For an ownership right to be meaningful, it needs to have some legally recognized meaning by your centralized authority. If I have a peice of paper that says I own a house or a car or whatever, it’s only useful because I can show that in a court and the people with guns working for the state will give it to me instead of someone else with a fraudulent claim. And if you have that, then the distributed crypto part is redundant... It gets more complicated with art; especially like the jpeg that was just sold at an auction. What does it mean to own that digital image? What value/ rights does ownership give me? But, fundamentally the ownership being tabulated in a blockchain doesn’t do much a piece of official looking paper doesn’t do, except sound more exciting. I think of it is as notarizing a title to something, but in a new cool way associated with getting rich off Bitcoin.
One of the key issues of the TCGs is that in their digital form, trading of items is up to the whims of the game author. Providing a standardized NFT allows the players to trade in game items, just as you can trade physical cards today.
Just because you don't see the implications today (I agree, buying GIFs for 7M USDs is crazy) that doesn't meant that NFTs aren't a very interesting development.
This applies to every single form of game-based NFT. What incentive does a Game Developer have in implementing their items on the blockchain? So I can trade my WoW Health Potions for FFXIV Health Potions? In a kind world, when I'm tired of WoW I could safely transfer my wealth from WoW to FFXIV, but does Blizzard want that? Better to ensure lock-in. Further there will never be the case where a game like WoW would recognize an item from FFXIV as canonical and equal value. I wouldn't be able to buy a FFXIV health potion and use it in WoW.
The only games that will implement NFT items will do it as a gimmick. TCG, or normal game, or anything.
I have yet to see an actual compelling use case that solves a problem that game developers have. Remember, solving a problem a player has doesn't mean the incentives for game developers are aligned.
Many heirlooms go back centuries and pass down through generations even as those generations move jurisdictions.
The Nyan cat gif NFT was composed by the original meme creator. That gives it value.
What does it mean for a baseball to be autographed with Babe Ruth's signature? If it's authentic, it means a great deal. There's no court of law that is going to validate if a Babe Ruth baseball is authentic or not and whether that fact gives it value or not. That is going to be up to the market of appraisers.
The crypto part gives you a perfect chain of custody. I'm giving you a digital item, that is provably rare and verifiably linked to the original creator of the artwork.
Of course governments and police rarely get involved with small property disputes unless part of something larger like an assault.
Smartphone locking is similar to NFTs in that it is an extrajudicial process of enforcing property rights.
Likewise we also have algorithms that can take away all your photos and emails with basically no recourse to government or person.
NFTs just don’t seem that different to many things we’re already doing.
You can get a perfect copy of the Mona Lisa at your house. You either print a high definition picture or have someone paint an exact copy. Will anyone confuse the one in Paris with yours? Will the Mona Lisa in Louvre lose value?
Regarding the authority.. you don’t need men with guns. You just need to prove that yours is the original. The registration date is a strong indicator.
It’s not like people who own bars of precious metals are betting that suddenly we will have a huge demand for gold and silver electronics after all, most are looking for something to offload to other people who want something easy to offload later still.
What people think was sold is the JPG. What was actually sold is the right to say you purchased an NFT that represents the JPG. In the case of the NFT sale, ownership of the JPG was not a part of the transaction.
Clarification may be required, and an example will help. If you see a JPG of The Mandalorian on the Web, you can be sure that Disney, Inc. owns that image. Which means that Disney, Inc. can stop others from using it; can charge license fees for including it in other works; can sell the rights to do so to others as it pleases. You cannot download an official Disney Mandalorian image, change a few pixels, and resell it. Disney owns the work. If Disney sells it, the buyer can then charge license fees, etc.
By contrast, the entity that purchased the NFT for the Beeple JPG does not have any rights whatsoever over the JPG or its intellectual property. That entity owns the right to say they are the sole owner of a slot on a blockchain known to be the entity that purchased a given slot on a blockchain (there may be many equivalent slots on that blockchain). They can sell the right to ownership to that slot on the blockchain, but they do not have any claim on future use of the Beeple JPG. If the buyer makes derivative works ("change a pixel or two") for resale, Beeple could sue for damages. In any common understanding of "ownership," the NFT buyer does not own the Beeple JPG.
