NFTs are not the answer to many questions. Maybe you should start asking the correct questions.
The one problem NFTs solve perfectly: How to do decentralized and pseudonymous proof of community membership.
Successful projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club are not about the fancy drawings, but about the exclusivity of a social club. You may find that silly, but that does not diminish the human craving for status.
NFTs are the digital equivalent of designer clothes, luxury watches, and fancy cars.
There are a lot of people promoting NFTs as the solution to problems digital artists have, so it's worth spending some time talking about how that's not true, and how, in fact, many digital artists have been getting paid for their work ever since stuff like PayPal existed. Myself included, digital art's my job.
Your point that they are status markers has something, though! Especially given how most of the successful work seems to be operating under completely different aesthetics than those non-filthy-rich people enjoy looking at and funding (seriously all these randomly-generated things are ugly); the "fine art" world has had increasing amounts of work that you have to be trained to see as "good art" ever since photography made accurate depictions of a scene something everyone could have for very little effort.
Ignoring the NFT aspect of it, I disagree that all of the randomly generated art pieces are ugly. I think the vast majority are, but that some turn out great, and that this is the main reason it's an interesting medium. The artists who are the best at this are successful at upping the rate of outputs that look good, and that makes them good artists. It's very similar to how anyone can throw paint splatters on a canvas, but not everyone who does so is Jackson Pollack. And many of the individual pieces even from the most successful (artistically I mean) projects still aren't nearly as good as the best pieces, similar to how most Pollacks are not as good as his best.
This was long-winded, but all I'm saying is that I think generated art is an interesting medium, with both good and bad artists and good and bad pieces, like every other artistic medium. (Again, completely without taking a position on whether NFTs are the right way to create / sell these!)
The intent of my statement "all these randomly-generated things are ugly" was not "all aleatoric art is ugly", it was that all of the randomly-generated NFTs I've seen look like the results of hitting "randomize" on a mediocre Picrew except for the part where someone's trying to convince people it's worth more than I pay for rent in three years.
> NFTs are the digital equivalent of designer clothes, luxury watches, and fancy cars.
I feel like a lot of people (particularly on this site) see these kinds of things as shallow, uninteresting, and contributory to a lot of the worst parts of society. It feels… odd… to hear them invoked as a positive/useful thing.
Like, yes, I get it, a lot of people are shallow and want status symbols to fill the voids in their souls and give their lives meaning. But the idea of taking the clout-chasing mechanics that wreak so much havoc on society and going “what if we had more of that?”… well it feels a little like trying to invent digital junk food because real world junk food sells so well.
I totally share your vibe on this, but I also think we do ourselves a disservice when we turn our noses up at stuff lots of people actually like. I try to separate two different questions: "Is this something that people will find valuable?" and "Is this something I want to dedicate my scarce time and energy toward working on?". I think in the case of all this shallow stuff, those answers are "yes" and "no". But I think we have a tendency to conflate the two questions and since the answer to the second one is "no", assume the answer to the first one is also "no". I personally did that with Facebook for many years and really talked down the business because I considered it superficial and actively bad and not something I wanted to have any involvement in, but the truth is that it is a very valuable business that I just don't want to work on, and that's fine. I increasingly see a lot of this cryptocurrency stuff as very much the same. I may not like it, but that doesn't at all imply that it won't be valued by a large number of people.
"designer clothes, luxury watches, and fancy cars" all have understandable limits to production and have genuine scarcity (even if that scarcity is strictly controlled). NFTs have artificial scarcity... for little to no purpose other than monetary gain. Generally I am against the concept of artificial scarcity in any industry.
Many fashion houses literally burn their unsold products to create this scarcity or create limited runs. DeBeers have a heavy control over the diamond industry. If an artist says they'll only create unique pieces (a 1/1 collection) then while they could create more in future, they'll still have a market determined value.
Fashion houses burning clothes to maintain image and Dabeers creating a diamond cartel are not good. Im not saying that artifical scarcity doesnt exist, im saying that its bad and we shouldnt build economies around it.
For digital art vs physical art, there is a clear difference between "there will only ever be one mona lisa" and "I am not going to press cntrl-c cntrl-v on this image license"
I’m all for artificial scarcity. Collectors are going to find rare things to collect. It would be better if they didn’t, but I think it’s probably a part of human nature to some degree.
Personally, id be ecstatic if collectors decide they can get their fix collecting rare jpegs and Pokémon cards instead of “truly scare” ivory, furs, or blood diamonds.
To me, TCGs are defensible because they are Games in which you are knowingly consenting to a system in which collection is a part of the experience. The manufacturers give a standard MSRP for cards during their printing period. Aftermarket cards are priced based on the utility given within a game system and that feeds into a collectors valuation. This is, I think, an acceptable outlet for the humanistic urge to collect things. I do think its exploitative but at least the messaging is clear and fair.
I take issue with systems which exploit gambling urges for profit. NFT's claim to be the future of DRM for independent artists, but they are exploited into becoming pump-and-dump schemes and wildly speculative markets. They use language used to defend artistic IP but ultimately function as a game with arbitrary rules.
