I vividly remember being woken up by my dad returning from a squash match the surprise me with the set of poster paints and brushes I'd been dreaming of that cost 99c in Woolworths...
I'm no artist but when I had the desire to learn no obstacles would discourage me in my quest to afford materials and the process of obtaining a new watercolour book would take weeks and weeks I think the first third of school summer holidays actually.
now I'm wondering if I inadvertently lost interest in the impatience of adolescence...
but access to incredible artists materials is equally amazingly nearly ubiquitous in the western world along with peak uninstructed leisure time for young people to dabble but unfortunately not study and practice and master their tools in the dedicated way I remember absolutely everyone who had aspirations applied themselves in my youth.
by no means do I mean to hand waving dismiss the younger generations for laziness, but the economic realities are radically different from the seventies and maybe we haven't culturally adjusted quite yet to the increase in availability of purported artwork which might have formerly been graded as something less. Certainly the self regarding high social status of the art world at the time I was growing up excluded too many worthy creative talents from serious consideration, but that seems to have flip flopped to most liberally apply the glaze of authenticity over a entirety of output with unclear to me discrimination.
Even if you only count the people who do study and master their tools in a dedicated way, you still end up with an absolute flood of talent compared to demand. My kids are both music students, so I'm immersed in it, plus I'm a part time working musician myself.
It depends on the art market. Certainly a lot of forces are at work conspiring to push the marginal value of digital content towards zero, but there are some digital art markets that aren't at zero or at least aren't stuck at zero over longer terms.
There was a joke I saw the other day on Mastodon that "if NFTs actually worked as promised then the furries would have invented them years ago". While an amusing joke, it's also one of those things with buried bits of truth that stick out like wisdom. The furry commission markets have generally seemed to be stable over the life of the internet, the prices haven't converged to zero, and generally there seems to be respect for the labor costs of the artists in that market. Obviously a lot of other art markets wish they were that stable, and it's a weird benchmark (thus the humor to it), but it's still a benchmark.
>So the NFT isn't even of the actual image itself but just a URL to a JPEG image hosted somewhere.
When you put you life savings in a bank you don't have even the money itself - just some 0s and 1s in the bank's database. A lot of things work that kind of way.
I guess the important thing is not the digital representation but whether you can get you funds back at a later date. Which kind of works with bitcoin. NFTs I dunno.
Wow. NFT are even more worthless* than I imagined. I thought the data was "hashed" and "signed". This arrival makes it would like its just "url" to thing. Now That I type it. That can't be true! Journo/layman misunderstand tech or is really how it works!?
* inheirent worthless. Real worth is what some is willing or can be convinced to pay.
Most people's response when someone explains what NFTs are is "It can't be that stupid, you must be explaining it wrong."
But really, they're not that different than any other asset. They have value for as long as someone is willing to pay for them. Gold works the same way, except that if you can't find a buyer for your gold you can make jewelry or electronics connectors with it instead. With a NFT if there is no buyer then you have absolutely nothing.
This is an emperor has no clothes situation. No one wants to point out the whole thing is stupid and a borderline scam because they fear or believe that they might be seen a stupid or are stupid for not understanding something everyone else does.
No, as it turns out, it was just another crypto scam
Why wouldn't they at least point the NFT at a hash of the image, or an ipfs link? You still have the issue of the file disappearing because no one is hosting it, but at least no one could swap out the content..
Is there at least some attempt to normalize the URL, or could I sell twenty versions of my tweet if I wanted to by making different URLs that all point to the same tweet? (and could find buyers, which in my case, wouldn't happen)
Sometimes I hear about some fancy new thing and don't get it, and think it doesn't do what it claims to do. I like to assume I don't get it because I don't understand the problem space, or am just missing something basic for whatever reason.
I'm beginning to suspect that's not why I don't get NFTs.
Why are museums upset to discover that a painting they own is a forgery? Clearly it was indistinguishable from the original even to experienced curators, the “content” is the same as an original Vermeer. But the difference is that on one person can own the original, and they get to thumb their nose at all the losers who can’t. NFTs are the same. So what really “crazy” is the infantile human desire for exclusivity, not NFTs in particular.
I don’t think NFTs come with any legal or copyright rights. And even if the nft did give you some rights, legally they probably wouldn’t transfer to the next person.
For fairly small images. It costs gas to store data in the chain -- the bigger the transaction (in bytes), the more it costs to process. Rates fluctuate, but you can estimate around 0.03 ETH per KB. Since you have to exchange the token every transfer, it becomes clear quickly why you want to offload the file itself from the main chain.