Going back to the Mandalorian example, Disney could sell an infinite quantity of NFTs around all the images and video clips they currently publish for free on the Internet. (The NBA is currently doing likewise.) Like the Beeple NFT, those wouldn't convey ownership in any real sense, but could pad Disney's margins in a very real fashion.
This varies by NFT. Like software, different NFTs have different license agreements. Some grant exclusive copyright ownership to the holder of the NFT. The industry as a whole lacks standardization in this respect. But the main NFT marketplaces are working on this.
And many of these NFTs don't even pretend to sell ownership of any underlying asset. Take Jack Dorsey's tweet, or the burned Banksy artwork for example. When you buy those, you get ownership of exactly 0 actual assets. It's just cashing in on NFTmania (and the larger cryptomania).
is not an industry problem. Another big player is NBA Top Shot, which also is not selling IP rights.
In theory, something like an NFT could be useful. But this isn't about standards at this point. The NBA isn't retaining IP because there's no standards, they're doing it because they're not going to give away their valuable IP when suckers will pay to say they paid for a receipt.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jessedamiani/2021/03/12/beeples...
It's only dumb until they can find someone even dumber to buy it for even more. Then it's genius.
Huh. Guess it doesn't sell you that right. Merely the right to prove it. How often are people proving they own the NFTs? Never?
The key idea - the artist can be the one who creates a market is extremely insightful for me.
It means that the art is an extremely risky value storage since entire market is limited at the moment and may never expand. The number of players in the market is what makes it thrive or disappear.
Of course there are somehow two institutions fueling this market. The author and ethereum users with some visible synergies.
I get some auto-downvotes on every comment I make...it's been happening so long that it doesn't even bother me anymore lol. Every once in a while, someone still reads a comment of mine, while it sits at the bottom of the page :).
All copies ultimately come from the artist, and they are all bit-by-bit identical. Why wouldn't they have the same value?
Nothing.
There are experts that can verify Picasso. Digital assets are copied verbatim with 100% fidelity and zero error.
It gets more complicated later: experts assess the credibility of the painting by examining the ownership history, if available, the signature on the painting, the quality of the work, chemical properties of the pigments and canvas, etc. They sometimes get it wrong, though (cf. Beltracchi!). It's more a probability that a work is genuine, rather than a 100% certainty.
a copy isn’t. an nft is just bytes. a copy is exactly the same as the original. it’s impossible to get an exact copy of a picasso because he himself only ever painted one. you can carbon date it etc
A normal token is like having 5 dollars, with no individual/per token owner, history or storage.
With an NFT you will have 5 times 1 dollar with their own owner, history and storage.
Their value should be based on the legal contract or utility that they represents. Which often is 0.
For programmers it should be easy to understand.
Token: key value store of a global userid->amount
NFT: NFT class (name, jpg checksum, jpgurl) for example
And a global key value store of: userid->NFT instance
Just read any ERC20 and ERC721 template, it’s just a few lines of code.
If I have a copy of a digital piece of art I don't care if someone has an NFT, I still have an exact copy right? I don't get it.
So let's say you're Van Gogh, and you just finished painting "Starry Night." Let's say in this hypothetical scenario, you made it in a context that already celebrates your work and is willing to pay you insane sums of money for it. You sell it to the top bidder and there's all the papers that say X buyer now owns "Starry Night," bought the original painting for $70million. But you as Van Gogh still own the rights to licensing reproductions of it, even if there's only one original. The entire village you're a part of now buys printed copies of the painting. You get to hang the original painting on your wall. Everyone else also gets to hang a printed copy on their walls. Everyone, including Van Gogh and you and the village people, all know who owns the original one. The copies maybe can be resold for perhaps $1.00. Maybe even $10.00 if you're a shrewd negotiator. But the original can resell for a bajillion dollars.
