The author doesn't address the biggest issue: ensuring scarcity of digital artifacts. How does a digital artist create limited editions of their digital artwork?
NFTs don't create scarcity either. The image is freely available to anyone. Nobody knows you own an NFT unless you explicitly drop in and mention you own the image every single time it's posted somewhere, in which case people will mock you.
But the actual solution has been around for centuries. An artist can sign their work or tailor it directly for the purchaser. Artists have been doing commissions online forever now and you can have them write your name if you want. Anyone out there "stealing" work you bought is either saving something with your name on it, or they're modifying it to remove your name.
No artist views NFTs as a solution to an already solved problem. They're either seeing it as a scam and avoiding it, or they're seeing it as a scam that they can quickly cash in on. Countless artists are on twitter and various places online making rock-solid careers out of selling art commissions. NFTs were never a part of it. The people proposing it as a solution are the ones "investing" in NFTs.
> No artist views NFTs as a solution to an already solved problem. They're either seeing it as a scam and avoiding it, or they're seeing it as a scam that they can quickly cash in on.
Lord forbid there are artists who (somehow) see value in NFTs. Look, I myself have no interest in NFTs, and I think most uses are indeed scammy right now, but that doesn't mean the entire idea is void.
There are artists who see it as a modern way of managing usage of art. They might not be a lot, but some do see value in NFTs besides "scam I can quickly cash in on", otherwise the market wouldn't exist in the first place.
> otherwise the market wouldn't exist in the first place.
That's not even remotely true.
Bubbles, scams, and artificially inflated markets have existed as long as artists have been signing their works to ensure scarcity and value exists. NFTs do absolutely nothing new. It's the 21st century version of beanie baby sellers saying "dude trust me it's totally worth investing in these haha you'll be rich haha these are totally rare hahaha."
NFT is scarce by definition, hence their "non-fungibility."
Unlike traditional physical art, the economic value of an NFT is not driven by scarcity of access to the media that it represents (such as a JPG or GIF), as the token remains provably scarce despite the abundance of its associated digital media file. This is a rather interesting, albeit polarizing, new paradigm.
> This is a rather interesting, albeit polarizing, new paradigm.
its not really, its basically the same as fake paper shares from the late 17th century. Sure everyone knows they are fake, but they still have a value because they can talk a good game.
"I've just sold 15 shares in the south sea company to Jacob, I have a few left, I can do you a good price."
but how do I know they are real?
"look they have the seal, and they are numbered. plus shares only give you a tiny part of the company anyway, its totally new and valuable. The prices keep going up, you can sell them to your friends"
How do you know a signed print is really from the artist? If the artist themselves gave it to you, then you can probably be fairly certain. If the provenance of that artefact can be reliably tracked over the years, then you can also be fairly certain.
Obviously, a signed inkjet print can be forged more easily than a NFT, as it is just ink and graphite on paper.
I can go and make an NFT by absolutely any artist I want and there's nothing that can be done to stop me. Nobody is forcing me to provide several levels of documentation to prove my identity before selling my image online.
In fact, it's pretty much daily that I see fellow artists warning people that fake NFTs are being sold in their name.
A signed inkjet print is harder to forge than an NFT. A hand-written signature is possible to forge, but it's substantially harder to forge than a copy-pasted digital file.
I mean, there are documented cases of it happening as well[1]. Faking an NFT is an incredibly easy way to get rich and there's no liability. It's wonderful for scammers.
You can easily copy the CryptoPunk contract and mint your own token[1], but the new token will be very easy to spot as a fake (as it will have a different contract address), and will have no market value, and likely zero buyers.
Compare this to physical prints, which can and often are forged in such a way that the original becomes very difficult if not impossible to detect.[2]
EDIT: The Banksy example you gave is one of impersonating the artist, rather than forging an artwork, and depends on the artist's accounts or website becoming compromised. It's not something NFT as a technology prevents; and, of course, the same problem could have occurred had it been a physical print sale distributed via the website.
> How do you know a signed print is really from the artist?
you don't, that's partly why they are cheaper, that and there are more of them.
> If the provenance of that artefact can be reliably tracked over the years, then you can also be fairly certain.
