[iskander]

I'll try to engage without pulling us into familiar debates.

I have found, in a year of intensive use and research around the Ethereum ecosystem, here are a few things I like that wouldn't really work without an underlying immutable distributed ledger:

1) Creating limited editions of generative art.

2) "Forever" art like on-chain pixel and ASCII art.

3) Frankenstein-like adaptations of traditional fintech constructs into a decentralized implementation, such as AMMs.

Also, the more I learn about the zk-rollup space (STARKs and SNARKs) the more curious I get about the possibilities there. You can, for example, have digital treasure hunts where whoever finds the treasure can generate a proof without revealing the location. So far this is just cool without having an obvious killer app, but more than anything else in the crypto space I think there will be killer apps emerging from this technology.

By volume, I agree with critics that it's mostly bubble-chasing, gambling, and scams. It might be healthier for everyone if the tech & art experimentation were walled off from investments. At the very least, we probably shouldn't have crypto exchanges advertising -- really nothing interesting comes from luring Main Street to buy and store Doge on a centralized exchange.

[8note]

I don't know what the third one entails, or whether a distributed ledger actually enables it without also having a centralized legal entity, but the other two seem like they already exist without a distributed ledger.

The limited edition art is really just tracking receipts - you can do that over email if you want and it really doesn't have to be public. Non digital art does fine with private receipt tracking. You can also have a dedicated database that charges art owners a maintenance fee, and tracks who the current owner of each art piece. Basically free tier AWS.

For 2) forever art already existed without any ledger. People store copies of pictures they like because they feel like it. Not being on a ledger doesn't mean Nyan cat will disappear. The ledger might attempt to guarantee that unpopular works stay available, but I don't think you can guarantee that any particular ledger will continue to be active "forever".

They could do a hard fork that prunes out the unpopular art to save on space, and migrate everyone to that one, leaving the old one unhosted. Long term, you're not going to force people to keep spending resources to maintain stuff that nobody cares about

[iskander]

>The limited edition art is really just tracking receipts - you can do that over email if you want and it really doesn't have to be public. Non digital art does fine with private receipt tracking. You can also have a dedicated database that charges art owners a maintenance fee, and tracks who the current owner of each art piece. Basically free tier AWS.

I think this is a misunderstanding of what happens when a collection is created through a platform like Art Blocks. The generative code is frozen on chain, every minted image has a verifiably random initial seed, and each image is generated from the composition of these two elements. The number of random seeds which can occupy an "official" slot is preconfigured and cannot be later increased.

I promise you that this has significant impact on the feeling of working on generative art and what you think of as the final outcome of an art project. It cannot be replicated through some kind of ad-hoc receipt system that lacks algorithmic guarantees and is subject to modification or increase at any later point.

[simias]

>1) Creating limited editions of generative art.

I personally think that it's not really an interesting feature. Creating scarcity out of something that ought not to be scarce is just a way to infiltrate capitalism in every aspect of our lives. Hacker culture historically went completely against that (phreaking, breaking DRM etc...) but I concede that it's more of a philosophical/political argument than a technical one. I still find it utterly depressing.

I would also argue that there's usually a significant difference between ownership of a token on the blockchain and what the local IP laws says. IP law is messy and sometimes subjective, putting things on a blockchain can make things messier rather than simpler.

>2) "Forever" art like on-chain pixel and ASCII art.

So that one is interesting, but I would argue that it's only true if you consider that the blockchain is "forever". In order for that to be true it means that you have to believe that your blockchain of choice will be considered significant enough by a number of people across... well eternity really. This could be true for the "big" ones like Bitcoin and Ethereum, although I'd say the scene is way too young to be sure of that. It's as good a bet as any I suppose.

But here's the thing. We already have "forever" digital "art": the source code of the Linux kernel. There are countless copies of it across the globe, and it'll remain archived for the foreseeable future.

My point here is that if something is significant enough it won't be difficult to convince a bunch of people across time and space to archive it. People do that for old videogames, music albums, usenet posts etc... And unlike the blockchain you can actually curate it, you don't have to archive the neighbor's sandwich picture collection. I'd argue that this curation power is a feature, and the fact that the blockchain just stores everything forever is a bug. It actually means that the bigger the blockchain grows, the less likely it is that people will want to store personal backups of it.

