| > all of these articles claim widespread theft and stolen work, but a surprising lack of data on how much of that is actually sold considering all of those payments should be publicly traceable on the blockchain. Payments, yes. But not provenance. Because you'd have to find all the artists, then all their work, then sift through all the listings at OpenSea, and cross-reference that. Because the following statement from you is a blatant lie: > it is also trivially easy to look at these scam tokens and realize they are not from the authentic collection they claim to be No. It's impossible to say whether something is from a legitimate artist or not. > if you look at art forgery in traditional media, not only is it rampant but it actually accounts for millions of dollars per year NFT scams are significantly more rampant because stealing a digital image trivial. As is pretending someone you're not. Quote: "DeviantArt has sent 90,000 alerts about possible fraud to thousands of their users since then, company executives said. It’s now scanning for fraud across 4m newly minted NFTs each week. The number of alerts doubled from October to November, and grew by 300% from November to mid-December." [1] [1] https://www.theguardian.com/global/2022/jan/29/huge-mess-of-... |
lol, have you ever looked at the chain? if an artist has been minting work for 1 year on the same public address and then suddenly somebody purchases a lookalike token from a different public address there is a high likelihood it is a copymint. you can avoid this by comparing the addresses, it does not take an art history expert to detect this form of copyminting.
many platforms will show attribution based on address and username. so if the artwork is attributed to b33ple.eth instead of beeple.eth then it is likely a copymint.
> DeviantArt has sent 90,000 alerts about possible fraud to thousands of their users since then, company executives said
it’s clear copyright infringement, but easily detectable to the point that DeviantArt is able to automate their search, and not a sophisticated form of forgery. still you are not able to provide evidence of significant funds being consistently lost here despite it being so prevalent, especially when you compare to trad art forgery where you can easily find evidence of millions of dollars per year being mistakenly spent on forged artworks.
it is like Nigerian prince email scams. part of the protocol that some unfortunate and naive users might fall for, but most users will learn to recognize and avoid this problem in time.