It seems that you may have missed a few of my prior posts on this thread,
q.v.:Note: I am not an NFT expert, and do not claim to be; here, I seem to have fallen into that rôle by default. I neither know nor care about most of what is going on in the NFT markets now; my interest is in the future, and in the use cases that make sense. Most of the following is simply my own musings, although I vaguely recall having seen the art provenance use case discussed somewhere.If someone sells a "NFT" of say, the Monalisa, under what authority is the painting sold digitally? What would stop a random person, who has no connection to ownership of the actual Monalisa from selling this NFT?
What stops a random person from selling a deed to the Brooklyn Bridge? That was
such a famous scam that it inspired an American idiom, “I have a bridge to sell you.”
I should make an NFT of this image, and sell it for $100 million.Yes, there are fraudulent NFTs now being sold. They are no different than the fraudulent deeds that George Parker sold for the Brooklyn Bridge and various other landmarks. A fool and his money are soon parted.
Now, let us flip the scenario around:
Suppose that you do own the Mona Lisa. You hit hereby on an issue that I have specifically spent time thinking about—
specifically in the context of NFTs:
Art provenance, and the certification thereof.You invest considerable money and effort in having art provenance experts certify that you own the actual Mona Lisa. They give you a certificate which states, “We, the undersigned, hereby certify that the painting in PrimeNumber7’s possession is the genuine Mona Lisa,” with some attached documentation. You want for that certificate to be infeasible to counterfeit; you want a means to back it up; and you want a secure means to convey it to buyers—a means that provides a timestamped and authenticated chain of transfer, which helps to keep provenance established as the asset and its attached certificate are subsequently resold.
An NFT, with ownership controlled by a private key backed up with whatever means you use to back up your cryptographic seeds, meets all of these criteria; and an NFT far exceeds any physical medium per these criteria, just as Bitcoin has many practical properties superior to paper cash notes. (Of course, the analogy is imperfect insofar as a non-fungible asset cannot be combined or subdivided.)
N.b. that I am
not talking about some arrangement of pixels that appear to be the Mona Lisa. I refer instead to cryptographically secured, strongly authenticated provenance paperwork.
I think that in the future, the sale of physical artworks may practically
require provenance to be certified and conveyed via NFTs, insofar as buyers may start to demand it. That could take a bite out of art forgery and other frauds!
(Of course, there is no way to cryptographically guarantee that a physical artwork is transferred together with the NFT. But that is no different than the situation with paper documentation of provenance; the security of an NFT is still strictly superior.)
Compare and contrast what I just said about art provenance with what I previously said about a much more common use case:
Real estate title. Just be sure to avoid the scams with people selling NFTs of title to the Brooklyn Bridge. Yes, it is trivial to make a token contract that sells as many instances of the Brooklyn Bridge as you want—just as trivial as making a bunch of plausible-looking paper deeds for the same purpose.
Myself, I look forward to the day when I will send you a bitcoin in exchange for an NFT of a house. I don’t mean a “virtual world” house. I mean a real house, the legal title to a house: An NFT minted by your local government to represent title to a certain parcel of land with all improvements thereupon.
The swap will be done atomically—either on Bitcoin with RGB/Spectrum, or with cross-chain atomic swaps. If implemented properly, it will be incomparably more secure than a system of notaries public, lawyers, recording clerks, and title agencies; and it will replace all of these functions with something better. “Closing of title” will consist of your cryptographic digital signature (“Not your keys, not your house!”), a tx broadcast, and some blockchain confirmations.
If there is already a NFT of an image in existence, what would stop someone from changing a small number of pixels of said image, and selling a NFT of said image?
Nothing. Depending on how the contract is written, they may not even need to change any pixels. It is just another dumb fraud. The systems for creating an NFT (such as the
ERC-1155 standard) typically just specify a set of interfaces; in the application thereof, you have great flexibility in defining the semantics.
The world is chock full of ways to scam people. That is not a problem specific to NFTs, although the problem with scams is always bigger with new technologies and new markets. As people learn, they wise up until the scams can only fool some real suckers. This has happened in various forms many times.
There is also the issue of GANs. Someone could potentially create a GAN whose generator network creates images of art. Once the GAN is created, it would be trivial to create a near unlimited supply of NFTs.
As you probably know if you saw my posts in Lauda’s goodbye thread, I love GANs! Especially GANS that create
nonexistent cats. 😼
What you ask is really just a question of valuation. People’s ability to value such things may currently be impaired, because both GANs and NFTs are unfamiliar new technologies. If anyone is spending huge sums of money buying an artwork NFT generated by an adversarial network, well—a fool and his money...
That being said, GANs do take some skill plus compute resources for generating the model. Arguably, they also require at least a modicum of artistry to obtain a quality model.
I might consider paying a moderate amount for GAN imagery that I found especially pleasing—especially for high-resolution imagery, which would require terrific GPU resources to get the model. (For hobby-level computing costs, you probably will not go above 512x512 pixels—if that!) And why should I not pay? I
have considered asking around to see if I can find someone who will make me GAN images of X, Y, and Z; for you see, I want
high-definition nonexistent cats. NFTs could simply be a convenient way for me to pay for that type of thing.
Last summer, millions of Americans were receiving more in unemployment than they were receiving while working and didn't have to pay for expenses related to work such as gas for commuting, dry cleaning, or eating out to lunch. Americans have also received thousands of "stimulus" dollars, while many traditional forms of entertainment are closed. I think the crazy prices of NFTs are largely a result of this excess money given to Americans.
How much of this supposed excess money has gone into Bitcoin? Hmmm. (To be clear, I think
that would be a good thing insofar as it may lead to bitcoinization.)
I think that the current crazy prices for
some NFTs are the result of media hype. Remember that Pets.com collapsed, but Amazon.com is
(unfortunately) still here—and more apropos, the Internet is still here. These things happen with hot new technologies—when every fool wants a piece, and the scent of “get rich quick!” hangs heavy in the air. After fools get shaken out, then adoption stabilizes, and the technology becomes ubiquitous. And yes,
a few people will get fantastically rich off of it. A few.