The unique copy of the URL exists only for you. It's equally as silly as you thought. (Or perhaps imagined that the blockchain wasn't 100% public 100% visible)
No, no there is nothing actually unique about about an NFT. You can make as many as tokens as you want that point to the same resource (or a bit-perfect copy of it). You cant copy the token, but you can copy its contents.
It can work both ways. It's just easier to create an NFT of a hashed and signed set of metadata + URL than it is to encode all of this artwork on an actual blockchain.
Looking at this submission's ranking, it must be being flagged. Do people believe it doesn't belong on HN? Or are you unhappy that a crypto-y thing is getting criticised, so you flag the submission as a reflex action.
I come to HN for the insights and observations of the people in this community. If you think this submission doesn't belong here then please tells us why.
If you flagged it for some other reason, perhaps you could, and possibly should, explain that too.
People seem to use flagging as a “I don’t like this article” rather than “This is off-topic/not interesting for HN”; see e.g. the multiple stories yesterday about Red Hat pulling out of FSF getting repeatedly buried and flagged; and that seems pretty big news, to me
Methinks this would make a useful money laundering scheme because I can’t for the life of me figure out why people would pay millions for a digital image that is posted publicly on the internet.
Art is a money laundering game. Even with physical objects the price isn't objectively decidable.
I know from interacting with different painters and sculpturers who's works I have in my apartment, that the price on the bill often isn't the one being paid ...
Where does this 'hashed-and-signed artwork' terminology come from, ive seen it mentioned in online articles? That is not what NFT's are. NFT's are typically ERC721 contract (https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721) that contains an attribute containing a hyperlink to an ERC721MetaData JSON document, and a attribute of a map of 'id' to 'address' for the ownership.
Images are not stored on the blockchain, and they are not 'signed-and-hashed'.
This ERC721MetaData json document could disappear/be swapped out, unless it is an ipfs URL, in which case it could could disappear, but not be swapped out. Ipfs URLs are a commitment to the file contents, eg: hash. IPFS thus allows commitment to a given image in the json that may no longer actually be hosted. There is no guarantee that an IPFS NFT's referenced content will exist in future, let alone the ones on personal domains or s3, etc.
A signature exists to authorize contract calls to the 'transfer()' function, allowing the mapping of id to owner to be updated.
There are hashes, there are signatures, but to say 'artwork is hashed-and-signed' is a big stretch!
So, while scanning some of this earlier today I caught at least once the word 'deed.' A deed, traditionally, includes a clear statement of the rights being transferred. Do NFTs not include any contract-like statements?
Not generally, no. The metadata may contain some legal wording in a free-text description field, but it's up to the contract publisher. The big expensive beeple NFT metadata reads like a stream of consciousness.
Folk's are having trouble understanding the idea of owning 'nothing' and 'digitally enforced scarcity', so using the concept of a house deed is probably a good analogy. It's just an electronic record at the bank, but it lets you 'own' a house. Deeds of course have a long history of standardized legal definition and regulations. NFT's... do not.
Regarding contractual language vs code -- Ricardian contracts were invented for this purpose. As yet, we are not seeing Ricardian clauses appearing in smart contracts.
Personally, I think that folks buying NFT's are crazy. (and I am a bitcoin advocate). This doesn't stop me from wanting to sell them (for bitcoin) ;-)
> 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.
Does anyone remember that super rusted, broken down carcass of a car that got bid up to extraordinary amounts by auto enthusiasts (including Jay Leno)? Everyone was saying that as a vehicle it's worthless, and that you're pretty much paying for the VIN. That's what NFTs seem like.
except even in that ridiculous scenario, you still actually get the car. you can physically own it, and nobody else owns it, and it is the only copy of the object. Makes me think that NFTs are even more crazy, because images are incredibly easy to make perfect copies of.
Wait so NFTs are not even a hash of the actual data representing the underlying art?! It's a signed link to the art stored somewhere else? I guess I was in the "NFTs are silly" camp before but this really makes them look even more ridiculous than I already thought they were.
> It’s not unlike those cafeterias which sell customers little plastic tokens that can later be exchanged for food after queuing. Except in this case, the token is invisible, the queue never ends, and the “food” is a JPEG stuck to a wall—which abruptly disappears after about a week.
> A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unit of data on a digital ledger called a blockchain, where each NFT can represent a unique digital item, and thus they are not interchangeable. NFTs can represent digital files such as art, audio, videos, items in video games and other forms of creative work.
On these platforms, minting a work is the same effect as posting an image to your deviantart, for example. The only difference is that the table that links user id to content id is a blockchain.
Blockchain is a useful tech.