This is why auction houses are a thing, its also why eBay are spending loads of cash with their verification services. They have provenance tracers, and "experts" who try to assert that something is "real"
> Obviously, a signed inkjet print can be forged more easily than a NFT,
Apart from looking at the specs, you can only embed the URL in the NFT: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721 so the only thing thats really guaranteed is the URL and metadata. as soon as you download the NFT, it ceases to be the NFT anymore.
Signed prints are not necessarily cheap—see Ansel Adams prints going for nearly $1M USD[1]. It becomes a matter of what price society (or, perhaps just a handful of buyers) is willing to place on the artefact.
One of the great things with provenance on the blockchain is that it is not solely dependent on private for-profit auction houses like Christie's and Sotheby's to track provenance of the art we are creating.
By the way, NFT is programmable: it can define whatever you are willing to upload & embed onto the blockchain.
I'd recommend [2] if you are curious to understand this topic a little deeper.
> Individually owned, but free to share and use by anyone. When it’s freely shared and used it’s not detracting value from the original, it’s adding value. The Mona Lisa is an exceptionally valuable artwork that lives in the public domain, it is individually ownable yet publicly available for reuse. Mona Lisa Instagram posts, poster prints, remixes, reuses all do not detract value from the original, they add value to it.
It didn't. The Mona Lisa was a work specially commissioned by a family.
The modern version of that is someone paying an artist to commission a unique work. What changed? Nothing. The Mona Lisa was copied, and digital works can be copied. But nobody else is getting the custom ordered work that you paid for. Only you got your dream painting--everyone else just copied or downloaded a nice looking painting.
Mona Lisa is on the weak end of great pieces, but by and large, a jpg of a great piece it is nothing like seeing the real thing in person. Totally different experience.
Lack of scarcity is the unique selling point of the digital. I think future generations will look back at the madness of manufacturing scarcity because society refused to adapt to abundance.
Good question. I think I can best answer this by example:
People get paid to develop Blender. Blender even has an in house film studio, with paid artists. The software and artwork is made available for free. No artificial scarcity is imposed. And no one is starving.
Trying to emulate the restrictions of the material realm is the wrong direction.
It's a good example but I can't help feeling that we would end up with a much smaller ecosystem if that was how all software was funded.
I work in a very narrow niche selling B2B and my experience tells me it just wouldn't be viable if it was open source. I'd end up selling support which is not how I want to work.
It is an example of how to think outside the constraints of scarcity when dealing with immaterial ”property”.
But if you are looking for individual artists there’s Patreon.
I’m sure people can think of reasons why Patreon does not fulfill some criteria which to them is important for a healthy artistic community. After all, people are imaginative. What I’m encouraging you to do is to use that imagination to think of ways to embrace digital abundance, instead of trying to shoehorn the property rights that humans constructed to distribute physical goods onto something inherently non-physical.
If humanity can not handle the virtually infinite supply of digital goods without artificially enforcing scarcity, what does that say about us?
Not an universal solution, but you can get paid once by a person or a group to paint/draw/program/record what they want.
I see people showing of what they can do and then accepting requests on patreon, if the client shares the thing later is something is probable that will happen.
Today DRM exists that is quite hard and time consuming to crack (Denuvo). Some games exists that has not been cracked for 1+ year.
Has anybody tried to use this to provide scarcity for a digital artifact besides game developers?
A picture can always be screenshotted, so instead think more a 3D digital environment, sort of like a FPS but without the guns, instead a painting or sculpture you can walk around in.
Denuvo is easily cracked for games people care about. It's not put in games to stop crackers, it's put there to allow the game to go through the first weeks (where 90% of the sales happen) without competition from pirated versions.
After this time some companies even remove the DRM because it already did it's job.
The whole game industry is based on hype in the hope people buy on day 1 or, even better, pre-oder the games. One reason most big games are released broken or in a very buggy state.
But the actual solution has been around for centuries. An artist can sign their work or tailor it directly for the purchaser. Artists have been doing commissions online forever now and you can have them write your name if you want. Anyone out there "stealing" work you bought is either saving something with your name on it, or they're modifying it to remove your name.
No artist views NFTs as a solution to an already solved problem. They're either seeing it as a scam and avoiding it, or they're seeing it as a scam that they can quickly cash in on. Countless artists are on twitter and various places online making rock-solid careers out of selling art commissions. NFTs were never a part of it. The people proposing it as a solution are the ones "investing" in NFTs.