Are you an art collector? Because I'm getting real tired of criticisms of NFTs that actually apply quite generally to the entire art collection space.
I am not an art collector, but as I understand it, the most important thing that they care about, even before aesthetics of an art piece, is *provenance*. That is, who created it, and who has owned it since it was created. NFTs provide a nearly unforgeable cryptographic record of both of those things, and are therefore a perfect fit for this market.
To you down-voters: this was a serious question. I have heard that NFTs are used to provide provenance for collectables and artwork. So based on cursory knowledge, this would seem to be a use case. What am I missing?
A little more education and a little less snark and vitriol, please.
You are correct that the NFT is valuable because the artist says it is (though ideally, artists should be digitally signing their works with their private key, which is a whole other thing).
What the blockchain provides, however, which is incredibly valuable in the art world (not saying this isn't vapid, btw) is provenance in a secure verifiable way that would likely extend past the lifespan of any centralized company.
Showing provenance is basically a requirement for any high value work of art, which gets more and more difficult as time goes on and the work changes hands. We're talking timespans of hundreds and thousands of years.
Highly recommend watching the fascinating show "Fake or Fortune" -- on Amazon Prime (at least in the US) -- to really appreciate how much people care about provenance.
The problem is that people don’t understand what NFTs are and talk about them with the idea that they are about representing digital art.
NFTs are about representing non-fungible digital assets.
For some reason, NFT art took off (which I don’t understand), but that wasn’t what NFTs were built for. NFTs can represent digital assets that exist fully on a blockchain and aren’t tied to off-chain assets. A digital ID, a in-game asset, a digital license, a ENS name, etc… are all NFTs and don’t need to reference any odd-chain URLs or images.
Ngl having a shared global decentralized database that’s you can develop on sounds pretty nice to me. Definitely wouldn’t call that a scam. Maybe it’s overvalued though…
As someone who’s dabbled in the art world, I think people underestimate how important provenance is to an art piece. Having a decentralized system that can automatically keep a paper trail and is seamlessly connected to an automated market/auction service is mind blowing for the art world. It’s basically automating two entire sub industries: the auction houses, and the appraisers. The NFTs don’t even need to stay digitally to be useful. The art world is experimenting a lot with printing these days, and the NFTs are just a method of being able to buy a print from the artist.
I think the majority of the value in art nfts will be derived from being part of the provenance, or being part of the history of the beginning of 'owning' digital art, much like owning a famous painting. By extension it could be applied to digital culture, for example the tiktok guy riding his skateboard is selling that meme as an nft. So if collectors are good (and lucky), they are basically able to buy their way into a niche of history by being associated with works that represent periods of cultural significance.
Sure that may seem stupid to most people, but most people don't even get why regular art is significant or can be very expensive. Personally I would attribute it to my lack of understanding rather than dismiss it outright.
The problem with art is good provenance. NFTs specifically solves this issue. Provenance was a common word used by art collectors describing the issues with Art auctions during NFT.NYC. Noah Davis really opened my eyes to this topic, here's his speech at NFT.NYC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeVZeXsRKhs
It would take a while to explain provenance in crypto space. It's largely based on credibility and ownership of addresses. Once credibility and address is established, it is a simple operation to prove the Bridge picture came from a specific artist. Things like ENS (Ethereum Name Service) are examples of deep support for provenance in Crypto.
The basic concept of an NFT seems like it's the same as a signed print of a physical piece of art. It's a limited edition, identifiable unique object, and conveys little to no 'ownership' rights of the underlying art (in terms of copyright).
Often those same pieces of art are available as cheap mass produced posters or similar.
That's been a thing for quite a while, sometimes they end up worth a bunch of money. (I just recently went to a museum with a bunch of Warhol prints)
On-face, NFTs are ... whatever ... boring to me. The underlying Eth blockchain is super problematic, as the environmental cost of creating and trading NFTs is so incredibly stupid. Other blockchains seem better, but have less traction generally.
Considering the #1 use case widely discussed for NFT's is establishing authenticity+ownership of art both digital and physical, I'd say you seem to have missed the point.
You clearly seem to have a strong opinion about it, but your opinion seems to be entirely against the mainstream NFT conversation.
And please don't insult people by claiming their ignorance is "understandable" because their brains aren't "flexible" enough.
Sticking specifically to art, NFTs solve a problem with digital art (non fungiblility) and some platforms provide artists with new benifits (tracking ownership, price and commission on sales, etc).
I think it's an especially crypto centric mindset to not see their value but if we take crypto aside do you appreciate works of art, collectable cards or limited edition runs as having value above their fungible copies (copy of art, copy of card, same product but regular edition)?
Art has a couple of sticky points that allows it to be used as storage of value:
* It is impossible to copy and produce second original
* It is recognizable by trained and common people alike, it is useful a symbol of status
* New art inherits some of artist's prestige; say a newly discovered Picasso painting will be recognized as valuable just because it's a Picasso
* It is very difficult to produce enmasse - a computer-generated drawing in the style of Picasso will not be valued as an original Picasso
* Wealthy people agree it's a storage of value - when somebody needs liquidity they can be assured that somebody will buy their unique piece.
