NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens) - Files as crypto currency

[Fanatical Pragmatist]

This looks like a total scam. How does holding some IUO on a blockchain mean you own the art? I literally can save the gif to my pc.

Alternatively if I can get some ETC from my png of a frog it took me 20 minutes to find and 3 minutes to photograph and 1 minute to artify in Gimp, do I care if someone else downloads the png afterwards without paying me?
Shit, if 100 people decide they want it, 99 of them download it without paying me but 1 does, I still profit, no?

But wait... If the froggy pic is already on my instagram then am I scamming investors by selling it on Rarible?

 

[The Ultimate Ramotith]

There i something called 'The Analogue Hole'. Basically, Digital Restrictions Management cannot stop analogue forms of reproduction. In other words, not even blockchains can stop someone from recording the screen with a separate camcorder (even one that saves its files digitally).

 

[Kosher Dill]

There i something called 'The Analogue Hole'. Basically, Digital Restrictions Management cannot stop analogue forms of reproduction.

True, but blockchains don't even stop digital forms of reproduction, so there's no need for circumvention.

 

[The Ultimate Ramotith]

True, but blockchains don't even stop digital forms of reproduction, so there's no need for circumvention.

Which forms of digital reproduction do defeat blockchains? /sincere/

 

[Kosher Dill]

Which forms of digital reproduction do defeat blockchains? /sincere/

That's literally all there is to it. Blockchains make no pretense of being DRM or access control of any kind.

 

[The Paranoid Organ]

Shit, if 100 people decide they want it, 99 of them download it without paying me but 1 does, I still profit, no?

Totally. I cannot begrudge those selling NTFs, it's a good hustle. I can only think those buying them are fucking idiots.

 

[paint.net]

Totally. I cannot begrudge those selling NTFs, it's a good hustle. I can only think those buying them are fucking idiots.

You have a good point, but the only thing I think would be a good excuse for buying them is to brag about them.

 

[Fanatical Pragmatist]

Totally. I cannot begrudge those selling NTFs, it's a good hustle. I can only think those buying them are fucking idiots.

My problem is right now looking at the fees (in ETH of course) it takes to "mint" an NFT...

However, on the flip side the few times I've sold hardcopy photos its a painstaking process of finding a print shop, ordering from the print shop, making sure they didn't fuck up the image quality, then mailing it to the customer. Its a bit easier with paintings because I can create the work more organically/at home; but still the idea that all I have to do is mess with a .jpg/.png for a little bit then straight sell the file seems like so much less of a hassle on my end than producing a hardcopy product.

 

[Conn4618]

My problem is right now looking at the fees (in ETH of course) it takes to "mint" an NFT...

However, on the flip side the few times I've sold hardcopy photos its a painstaking process of finding a print shop, ordering from the print shop, making sure they didn't fuck up the image quality, then mailing it to the customer. Its a bit easier with paintings because I can create the work more organically/at home; but still the idea that all I have to do is mess with a .jpg/.png for a little bit then straight sell the file seems like so much less of a hassle on my end than producing a hardcopy product.

I think the idea can go further than just point of sale. For example, royalty payments can be made to the original author every time a piece of art is resold, assuming the appropriate contract is set up. The fees on eth are ridiculous, like you said. Eth 2.0 would be huge, but hopefully stuff like efinity makes minting nfts on polkadot more attractive to people.

 

[Sprate Header]

Art YouTuber DaftPina just released a video talking about NFTs, partially focusing on Yo Mama having another of his Twitter breakdowns after facing backlash for his NFTs, as well as Annoying Orange having his (exclusivity-based) NFT swiped by the general public by the use of Inspect Element.

Spoiler: Archive

He spends more time talking about NFTs themselves than he does Yo Mama and Annoying Orange, mainly focusing on the negatives, them being the environmental impact, the harm they have done to artists, and how using them is not socially acceptable (wut). He focuses in on a Twitter thread made by the founder of DogeCoin to make his points, and as someone who doesn't really listen to anything Art Twitter or Crypto Twitter says, his logic sounded fine to me. Am I missing something?

 

[Cool Dog]

So has anyone here tried doing an NFT?

I been checking opensea which seems to be one of the big players in the scene and they apparently allow you to post an NFT for sale that doesnt exists and then mint it once you sell it, am I getting this right?

 

[The Ultimate Ramotith]

View attachment 2139748

That's literally all there is to it. Blockchains make no pretense of being DRM or access control of any kind.

...I actually never thought hat NFTs were that easily copiable!
I mean, if you can disable right-clicking and if streaming services can black out screencaps, then how come blockchains do not restrict access at all??

 

[Kosher Dill]

I mean, if you can disable right-clicking and if streaming services can black out screencaps, then how come blockchains do not restrict access at all??

How could they? The whole point of a blockchain is that it's public and runs on everyone's computer.

Now, you could encrypt the actual data file if you want, but that poses its own set of issues with how you transfer keys, how you prove that an encrypted NFT really is what you say it is, and so on.

 

[The Ultimate Ramotith]

How could they? The whole point of a blockchain is that it's public and runs on everyone's computer.

Now, you could encrypt the actual data file if you want, but that poses its own set of issues with how you transfer keys, how you prove that an encrypted NFT really is what you say it is, and so on.

...
The firs time I read of the blockchain, I though that blockchain was essentially 'smoke and mirrors'.
Now, after spending months reading of the concept, I still think that blockchain is essentially 'smoke and mirrors'!