Artificial scarcity is, however, a prerequisite for it, at least with that kind of margin. Otherwise you'll get competition bringing the price back down toward production cost + overhead.
Technically, I think that would be monopoly power, not artificial scarcity. The government grants a legal monopoly to producers to stamp their products with their brand name, which also prevents producers from using someone else's brand name on their products.
A legal monopoly is artificial scarcity. However, if the provenance of an item is important to the buyer then scarcity of items from that source would be natural, not artificial—even if goods which are otherwise physically identical down to the atomic scale (including branding) are available from other sellers. That has nothing to do with any monopoly granted by a government. The trademark rules which prohibit using someone else's brand are there to protect buyers from fraud, not to create scarcity. As long as the buyer is fully informed as to the actual origins of the item there shouldn't be any concerns over fraud regardless of how it's been marked. Using someone else's mark in a misleading way to sell your own product would be fraud, though, even in the absence of trademark laws.
In many cases the “limits to production” and “genuine scarcity” are functionally meaningless though, and surely have no measurable effect on the market price of the item. A cheap screen-printed t-shirt could be $7 if it’s printed with one design, and $100 if it’s printed with another design. It’s completely silly to point to “limits to production” and “genuine scarcity” as an explanation for this.
A more apt explanation for this is Baudrillard's conception of sign value. (Veblen initially thought out parts of it through the concept of Veblen goods, but it was Baudrillard who took this idea to the extreme). The value is not created by any utility or scarcity, but is derived by the system of signs (prestige, class symbol, brand) created in consumerist societies. This system of signs is often self-reinforcing, since sign values themselves are "in association" with other sign values, rather than having cause-and-effect chains and physical processes. And it's "free-floating" just like the current monetary system of floating currencies are.
I don't think anybody is trying to explain the price difference between a $7 shirt and a $100 shirt as being the result of one having a larger supply than the other.
That’s the most charitable interpretation I can make of the original comment:
> "designer clothes, luxury watches, and fancy cars" all have understandable limits to production and have genuine scarcity (even if that scarcity is strictly controlled).
The entire thread is about buying and selling NFTs, so I think it’s fair to infer that we’re all talking about the merits of NFTs having a non-zero price.
Yes, and their point was in the context of a thread debating the merits of NFTs having non-zero price. The comment was claiming that the supposed "genuine scarcity" justifies the buying and selling of those physical goods.
The claim was that they would rather not buy anything that is being made scarce artificially, which is a perfectly reasonable position. You don't have to agree with this principle. But, again, this is bears no relationship to the question of why a t-shirt is worth $10 and another t-shirt is worth $5.
If you're talking about mass-produced watches sure. But visit, say, Rexhep Rexhepi's or the Gronefeld brothers' workshops, and you would be hard pressed to come away without an appreciation for hand-finished mechanical movements that border on art.
Yes, but if you buy the watch you can put it on your hand, use it and show it to me. NFT is more akin to a photo of an invoice from the workshop you attended - it might have some sentimental value to you, but it's not a watch, does not have intrinsic value and I don't have to respect it.
You're taking a digital item and complaining it doesn't exist irl. It's only an "invoice" to the physical world, it can actually be used for things in the digital world, like gaining access to private chat rooms / spaces or getting early access to product drops.
Also a digital item should have a value irl otherwise it won't get any respect irl. What you describe here is similar to any old-style password or subscription code, while a NFT art doesn't give you access to anything extra.
And which side of that continuum between craftmanship and lazy brand-markup are NFTs actually on? I don't look at the NFT artwork I'm seeing sold online and find myself filled with an appreciation for incredible, intricate, hand-finished work. Digital apes in particular are incredibly derivative and feel very mass-produced, this is the kind of artwork that would sell for maybe $50-100 tops as a commission. Except honestly not even for that much money, because part of the commission price is being able to choose what gets made, you can't just recolor the same image and give it a little cigarette and an earring.
It's all well and good to talk about designer watches that are perfectly constructed masterpieces, but NFTs aint that. They're the $3 mass-produced digital watches that are getting a brand slapped on them and then sold purely for the name. The only thing more mass-produced than the bored ape collection are the silly pixel avatars on Twitter; we're not really talking about significant skill or craftmanship or even creative expression here. Zoom in on some of the images in the bored app collection, the artist is very literally copying and pasting parts of the drawing between pictures, that's why they all look the same.
It just feels really silly to try and artistically compare some cookie-cutter Photoshop templates to a hand-crafted watch.
> It's all well and good to talk about designer watches that are perfectly constructed masterpieces, but NFTs aint that.
Nonsense. NFTs are neither mass-produced digital watches nor Rolexes. They are simple watches - some mass produced and some artworks created by skilled craftsmen.
Sure, a good bunch are (looks like 20% to 50%, depending on your percentile chosen).
But the Cryptopunks are, generative and a collectible yes, but by all accounts a labour of love, an experiment before its time, given away for free at a time when no one gave a damn; it's not exactly the mass-production story you suggest.