Crypto currencies are an interesting idea, but easily manipulated by launderers, i.e. the guys over at Wall Street.
NFTs are basically a ponzi scheme: most of headlining ones are bought by artists themselves, or folks who stand to benefit from NFTs becoming popular.
As with everything, the rule still stands: don't spend money you're not willing to lose. Crypto and NFTs are NOT an investment: they are a gamble… just like most of the stock market "game". :X
I'm here collecting downvotes in exchange for hard truths.
Could have paid to put the data on chain for less than the cost to settle the purchase of this luxurious immutable broken link. BSV is much better low level technology for this kind of thing. Now shower me with your hatred before I give you more sound reasons it is clearly superior.
Been having an argument in a group chat... Is selling a link copyright infringement?
Suppose I mint an NFT which contains a YouTube link to an official music video. Am I infringing if I sell this NFT? I know about rulings saying that sharing links is not infringement. But if I neither upload nor host the material, then where’s the infringement?
Really a downvote? It seems legally interesting to me.
If you claim that selling a publicly available link is infringing, then what if I sell access to a weekly newsletter which is just a YouTube link to my favorite song of the week?
NFTs for expensive art is not something that fits very well longterm.
But NFTs for simple trading games where assets are tracked by the trading game company as well as the blockchain (e.g., affordable cryptokitties) is much more reasonable.
But, then it just becomes part of the games industry. And those games simply utilize the blockchain.
I haven't bought any NFTs and will probably not do it until I see real data on large efficiency improvements of blockchains (I'm hopeful for PoS but want real data on it).
But if I would buy one I would make very sure that it was hosted on IPFS and immedietly downloaded a version to selfhost and store. People rush into this way to blind I really think. But that is a problem with blockchains in general I guess.
I think people here are being quite short sighted.
Yes, the impermanence of many (most) NFTs right now is a big problem, but that is a problem that many are working on and I expect to largely be solved within a year.
ArtBlock allows generative artists to create a script, which a user can then mint an artwork whereby a unique hash passed to that script creates an output. This leads to the creation of a cohesive set of visual works, but with each piece having a unique feel that still feels part of the set. See Archetypes or Ringers for two well known collections on ArtBlocks. The script and hash is all stored on chain.
This artist has created C-code that lives on chain which can re-create the audio and visual components of the media you are buying. So you can always re-create the media with what is stored on chain.
There are numerous other projects that are storing the media "on chain".
Other projects store a hash of the file you are purchasing in the NFT, and then point the URL to an IPFS gateway. As long as someone on the IPFS network is hosting the media, the hash will find it. Their are platforms being created to assist with this (e.g https://infinft.com/#about)
See also Arweave and Filecoin, which are decentralized networks that can be used to incentivize others to store the media (in Arweave's case, potentially "forever").
This space will continue to evolve and new standards will be developed to address these issues.
In the meantime though, it is definitively caveat emptor and I would urge diligence as to how any NFT you might purchase handles these types of issues.
And all you get to say is you paid for that. Because anyone can go see https://api.artblocks.io/generator/7 in all its glory, but only one person (presumably) can say they were the last one to pay for the pointer.
This isn't "a thing of note". This is not even bullshit, because art might actually be bullshit. This is bullshit dropping its own shit, blindly, on a spreadsheet.
They may as well stuff the data into a QR code, print it out, and stick it on the wall. That's really the only "artwork" that they come out of this transaction possessing.
I agree. I don’t see “permanent storage” as an unsolvable problem.
What I see as a problem, is creating a process to identify ownership of the NFTs. I wonder how auctions do that. Technically must quite expensive to prove ownership of a digital asset.
Permanent storage is a harder problem than many people give credit: it costs money for storage and for access. When you have a little bit of data used by a few people, you can probably find volunteers on the internet who will donate capacity but that falls apart once a service becomes popular enough that people have expectations of reliability or support. It also becomes legally a minefield the first time someone puts copyrighted or illegal material there, so nodes are going to become selective about what fraction of the total they mirror.
This seems like a challenge for artwork since blockchains are so inefficient compared to the alternatives and for any one person it's both cheaper and more reliable to store their collection on a regular storage service which has SLAs. Why pay more to take on other people's problems?
Totally agree! My point was that although you can solve long term storage with tech and there are projects who can try to solve the problem, with all the caveats you mentioned, there is no way technically to solve the artwork provenance part.
You have to assign to an individual or team to go through drills.
This is pretty funny. So the NFT isn't even of the actual image itself but just a URL to a JPEG image hosted somewhere.
The only thing "revolutionary" about NFTs seems to be that artists now have a new and exciting way to hawk their work to suckers.