So I know people throw this example around with variables swapped out. And for me, I'm a digital artist, and it didn't click until I saw artists I genuinely respect and admire and have followed for years post their GIFs on NFT sites. Other artists' work that I'm not interested in, I thought to myself, "This is stupid; what a load of crap." But for the artists I genuinely admired? I didn't go so far as to want to buy their GIFs but I definitely was rooting for them to get top dollar. For me, I already valued their work before any NFT stuff. So when they posted it on auction sites, I knew it was worth something and had power to it. I could see myself saying, "It would be cool to own that GIF" for the first time ever. It's a feeling, that is different from right-clicking. It felt more like a personal connection to the artist.
So if the artist were to then mint the exact same GIF on another platform because the ETH 1.0-based ones collapse, OR, this who NFT art speculation thing goes bust and it becomes worthless? I'd feel like the mad left with the bag, so to speak, and feel a bit dumb. But I can't deny that I wanted to own rights to GIFs from artists I deeply respect, and that seeing many others ascribe real monetary value to said GIFs completely changed my perception that GIFS can be imbued with value. Again, if the bubble pops and these become worthless? Then yeah, everyone who paid any money for these GIFS looks like an idiot.
Long story short it feels like a kind of personal connection to the artist. Might just be some woo woo nonsense, but seems like many people buy things from a visceral emotional reaction, rather than cold hard logic and reasoning. Not saying everyone does. But many definitely do.
Most "digital art" NFTs do not confer any particular rights in relation to the artwork in question. Unless you have a written agreement which states otherwise, you do not have any rights at all, except for rights over the NFT. The NFT does not give you the right to make copies of the artwork, to claim royalties from others who make copies, or to issue DMCA takedowns or similar. This is for the simple reason that the copyright in the artwork is retained by the original artist unless agreed otherwise. This is, of course, true of physical art too: I can buy a physical Banksy, but Banksy keeps the copyright and can decide to deny or permit the making of copies.
When I buy the physical artwork, what I'm buying is the fact that the artist personally created it. I could buy a print, but even if it is a perfect reproduction it lacks the direct connection to the artist's physical involvement. Because people value authenticity, my authentic artist-created copy is worth more than a print.
NFTs work by creating a connection to the artist, albeit a fairly minimal one: the artist's digital key was used to sign a record on the blockchain, and now I own that record (loosely speaking). It is, I suppose, more like owning an autographed copy of a print. However, since this is the most authentic connection we _can_ achieve with respect to digital art, it is deemed (in some cases) to have significant value.
In more concise terms: NFTs are not artworks, they are not copies of artworks, they are signed digital records which refer to an artwork, which are valuable because they are (believed to be) signed by the artist.
To the original question, then: what happens when someone copies an NFT on to another blockchain? It's not obvious to me how someone would do this. Of course, anyone can create a "fake" NFT just like anyone can create a fake autograph. But "copying" here is very difficult, because you can't create a duplicate of a transaction that was signed by a particular private key unless you have a copy of the private key yourself. So, either the artist is minting multiple NFTs for the same artwork, or someone has stolen their private key.
If the artist is minting multiple NFTs, a question we need to ask is whether they ever committed to _not_ doing this. If they did not, then it's hard to see what reason anyone has to complain. If they did commit to this, then the owner of the NFT may have some claim against them (again, this is not legal advice). If there is a social norm against minting multiple NFTs, then the artist's reputation may suffer and the value of all of their current and future artworks will decline. Since some NFTs give the artist a cut of all future re-sales, they do have some economic incentive to avoid doing this. If someone has stolen the private key then we have a very interesting conundrum!
How do I verify the artist vs someone who just says they are the artist?
Couldn’t I generate a private key, call myself Banksy, sign a new token and add it to Bitcoin’s blockchain instead?
In this situation is Etherium running some pki that can prove that Banksy is really Banksy?
Or does Banksy tweet out his public key and just announce that only signatures from his key are authentic?
I guess the challenge in my mind is if there’s no root name authority to verify who is who, and there’s no legal provenance for who signs what, then someone could start creating new NFTs for Banksies and add them to any blockchain. So the desireability comes down to whether I want an autograph from the Banksy matching the signature his Twitter says vs an autograph from some rando claiming.