Even if you buy wholesale into the narrative about the history of cryptopunks (and to be clear, this is a deliberately chosen narrative, the cryptopunk creators were not against making money and they gave away a large percentage of their tokens in part because they hoped the tokens they held would increase in value if they became more popular) -- but even if you take everything about their history at face value, you're still left with:
A) Pieces that do not have much artistic value outside of their position and relevance inside the ecosystem in which they were created: nobody is going to seriously claim that cryptopunks are themselves great works of art, any artistic value comes from the creation of the NFT model for generative/mass-produced artwork,
B) Pieces that are definitively mass-produced by design, and that served as a template for how other mass-produced collections could work,
C) Pieces that have been largely divorced from any artistic message that the original pieces held; the evolution of a piece designed to evoke a counter-cultural punk aesthetic into a piece that can only be controlled and owned by the richest members of society is its own possibly unintentional statement on the state of NFTs, and
D) Pieces that are significant specifically because they formed a model for other even more derivative pieces by other creators who lack even the benefit of imagination about the crypto-ecosystem itself. Cryptopunks are significant because they proved the viability of other collections like bored apes and their ilk, products that are entirely devoid of any kind of meaningful social statement or craftmanship. And one has to wonder what the actual artistic value or craftmanship is in building that model and why we should be impressed with the creators behind it.
And even if you're optimistic about all of this and think the pieces are genuinely significant and meaningful, you still wouldn't compare cryptopunks to a hand-crafted watch. They're at best historically significant, but they don't demonstrate any particularly breathtaking artistic skill, and any artistic message they were trying to make has been largely invalidated by the evolution of the space into the least "punk" community in tech. The nicest thing I can say about cryptopunks is that they have inadvertently turned into an effective satire of what the NFT community thinks about itself.
BAYC is a community in the sense that it has members and non-members, but what binds that community other than having purchased some asset? Sure, that's one definition of community, but it's not a definition of community that I'm inspired to participate in, or a definition of community that I would be willing to stake my own money on.
people aren't paying huge sums of money for a collaborative virtual graffiti wall, they're paying huge sums of money to signal that they have huge sums of money. People have been doing that for centuries.
Didn't some artist get his NFTs stolen through Discord screensharing and he begged his Twitter followers not to acknowledge the possessor of the NFT as the real owner of art?
My personal view here is that your continued ability to own an NFT depends on your ability to tell an interesting story.
If 51% of the professional clout of the art world decides you don't own something any more, you ... might not?
If the metadata that denote ownership of beeple's first 5000 everydays are accidentally overwritten due to a small bug, probably everyone will agree to ignore that.
But if someone puts on a super cool art-thief costume and does a livestream where they write and execute software that resets the ownership so it's their art now, while they play "The Thomas Crown Affair" soundtrack in the background, probably everyone will go along with this, yeah?
(Certainly the theft of the Mona Lisa increased its value!)
Which database to you query? They're on the blockchain, but you have to know which format you're accepting, how to verify, etc. Do you accept OpenSea as the source of truth for NFT ownership? How about Foundation? What about MyFirstMarketplace, the one that I've decided to create?
This requires some social contract to know who the authority is, and that's probably based on how much they have spent on marketing to become The Authority.
The blockchain is the database. It stores objects and, like postgres, can store code for manipulating the objects. Each NFT would have a particular storage location which you can query, either directly via a block explorer like etherscan.io or via javascript using any one of a number of apis like ethers.js
This sub-thread is talking about an existing case where an NFT has been taken from the person who paid for it by social engineering. The new owner won’t return it so the marketplaces have blacklisted the NFT. So querying the chain isn’t enough in this case because social consensus has determined the chain to be wrong.
The blockchain isn't the database, it's just the storage medium. There are multiple different NFT database on top of the blockchain, implemented in different ways by different people, conforming to different standards.
you missed the part where the parent asked 'who is the authority'
if there are 20 NFT chains, and 10 of them assign ownership to A, and 5 of them assign it to B and the other 5 don't assign it at all - what can we say anymore about the ownership?
all of this public ledger stuff might make more sense if, unlike as is customary, there is a single authoritative chain instead of a 'marketplace' of chains.
it's up to the nft originator to assign ownership in just one jurisdiction. if they create and sell multiple nfts in different venues, but for the same item, then i imagine that would damage their reputation and the value of their prior and future items. the chain itself does not assign ownership independent of the nft originator.
with art i think nfts do function very much like certificates of provenance. game items are different in that the community of players, or the company hosting/developing, indicates the proper database source (chain).
It was funny to see how they responded to losing their NFTs by being tricked on discord: they contacted the centralized storefronts (rarible, opensea) to have them marked as stolen.
I do not know this particular story and do not see the relevance to the points I am making. That being said, you cannot steal an NFT via Discord screensharing unless you manage to display your private key on screen. In which case: Children gotta learn that the stove is hot.
The one problem NFTs solve perfectly: How to do decentralized and pseudonymous proof of community membership.
Successful projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club are not about the fancy drawings, but about the exclusivity of a social club. You may find that silly, but that does not diminish the human craving for status.
NFTs are the digital equivalent of designer clothes, luxury watches, and fancy cars.