poprock wrote:

Shady people will always find ways to launder money in plain sight.

I mean this is exactly the real art world all over innit.

Okay, we can get into the bigger picture too.

In the art world (as in fine art, the gallery and auction system, etc) digital art has one advantage. Just one. It’s reproducible in a way that no other art is. Digital art collapses the very concept of originality. There’s no distinction between the original and a copy. They’re not just functionally identical, they’re actually identical.

Sellotaping a method of assigning authenticity to digital art is a fucking hiding to nothing because it removes the one and only advantage digital art has.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk, etc etc.

Couldn’t afford the rights clearance.

I mean, artificial digital scarcity is about as good as you can do with blockchain I guess.
Fun for the crypto speculators to be able to use their digital speculation tokens to speculate on other digital speculation tokens and over-leverage that bubble. Social media-active artists need to make hay while the sun shines, but it’s quite soured a lot of digital art Twitter. Money changes things, same as it ever was.

I’m not so sure about that - the token is still the unique token, and given it’s all about using social following to hype the “drop”/auction the artists so far have been showing as much as they can.
Some of the interactive pieces are hyped as “only the buyer gets this feature” I guess, so some of the node.js or p5.js creative coders/procedural artists might become more private? but the more interesting generative galleries/auction sites use the generative aspect to seed “unique” prints of the piece that people can buy.

Given that the collectibility/worth is almost entirely derived from social media presence/reputation, hiding their light under a bushel isn’t going to help crypto artists imho.

NFTs are a complete mess.

"...NFTs are designed to give you something that can’t be copied: ownership of the work (though the artist can still retain the copyright and reproduction rights, just like with physical artwork). To put it in terms of physical art collecting: anyone can buy a Monet print. But only one person can own the original...."

Theres a video by someone called beeple that someone paid $6.6mil for. Any of us can still go download the video for free and keep a copy. Beeple still owns the copyright and reproduction rights but the person who paid $6.6mil "owns" the original (apparently) as they have the NFT.

However what blockchain was that NFT created on? Is it recognized by any governing body in the USA or any other country when it comes to digital art rights? No. As far as i understand it there are no globally agreed definitions, laws etc on digital art rights especially when backed by a NFT. So its the wild west, lawless and speculation run amok. Anyone who pays any money for any digital arr backed by a NFT at present is a fool.

On a side note Blockchain (cryptocurrency) aside has a massive future and can do alot of good in the world (electricity demands aside, but then electric cars are a false economy anyway). A year or two i did a presentation on the future and uses of blockchain to a packed auditorium (which surprised me) for work. Unfortunately in the Q&A part it was apparently from the questions asked that so many people just assoicate blockchain technology with cryptocurrencies and thats all. Theres alot of good uses for blockchain tech, digital art and NFTs isnt one of them in my humble opinion.

Well, I dont agree it has value. That should put an end to the mattee.

Diluted Dante wrote:

Well, I dont agree it has value. That should put an end to the mattee.

Unfortunately for you, not everyone has to agree that something has value for it to have value. If they did, the entire pro wrestling industry would be worthless.

The pound, dollar and yen have value because people say they have value. I doubt this is the place for a wider discussion about whether money was ever a good idea.

NFTs are not intended as currency. They’re intended as a ‘thing’, which you can buy, own or trade.

Or rather, as a certificate that proves you have a thing. Which I suppose does make them a little bit more like currency. Hmmm. Still not quite as abstract though. Money is a promise that you own a thing that doesn’t actually exist. An NFT is intended as proof that you own a thing that does exist. Except most of them only exist digitally. Hmmm. This argument gets tricksy quite quickly.

poprock wrote:

Wait until the digital archivists weigh in on the conversation. (It might take a few years, they’re a careful, slow to act, bunch.) When that token of authenticity is all that’s left, because your animated digital Pepe meme can’t be viewed on anything but ancient 2021-era computing tech, and your million-dollar investment is suddenly not worth the inheritance tax your kids have to pay to own it, what happens then? Who can they complain to? The court case is gonna be a cracker.

I think the whole Pepe Meme thing is quite reductive.
Every art movement has had its angry man shouting at cloud and you are in danger of being said angry man this time round.

Archiving and safe keeping. Well things worth millions of dollars dont tend to get forgotten about. How much time, money, energy goes into maintaining and restoring physical art? If we can store paintings in warehouses with humidity and temperature regulators, take them out once a decade to touch up the paint work after a fortnight of cleaning to put them back again I think we can keep jpgs going.

Dinostar77 wrote:

... . Theres alot of good uses for blockchain tech, digital art and NFTs isnt one of them in my humble opinion.

Really? what kinds of uses? 
Blockchain/distributed consensus ledgers seem rather boring to me, maybe I'm missing something.

Tbf he never said they were exciting uses.

poprock wrote:

I know a lot of tech bros in the law world are very excited about what they can use the blockchain for. Consensus is the basis of law, after all.

Is it really that much more transformative than just using a database?
Git being decentralised source control is pretty useful, but more often than not there's a central repo anyway, so a lot of the time the decentralised aspect of it is almost redundant.

It's just that over the years I've heard how a lot of people are "very excited about blockchain" but so far it's been entirely a solution looking for a problem. And I've yet to see an interesting problem that it's a useful/successful solution for.
Again, maybe I'm missing something (or even a lot! I've not been doing deep-reading on this), but financial speculation tokens and this artificial digital scarcity seems about the most "useful"/popular use-cases so far?