Right now, it seems that people are taking things on trust, buying only from digital artists who have very active online presence, and whose social media accounts are presumed to be true representations of the artist.
Nobody is running what I would consider to be a robust system for verifying digital identities for signing NFTs.
Other chains like Tron or Binance are pseudo-decentralized. They do have multiple miners/nodes, but Tron/Binance controls them all. So if they want to roll back a transaction, they can if they want. In Ethereum, that's not the case anymore. Eth did rollback and do a hard fork a long time ago, when the network was much smaller, but they had to get the buy-in for multiple parties in order to do it. It was be largely inconceivable nowadays.
So if I'm the counter-party that's to recognize your ownership in an NFT, I'm probably going to downgrade in my mind an NFT claim on a Tron or Binance chain, as opposed to Ethereum--because I care a lot that transactions can't be rolled back.
But if I'm a counter-party that doesn't care, because I think the risk of that happening on those chains is low, then maybe I would honor an NFT claim on those chains.
Like money, ownership is largely a social contract. The power of an NFT derives from its power bestowed by those honoring it. And the party honors it because of certain properties of the Ethereum chain, such as immutability--but it depends largely on why they're going to honor an NFT and for what purpose.
Yes, you can create various collections on different chains. Say there's one on Eth, and one on Binance.
If I want to purchase the NFT, which one should I buy from? Which one should I honor? Well, depends on what I value as a counter-party.
I know that Binance owns all the nodes, and can roll them back at their whim. I know that no one in Eth can roll back easily.
So if I value this kind of immutability as a potential owner of an NFT--I want my transactions to be final--then I'm going to go with the NFT contract on Eth.
There may be other things I value instead of immutability, but the point is just the answer to "which NFT contract on which chain is the 'real one'?" is simply, "The one your counter-party honors, for whatever reason."
There may be instances where both are honored at the same time, but in different domains.
contract ERC721 {
// ERC20 compatible functions
function name() constant returns (string name);
function symbol() constant returns (string symbol);
function totalSupply() constant returns (uint256 totalSupply);
function balanceOf(address _owner) constant returns (uint balance);
// Functions that define ownership
function ownerOf(uint256 _tokenId) constant returns (address owner);
function approve(address _to, uint256 _tokenId);
function takeOwnership(uint256 _tokenId);
function transfer(address _to, uint256 _tokenId);
function tokenOfOwnerByIndex(address _owner, uint256 _index) constant returns (uint tokenId);
// Token metadata
function tokenMetadata(uint256 _tokenId) constant returns (string infoUrl);
// Events
event Transfer(address indexed _from, address indexed _to, uint256 _tokenId);
event Approval(address indexed _owner, address indexed _approved, uint256 _tokenId);
}
All good. But that's all she wrote. Banksy can list his digital artwork on the internet and many people can bid on it. That is actually valuable if you think about it in isolation. The problem is on the auction side, with decentralized bidding - you have no idea if this artwork was pumped up by fake buyers. There is no Sotheby's or Christie's auction house to mediate this.
URL metadata is also weird - now you're passing on the value of the token to whoever owns the Domain Name and the servers responding to the GET request. If the artist decides to sell or forgets to renew the domain name, your NFT is useless unless the data was backed up somewhere. Even then, the next buyer of the NFT would want to access the URL and get their goodies instead of getting it from anywhere else since that's not on the tokenMetadata.
[1] Source: https://medium.com/crypto-currently/the-anatomy-of-erc721-e9...
Beeple did just that.
But, I get what you're saying. There is a verification process to traditional art as well. You cannot simply impersonate Banksy and call Sotheby's, they need to verify you are actually Banksy.
Of course, in an open source world, there's nothing stopping anyone from forking your work at any time. How many Bitcoin forks have been spawned off? You can copy the BTC source code but you can't make a community follow you. Likewise, if someone were to mint a Nyan cat on another chain, nothing is stopping them, but the Ethereum chain will be given more weight by the community at large because it's the community that spawned the concept in the first place. And the Nyan cat creator publicly announced his NFT sale on Ethereum, so there is provenance.
