ShivaX
1567
Pretty much. I can download art from someone on Deviant Art or Twitter right now and slap an NFT on it.
That doesn’t prove I made anything.
Right, so that’s basically like a self-signed certificate. If you want other people to care, you probably need a cert that’s signed by like, a “root NFT authority”, whatever people decide that is. And the root authority will probably require some sort of proof of authorship before issuing it to you, so that’s up to them, I guess. Like, I think the NBA issued a bunch of NFTs for video of famous plays or something, and those are presumably “signed” by the NBA somehow.
As for what it worth, I guess either suing somebody for infringement (in which case the courts get to decide if the assets they’re using is infringing on your IP, which good luck there), or just finding another sucker willing to pay you for it.
I’m not very familiar with NFT myself (actually, I’m pretty confused by them). Proof of authorship was a use case that a friend who is very involved with various blockchain tech told me. I trust he knows what he’s talking about, but again it’s all over my head.
So, I’m actually not entirely sure how NFT uses the blockchain, but my guess is that he was talking about the blockchain itself. When you mine bitcoin, or any other crypto, you do the work to mine it, and then attach that proof of work (a block) to the chain. Everybody else confirms that your work is correct, and then it’s added to the consensus chain, sort of the permanent record. So once it’s in the chain, there’s a historical record that you mined it, and every time it changes hands, the transaction is recorded in the chain. So for the cryptocurrency itself, you can trace back a particular “coin” back to the original proof of work.
AIUI, the NFT isn’t a “coin” itself, it just uses a blockchain to trace the transaction history. But it has to be introduced into the chain somewhere because the actual creation of a piece of art isn’t part of the cryptocurrency generation algorithm. And there’s no particular way of matching the user that added it to the chain to the person that, like did the actual work in photoshop. So you can prove who initially added something to the chain, but you need to do some extra work to validate that that user is the original creator/rights holder.
Since there’s no inherent value or utility to an NFT, it basically boils down to whether the person who’s buying it from you believes that the person who added it to the chain originally was valid or not. They need to turn to a trusted verifier or court or whatever to convince themselves that it’s truly valid.
My weak understanding is that if you create something and then generate the NFT from it, that could be used to verify you were the first to do so. Again, my weak understanding.
It verifies that you were the one who added it to the chain, because the first transaction can be traced to you. But it doesn’t do anything to say that you “owned” it before you added it.
Part of the discussion upthread about hashes is that a hash of the image that you’re adding is probably used as the proof of work when adding it to the chain. So for an image, all you need for the initial proof of work is a copy of the image. You can guarantee that there’s only one copy of something on the chain at a time (you can’t mine the same block twice, similarly you can’t add the same exact hash twice), so you probably can’t add something that already exists.
If you can create hash collisions (two files that generate the same hash), you can “prove” that you own both files, because the blockchain contains that hash. So, of you break the hashes you can “prove” that you own any file at all.
Edit: again, this is based mostly on a layman programmer’s understanding of blockchain in general, I haven’t done extensive reading on NFTs specifically.
I thought that NFTs had addressed this problem by putting a hash of the digital asset on the blockchain. But they didn’t at all; the only thing on the blockchain is a url that may or may not point to the original asset or to anything at all. It’s half-assed by design.
Haha, well…that’s even stupider then. I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you indeed.
Seems like we’re at the stage where everyone is running around in the Louvre with a Sharpie, first one who signs something owns it. I could see going forward that if you created something and wanted to maintain ownership of it while still distributing it digitally then you would generate an NFT for it. That still doesn’t address me taking your NFT image, changing a single pixel, generating a new NFT, and beating you at the distribution/meme game though.
Timex
1577
Again, all it proves is that you generated the NFT. It has nothing that proves you made the art. There’s no functional way for it to prove such a thing.
Generating an NFT only proves that you generated an NFT.
And when you say it like that, you might then ask, “well, that seems like it’s all up it’s own ass and not doing anything…”
Yeah.
Aceris
1578
Yep, you need a digitally signed document from the artist
They don’t even do that, and never can until the dystopian future where the only legal contracts are smart contracts. All they do is show that you have access to the wallet of the owner of the NFT. To be fair, this isn’t a problem unique to NFTs, but it’s the Blockchain propagandists who are making the extravagant claims about infallible chain of custody.
Maybe we should have a law that says if you’re going to do mass bitmining you have to use off the grid fully renewable energy to power it.
Maybe we shouldn’t reward wasteful, unproductive draining of our natural resources and destruction of our world by gambling on the outcome?
I think we need to get rid of bitcoin. It’s probably the prime vehicle for human trafficking and it will make cases far harder to prosecute.
Is there any reason why someone would want that tweet?
People collect all sorts of irrational things. From baseball cards to bitcoins, it’s always mystified me. But as long as enough people agree there’s value for there to be a market, then there’s value.
Man, our cyberpunk dystopia is waaaaay less cool than the ones I read about as a kid.