 

[Gimmick Account]

It's not meant to be anything like DRM. It's a contract of ownership and is only valid in the first place if the NFT was originally sold by the rights holder. You might as well bake the data into the blockchain but that's not the important part.
The protective element is that it's in a blockchain ledger. You can prove it's yours if someone is selling t-shirts and you want to challenge em or take your cut, and you can be taken seriously if you want to sell/transfer the rights to someone else. When it comes to dumb fucking memes that's novel.

Someone said itt that they don't confer ownership but that's not accurate. Contract law doesn't care if your agreement is written on a napkin or a dream, as long as it happened. Robust cryptographic proof is nice to have, though.

NTFs are a much more broadly useful tool that'll become pretty important for lots of applications in the near future just like blockchains and distributed ledgers in general; this novelty fad is just drawing attention to it early before it makes sense to people.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Someone said itt that they don't confer ownership but that's not accurate. Contract law doesn't care if your agreement is written on a napkin or a dream, as long as it happened

Think about it this way. If I own something, and there's not a requirement in law to use a certain kind of ledger, such as the various title systems in place for recording land ownership, I can transfer ownership however I want. Like you said, contract law doesn't care where the agreement happens.
So even if NFTs really conferred ownership in some sense, I could buy ownership of something via NFT, then turn around and sell those rights myself outside of the blockchain. I could just draw up a contract with quill pen and parchment to seal the deal between me and the new buyer.
Now we have a new owner of the thing that used to be an NFT, and we have a token on the blockchain that is meaningless and doesn't correspond to the ownership of anything. But there's no requirement for me to publicize that fact, my off-chain sale won't be reflected in the blockchain. I could even go on and resell the token, pretending it's still valid, and no one would be the wiser. At which point you have to ask: if NFT tokens may or may not represent ownership, and there's no way to tell if they do, what was the point of all this? What did we gain over parchment?

The imaginary property system people think they're using when they do an NFT is more like entailment, which was abolished a century ago. Under our current legal system, you can't say "I sell this to X, but only on the condition that he never separates ownership of the object from possession of the private key for the corresponding blockchain token, and imposes this same condition on any future buyer".

 

[Gimmick Account]

At which point you have to ask: if NFT tokens may or may not represent ownership, and there's no way to tell if they do, what was the point of all this? What did we gain over parchment?

You can be naughty like that with or without NFTs. One difference is you've just incriminated yourself in a very provable way, however.

And yes, you can sell something with another form of contract. But if you've used the ledger to prove that you own something to a buyer, why would anybody purchase it from you without also demanding that you transfer the NFT?
And if you haven't mentioned that you own it via NFT, how is it relevant at all? I could sell multiple people a bridge I don't own, but why the hell would I bother purchasing the bridge first if I were going to do that? It'd only create an unnecessary paper trail directly to myself. And lower my profit by whatever a bridge is worth.

If there's a conflict of ownership, NFTs are better for everybody but the scammer. The process of sorting out ownership is necessary no matter what but it's going to include uncovering criminal evidence against you backed by a system fundamentally designed to be trustworthy in this case. Similarly if there's parallel chains of ownership the NFT owner will never have a worse claim than someone with a paper contract in court if they're in the right. Providing the NFT was originally legit they won't have to prove anything, while the paper buyer has a diligence problem or some work to do (luckily there could be a concrete record of whether their agreement takes precedence thanks to the ledger, as long as they have proof on their end as well). Potentially bad luck for them, but another plus in the NFT column.

Edit:
I should also mention to answer the question (although it's in the title of the thread) that aside from this, we gain all the crypto utility that you can't do by signing in blood on lambskin. And redundancy, speed, (relative) liquidity etc. Now you can buy weed with cat gifs.

 

[D.Va]

You can prove ownership with NFT all you want but it won't streamline the legal process in any way and it still won't stop Ivan and Chang from ripping your shit off overseas.

 

[Gimmick Account]

You can prove ownership with NFT all you want but it won't streamline the legal process in any way

I dunno what aspects you have in mind but it probably will cheapen some processes quite a bit. Standardisation and history/trust features are nice for contract-forming, comparing notes to get to the bottom of shit without wasting time in court (and fewer opportunities for conflicts to occur in the first place, which in aggregate certainly counts as streamlining), etc. Contract arbitration can be pretty case-by-case but standardisation helps with that too, although most of that example really has nothing to do with the contract medium itself. The system can be designed to reduce or mitigate opportunities for abuse but it's asking a lot for software to make people fundamentally honest.

Forget meme bullshit; the potential for lower legal overhead is one of the things that's attractive to business adopters. Courts have to weigh evidence (say agreement dates again, something people might fudge in a dispute) but as it becomes more conventional I wouldn't be surprised if standard precedent favours distributed ledgers, again relevant to research and the whole not wasting time in court thing.

 

[D.Va]

It sounds like a competence problem if you as a company acquire ownership of something but not be able to prove it ever happened. If you run your business that way, you'll be out of money before you are even able to make a suit. This is solving a problem that isn't there.

If you see it as a valid use case for NFTs, it's only an incredibly small facet not worth the amount of hardware overhead required to keep it working. If the core idea of tracking copyright is attractive to a state, it might as well be depending on a centralised database which is monumentally cheaper to run and accomplishes the same goal. Otherwise, you're trying to convince people to have their legal frameworks depend entirely on foreign hardware.