As far as physical ownership goes, it comes from what ownership record keeping system are you going to trust? For land, we have trusted state provided system so far. This can change with NFT like technology, provided people including the state trust it to manage those records.
For digital items ownership, there is literally nothing that prevents others from getting a copy of your item. You just get to claim the ownership rights to it, which doesn't mean much when everyone can get a copy of it, like you do. It's essentially reduced to bragging rights, claiming you own it, on a record keeping system which people trust. But would people even care to trust a system for ownership when literally anyone can hold a copy of that digital item in their possession? If someone else copies it over to another record keeping system, what difference does it make? Not much. There isn't much value in bragging rights to ownership, as much as it is in possession, which in digital items isn't securely feasible in this manner.
But in order for your forked bitcoin to have any value you need to give people some reason to prefer it over the existing bitcoin blockchain. If it really is just a clone of something that already exists, no one will value it very highly.
The same is true of NFTs. If an existing NFT is tied to an established blockchain like Ethereum and you fork it, then you would need to come up with a compelling reason for someone to prefer your forked blockchain over Ethereum.
Basically many mentioned everyone will know the Monalisa in Louvre is the original one or the starwars characters are owned by Disney.. Well the reason everyone knows that is because all those names built an outstanding brand and that's why everyone know the name "DISNEY who was the first creator of this NFT is a real deal. Same goes for watch market (Rolex, AP, RM &...)
So in the case that I save an image of unknown artist and put it in the blockchain and create a new NFT, considering that the artist behind the art is MR.NOBODY. Then who the hell can find out the real work was NOT done by Me until MR.NOBODY BECOME MR.SOMOBODY and find out about the fraud.
Keep in mind the date the NFT was created can't necessarily be a validation point alone since the date is only obvious when people got to know MR.NOBODY. (in other word, MR.NOBODY built a successful brand and became MR.SOMEBODY).
Any counter arguments which can help me and others to understand the scenario better ?
The existence of the tokens on a chain means nothing without the social acceptance of their meaning.
You are now effectively holding two copies on it on different blockchains and can transfer them independently.
Which one is “the real one”? That’s purely subjective. Just like with fungible tokens (“Bitcoin cash is the real bitcoin”)
The same principles apply when just making a copy on the other chain.
It’s data and signatures, the rest is just interpretation.
An artist selling their art as an NFT would probably say "hey This NFT on this chain is the real NFT for my art, anything else is a fake". A fake would never have this announcement, and there wouldn't be a record of the original artist owning/creating the NFT on the new chain.
So it's not so much that one blockchain is the defacto NFT implementation, but it's up to the creator to specify the blockchain that has the defacto NFT for that piece of media. They could even announce their own signature, and point out the transaction by their signature that created the NFT. Or something along those lines
Couldn't someone own an NFT within a smart contract, which can itself be fungible and transferrable without paying the author fees? Much like an artwork can be held as property of a shell corporation (well, an actual corporation with a single asset) and the corporation itself traded between collectors.
This can be fine and still interesting for these use-cases, for example several independent organizations can agree about the validity of a token independently. Personally I don't think NFT for art make sense though.
An alternative is that cross chain transfers are respected. For example on one chain your NFT gets deleted and on another chain a duplicate is given to you. The same can happen in reverse to swap back. This does rely on whatever security guarantees the other chain has.
What if a more well known artist copies the art of a barely known artist and puts it back into the chain again? There’s a good chance this “replica” of the original art would sell for greater value until the original one is found?
Random web definition: Provenance is the chronology of the ownership, custody or location of a historical object
Even in the blockchain world anyone can deploy a token with ticker USDT. There is the established understanding that there is one USDT contract that people use and transfer and store value in.
If a given claim means anything, then similar claims that are illegitimate probably won't mean anything.
Given that NFTs so far appear to be pretty much meaningless, attempts to duplicate them will also be meaningless.
For example for someone who has not heard of the chain, the contract is meaningless and worthless.
I hope these two sentences highlights my feeling about this. That said I've been following some of those artists for years and I'm glad they're getting paid. I just feel bad for the other talented 98% who are missing the bus with their jaw on the floor drooling.