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Whoever understands NFTs let's make one for DonationCoder
Deozaan:
Not so important, but fwiw, there is a huge difference between e.g. a painting, and a reproduction photo/print of that painting.
-tomos (March 22, 2021, 05:16 PM)
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Well, sure. Maybe. I mean, if I actually owned an original, historical artifact (such as the Mona Lisa), I would treat it very differently than I would a reproduction. My point was that, some people can approach the idea of "obtaining art" from a point of view where the difference between an original and a reproduction isn't so significant, while obviously the difference is very significant to others.
In other words, I'm more of a "function over form" kind of person. And to me the function of art is to hang it on the wall (or whatever) and for it to look aesthetically pleasing (or whatever). In my mind, the reproduction photo/print can do that just as well as the original. In fact, to me, having a reproduction would be vastly superior to owning the original! I wouldn't have to worry about (1) the huge upfront cost of purchasing the original, (2) insurance payments to cover potential theft, damage, or loss, (3) security costs to protect it from said potential theft, damage, or loss, (4) ongoing maintenance costs to protect/restore it from natural degradation, or (5) more generally, the huge amount of stress about the responsibility of being the caretaker of such an important piece of humanity's history. What if it was irreparably damaged or destroyed while in my care? 😬
I can buy a $15 poster, hang it on the wall, and if in 10 years the image has faded due to UV exposure or if it falls off the wall and gets damaged during an earthquake, who cares? I can just buy another $15 replacement. But again, that's how I prioritize the purpose and value of art. And that's why I would likely never spend hundreds of dollars on a piece of art. But all that said, I think it is perfectly reasonable and sensible for other people to have different priorities and to place much more value on owning original artwork over reproductions for various reasons.
wraith808:
Interesting article comparing NFTs to DRM - https://copyrightandtechnology.com/2021/03/15/are-nfts-drm-by-another-name/
This part was especially interesting to someone like me who just knows the basics:
The winner of that auction at Christie’s last week, who goes by the pseudonym Metakovan, no more owns that pile of bits by the digital artist Beeple than I own the ebooks that I got from Amazon. I can read the ebooks on my laptop and my phone (and my Kindle reader, if I could find it in my closet), but I couldn’t read them on my Nook or Kobo (if I had either). I can’t resell, give away, or rent them; even if I were to hack the DRM, I’d be violating Amazon’s terms of service.
Metakovan can view the Beeple artwork on any device that will display JPEGs. But in a sense, he can’t alienate the work either, because it’s already available to everyone in exactly the same format as it is to him. He can’t lend or rent the NFT, because the NFT platform doesn’t support those operations (though it could). He can resell the NFT, but then he doesn’t get to keep all the revenue from the resale–commissions go back to both the artist and the NFT platform and/or auction house. (Resale royalties to artists for physical art objects are mandated by law in many countries, but not in the U.S.) It’s not clear whether he can give the NFT away (i.e., resell it for $0) or leave it to his children to inherit.
In neither the NFT nor DRM cases do buyers get the same bundle of rights that are guaranteed for a physical object in copyright law. In both cases a single private entity controls and benefits from the process in perpetuity, whereas no private entity is involved–or is even allowed by law to be involved–after someone purchases a physical copyrighted work.
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In a twitter thread, an interesting comparison is also posed about this particular form of ownership by Matt Levine of Bloomberg:
https://twitter.com/matt_levine/status/1370784691029180425?s=20
NFTs are a new form of tradable ostentation rather than a new form of tradable ownership.
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Renegade:
@mouser, if you're interested, I can help you out with some direction there.
I work in this space full time - have for a few years.
I can pretty quickly bring you up to speed on the basic theory, the first NFT, what's happening now, and the future of NFTs.
Right now the NFT-crazy crowd is freaking out over the absolute most basic form, but (in my day job) we've already got NFTs that are paradigmatically orders of magnitude ahead of all that.
I'll drop you a quick DM.
Shades:
More clarification about NFT's.
Taken from Slashdot:
When you buy an NFT for potentially as much as an actual house, in most cases you're not purchasing an artwork or even an image file. Instead, you are buying a little bit of code that references a piece of media located somewhere else on the internet. This is where the problems begin. Ed Clements is a community manager for OpenSea who fields these kinds of problems daily. In an interview, he explained that digital artworks themselves are not immutably registered "on the blockchain" when a purchase is made. When you buy an artwork, rather, you're "minting" a new cryptographic signature that, when decoded, points to an image hosted elsewhere. This could be a regular website, or it might be the InterPlanetary File System, a large peer-to-peer file storage system.
Clements distinguished between the NFT artwork (the image) and the NFT, which is the little cryptographic signature that actually gets logged. "I use the analogy of OpenSea and similar platforms acting like windows into a gallery where your NFT is hanging," he said. "The platform can close the window whenever they want, but the NFT still exists and it is up to each platform to decide whether or not they want to close their window." [...] "Closing the window" on an NFT isn't difficult. NFTs are rendered visually only on the front-end of a given marketplace, where you see all the images on offer. All the front-end code does is sift through the alphanumeric soup on the blockchain to produce a URL that links to where the image is hosted, or less commonly metadata which describes the image. According to Clement: "the code that finds the information on the blockchain and displays the images and information is simply told, 'don't display this one.'"
An important point to reiterate is that while NFT artworks can be taken down, the NFTs themselves live inside Ethereum. This means that the NFT marketplaces can only interact with and interpret that data, but cannot edit or remove it. As long as the linked image hasn't been removed from its source, an NFT bought on OpenSea could still be viewed on Rarible, SuperRare, or whatever -- they are all just interfaces to the ledger. The kind of suppression detailed by Clements is likely the explanation for many cases of "missing" NFTs, such as one case documented on Reddit when user "elm099" complained that an NFT called "Big Boy Pants" had disappeared from his wallet. In this case, the user could see the NFT transaction logged on the blockchain, but couldn't find the image itself. In the case that an NFT artwork was actually removed at the source, rather than suppressed by a marketplace, then it would not display no matter which website you used. If you saved the image to your phone before it was removed, you could gaze at it while absorbing the aura of a cryptographic signature displayed on a second screen, but that could lessen the already-tenuous connection between NFT and artwork.
If you're unable to find a record of the token itself on the Ethereum blockchain, it "has to do with even more arcane Ethereum minutiae," writes Ben Munster via Motherboard. He explains: "NFTs are generally represented by a form of token called the ERC-721. It's just as simple to locate this token's whereabouts as ether (Ethereum's in-house currency) and other tokens such as ERC-20s. The NFT marketplace SuperRare, for instance, sends tokens directly to buyers' wallets, where their movements can be tracked rather easily. The token can then generally be found under the ERC-721 tab. OpenSea, however, has been experimenting with a new new token variant: the ERC-1155, a 'multitoken' that designates collections of NFTs.
This token standard, novel as it is, isn't yet compatible with Etherscan. That means ERC-1155s saved on Ethereum don't show up, even if we know they are on the blockchain because the payments record is there, and the 'smart contracts' which process the sale are designed to fail instantly if the exchange can't be made. [...]"
In closing, Munster writes: "This is all illustrative of a common problem with Ethereum and cryptocurrencies generally, which despite being immutable and unhackable and abstractly perfect can only be taken advantage of via unreliable third-party applications."
tomos:
What I've Learned has released a video on the topic:
NFTs, Blockchain and Crypto. Explained
(I've just started watching, but probably amn't qualified to comment on it anyways)
EDIT// meh, not very informative. I learned more in this thread I think //EDIT
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