Do NFTs touch all of these points? 1, yes. 2. they're trying to build the fame of NFTs now. 3. they're trying to build it now, very unlikely it will succeed. 4. Are some NFTs esthetically pleasing ? I would guess this is why it's needed to be tied to an artwork. 5. Unlikely.
Basically, you are saying NFT creators can create any type of digital artwork in any type of media that they want, and NFT collectors can collect them for any number of reasons. Maybe some of that is stored on chain, maybe some is not.
So then, what is a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) actually good for? The answer seems to be proofs of provenance, ownership, and authenticity.
Provenance is defined as the place where something originally came or began, or a record tracing the ownership history of certain items that helps to confirm their authenticity and value. How many things in the world need a proof of provenance? Paper towels? No. Corn? No. Cars? Yes, maybe. Art? Yes, as established, but not everyone likes art like they do their cars, at least in the West. So, market sizes matter. A good idea is only as good as the market, and NFTs aren't an idea that is actually sold, it's an idea on an idea of selling something. Like marketing, NFTs are more like a meme than a product or service. (I realize some people consider marketing to include market analysis, which is something else entirely.)
But, who runs the car provenance proofs? Do we put all the data about the car on the chain? That would be too much data for current chains. I suspect, like the speed of computers, an increase in throughput will just result in more junk on the chain. How much junk can a chain take? Not much, I'd hazard. How do you sell your car NFT to grandpa when the car chain is full of junk? You probably don't.
But, there isn't really much in which I need to prove ownership. My house and my truck have titles. It's pointless to make NFTs for them, given the state runs the database and the state is pretty good at this by now, especially given they take money from me for property tax and plates. I don't care to prove ownership of anything else. What I have in my possession is enough proof. The police would take a photo of my 3d printer as proof of ownership if it were stolen and then located in my neighbor's house.
The whole idea about using NFTs to share(holder) out my house or truck is also pointless. To make me pay someone that held an NFT on a share of my house is going to be a challenge. There's probably a contract somewhere that would do more good in forcing my hand to pay up, like the mortgage company would do if I had a mortgage and defaulted. But, is it useful? I guarantee attorneys will get involved if that happens.
Authenticity? Who cares? In this age of mass consumption, the focus of NFTs on art defines a very small market. In fact, I'd say the desire by some to "collect", of a certain generation maybe, is pretty pointless. It reminds me of my friend buying a bunch of Hot Wheels in his 20s because he thought not opening them and playing with them would make them worth more in the future. He had a huge collection in his attic. I don't trade things like this, but many do, and I appreciate that they may think NFTs help with their "hobby".
At the end of the day NFTs are made for the imagination - which is why the conversation always turns to gaming. They cater to it like nothing else. They make people think that "value" is a real thing and that it can somehow be "preserved" by using a series of calculations. I get that some people love the idea of NFTs so much, they can't help but spread that love to others. The only problem I see with that is that there really is no killer use case here. Instead, we get things like NFTs of blocks of tungsten that can only be touched once a year or saving that "special moment" in game that will be forgotten by the mind in a year.
Why do you need an expert to vet something when you buy it from the artist that made it? And in turn, when the artist put a piece on a blockchain you can trace it back to the artist. That's the point of NFTs kind of. But if you mean you'd rather have a physical original of an artwork than a digital representation of the thing, I see what you mean I guess.
This is a fantastic, illustrative example of why NFTs as they are currently implemented are bullshit.
I'm not sure I'd go so far to call them an outright scam, but they're highly fragile assets that likely won't stand the test of time.
I would be interested to see if someone is working on implementing NFTs in a way that we can feel confident that the digital art will remain provably attached to the NFT for decades and centuries in future.
NFTs act as unique instances of objects that can be “digital shadows” of real physical objects, or their own thing, wrt the blockchain they exist on.
For the art world, they are a new medium and can be used to secure provenance. In the rest of the world they are being looked at as mediums for selling tickets or keys to access unique experiences (an art piece/door/puzzle that activates or lights up if presented with a valid NFT as a simple example) among many theoretical use cases.
A lot of crypto stuff doesn’t make sense unless we get Decentralized Identities (DIDs) right, so things like NFTs can be associated with with a user.
I think art is different in some ways though. Far be it from me to tell others how to spend their money, but at least with physical art it is preserved. The art may mostly be traded by the ultra-wealthy, but at least it still exists for the good of society.
An NFT is really just a digital autograph. Not even really an autograph, isn't it a cryptographic signature? Which would surely need to be random by nature, so the artist can't even do something unique with that. It's external to the work itself.
I work in the industry dealing with art/design, and the only thing I really see NFT being useful for is a chain of custody to prove authenticity - but that only applies to newly created works, as with historic pieces you're already at a crapshoot on specialists validating stuff correctly.
edit: i use the term 'historic' loosely, i just mean stuff that has been circulating for a while.
I am not an art collector, but as I understand it, the most important thing that they care about, even before aesthetics of an art piece, is *provenance*. That is, who created it, and who has owned it since it was created. NFTs provide a nearly unforgeable cryptographic record of both of those things, and are therefore a perfect fit for this market.
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