So I don't think the blockchain does anything novel here, and I don't think it does it better. Forcing arbitrary people to store arbitrary data forever regardless of value or interest is just wasteful.

>3) Frankenstein-like adaptations of traditional fintech constructs into a decentralized implementation, such as AMMs.

I think the oracle problem is really going to make "DeFi" a tough sell. There is, in fact, a lot of trust in our financial system, and being able to use a central authority (the justice system) to settle issues makes things a whole lot simpler and efficient.

In general I firmly believe that trust is usually a good thing that makes systems more efficient and this obstination of cryptopeople to get rid of it is more based on political ideology than pragmatism. Trust, but verify. But trust.

[scyclow]

With respect to point 1, I'm sympathetic to your response, but I don't see things quite as bleakly for a few reasons:

- NFTs create a scarcity of ownership, but they don't create a scarcity of enjoyment or experience. In fact, the entire NFT generative art community is based around the idea of viewing and enjoying pieces that you don't personally own.

- I don't think scarcity of ownership is necessarily a bad thing. Having put some skin in the game for that specific piece, the owner sort of becomes that piece's biggest advocate. And this allows many collectors to form a much stronger relationship to the piece than they would have if they saved a copy of an image they found on instagram.

- A generative algorithm can theoretically produce an infinite number of outputs, and I think there are valid artistic reasons to want to limit the set to a specific size. For example, maybe the algorithm no longer produces unique results after 500 or so iterations, and the artist wants to cap the collection at that size to allow people to become familiar with that amount of outputs. Managing this with NFTs allows the artist to create a canonical collection limited to the desired size along with the proof that they all derive from the same algorithm.

- Blockchains are still fairly new as an artistic medium, and I think many artists will find ways to create interesting projects without leaning as much on scarcity. Some projects do open editions, which we may see more of in the future. Scarcity is simply a tool at the artist's disposal.

(Disclaimer: I'm an artist who makes a lot of generative NFTs, so I'm heavily biased)

[8note]

if youre not extracting a profit from people enjoying the art, why are you advocating for it? what is your skin in the game? if youre only advocating it to get rid of it by selling it, i dont think thats a genuine advocacy for the piece.

im unclear that this scarcity is different from making a wordpress site with n posts, each one being a picture generated with the different parameters.

i think the website version is better, even, since you as the artist can pick out the best individual items when producing the single art work that is "n pieces generated by this algorithm"

i dont think it really unlocks anything new. Whats different is having tooling that makes it easy to do

[scyclow]

Again, I think the act of "owning" it creates a much different relationship between the collector and that art than simply looking at it. They have skin in the game because they either spent money on the piece, or were able to mint it by being in the right place at the right time.

To be sure, a lot of the "advocacy" is exactly what you describe, where people are just trying to push their bags. But the advocacy I'm talking about is more about the social element of discussing the art with other people in the community.

The website is certainly a valid way to display a limited generative art collection, but it's a different experience. It means that the artist _can_ curate the collection and hide some of the rough edges of the algorithm... but then it loses some of its magic. NFTs have sort of enabled a new sub genre of generative art [1].

[1] https://tylerxhobbs.com/essays/2021/the-rise-of-long-form-ge...

[iskander]

> if youre not extracting a profit from people enjoying the art, why are you advocating for it? what is your skin in the game? if youre only advocating it to get rid of it by selling it, i dont think thats a genuine advocacy for the piece.

There's an emotional state associated with having paid money, sometimes a lot of money, for something which makes you want to get something in return. That something can be as simple as collective discussion of the art you bought, or propagation of its image into the real world through murals and commissioned derivatives.

It doesn't have to be a speculative interest in re-selling, though I agree that most people entering the space are exclusively interested in the latter.

[iskander]

Re: #3, there isn't really a meaningful oracle problem now that there are reliable oracles.

You can make synthetic assets which track prices of e.g. stocks. There are a few different protocols in this space, such as https://synthetix.io/. The biggest hurdle, I think, is regulatory -- is it legal to make and trade derivatives of $synthIBM and trade it like derivatives of $IBM?

[iskander]

Re: limited editions, I'm not talking about monetization. As someone currently working on a big generative art collaboration, I think knowing that the output will have a finite set that is considered canonical is an essential artistic constraint.