contract, but then it would not be the same network anymore.) If yall are buying leaf NFTs that cannot mint other NFTs, then I don't think you get to own anything other than the paper it's printed on. But that does not mean that NFTs cannot be used to own real things, or to enforce ownership of those real things (like a network, insomuch as a network is a real thing.) They can, and do.
• wpietri 5y ago
  I hope everybody recognizes the gap here. The fantasy of a lock of blockchain stuff is that it the source of truth for ownership. But when it gets down to brass tacks, everybody recognizes that true ownership lies elsewhere.
• bnralt 5y ago
  How does that make it fake? An NFT doesn't convey ownership. I can make a website that simply has a link to Google and sell it to people. That's not a fake website, even though it links to something I don't own. Likewise, I don't need to own the Mona Lisa to sell someone a piece of paper that says "The Mona Lisa is in the Louvre." This seems to be more about what people are imagining NFTs are than what they actually are.
  • bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    >This seems to be more about what people are imagining NFTs are than what they actually are. yes, and how people are imagining NFTs is highly dependent on how NFTs have been marketed.
  • jrm4 5y ago
    This is EXACTLY EXACTLY EXACTLY the problem. There is ownership, there is copyright, and NFT's doesn't actually say anything remotely conclusive about EITHER of those things.
  • numpad0 5y ago
    Everyone knows the original artist for Mona Lisa so anyone buying your copy is paying for material rather than artistic value. If you gather arts of obscure-enough origins and sell them off as NFTs, your clientele pays for artistic values you stole, which is a fraud in spirit. In modern internet, free, high quality, copyrighted but not copyright enforced arts are something that can be sourced at rates of almost items per second, rather than months per item as was in days Da Vinci lived. That makes such frauds extremely easy, and million dollar NFT craze only helps justify it on every aspects except ethical grounds. So it's a problem.
• jollybean 5y ago
  "An NFT minted by someone who doesn't hold the rights to the digital asset it is supposed to represent." ? The owner of Dorsey's 'first tweet' does not have any 'rights' to it. There are generally no 'rights' transferred with NFT sales. Anyone can sell Dorsey's 'first tweet' by putting a given URL in the NFT. The way we evaluate the 'legit' one is by tracing back to the original sale. So it's a matter of convention to determine the difference between 'real and fake'. That's an inherent problem in the marketplace. 'It's marketed as way for content creators' etc. etc. just like Amway is marketed as a way for regular folks to sell cleaning products. The difference being, the grift is so big, that everyone has to pay attention. The systems may adapt and yield better mechanisms, but still, I'm wary that there is such a thing as a solution.
  • cygx 5y ago
    There are generally no 'rights' transferred with NFT sales. Indeed. But people want it to work that way, or even assume it already does. The systems may adapt and yield better mechanisms, but still, I'm wary that there is such a thing as a solution. Cf zmgsabst's comment[1]. That's an example of what I was alluding to, the arthouse being the authority that could make such a system work. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30312906 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30312906
    • jollybean 5y ago
      If there is an 'authority' then the whole point of NFT's essentially crashes. The authority can 'buy and sell' any kinds of 'rights' it pleases, today. We don't need NFT's for that. The whole point of NFT's is that they are inherently distributed. It's possible to create an NFT such that the NFT owner legitimately has certain rights, but that's another level of complexity, the rights may be different in any given scenario. Even if it were standardized, it becomes a management problem, for example, if the asset is licences out to other content creators, then the NFT becomes tantamount to owning a small IP business. Again there's not much value in the NFT at that point.
      • cygx 5y ago