Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by PragmaticPulp 1916 days ago
So now we have no Banksy painting but someone has a crypto token that says “This represents a Banksy painting” in the code?

Since there’s nothing to own or even point to, what’s stopping a second party from claiming they actually have the original Banksy NFT and selling their own? Just the time stamps on the blockchain?

What a miserable destruction of real art to profit on a trading frenzy.

2 comments

Yup. You understand NFTs. You are not paying for the product, because once it's minted into an NFT, it's right there in public for anyone to copy; so it can't be used to do things like protect digital art. What you're actually paying for is the ability to say "this person _definitely_ gave me this item". That's still potentially useful in some use cases, like proof-of-ownership of software or tickets, but the way it's being branded as "wow you can own a banksy on the blockchain" is absolute garbage. Somebody actually paid millions of dollars just to be able to say "the artists that burned a banksy gave me this scanned jpeg."
Private keys are what's stopping other people from selling unauthentic NFTs for the same thing.
Private keys don't verify that an NFT was authorized by the owners of the painting. You're still relying on real-world trust and claims that the NFT you're buying was the "real" NFT.

If the owners of the Banksy came out a few days later and claimed that someone else sold a fake Banksy NFT, but they're now going to sell the real NFT, the private keys won't help.

I am not sure why I got down votes here. If you are buying a NFT for an artwork that is not confirmed to have been created by the author of that artwork then surely you are just stupid?

Only Banksy can mint an NFT for his artwork for it to be of ANY value. The same way that only Banksy can create Banksy art.

Public-private key encryption is how you verify that something was signed by the original author.

How does that work, what links a private key to an object in such a way another private key can't be linked as well?
It's the same problem that always comes into play for crypto: either people have to accept the crypto as currency (which almost no institution that must buy things and pay taxes can do; the IRS doesn't accept bitcoin...) or there have to be gatekeepers to interact with the blockchain.

This can either be a crypto exchange (regulated on conversion to fiat, lest they get shut down by some SEC thing) or on those "vote on the blockchain" or "verified supply chain on the blockchain" things: eventually some non-blockchain entity has to be trusted enough to set state on the blockchain (e.g. "party A did indeed fulfill the contract to party B. please fulfill this smart contract", or "your food ingredient was prepared in accordance to your green/bio label's requirements").