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NFTs again (Non Fungible Tokens)


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On 22/12/2021 at 03:44, Lynchpics said:

The environmental cost of doing and making many things is costly, as i said earlier NFT's do have issues but those issues can hopefully be reduced, its a new, very new scene so lets see what develops. You clearly do not like it, that's fine but i feel it can be a positive space for creators and artists. No one is forcing anyone to 'get into' NFTs. https://time.com/6120237/nfts-environmental-impact/

 

Most people don't know what they're buying with a Non Fungible Token.  Goods that are fungible are generally bulk items like oil.  One barrel of oil is like another.  With Non Fungible goods, one is not like another.  If what you're buying is a genuinely unique copy, like a physical painting, you're buying the only version of that painting.  Once you get into prints, the prices drop, even for artist-made or supervised prints.  Price a Jasper Johns print and a Jasper Johns painting.   If what you buy is a link to a web-hosted jpeg, then you don't really own anything.  If I have the jpeg file, I can make several million copies of it unless the jpeg encrypts a unique code every time it's copied.  And I'm sure someone out there could edit the jpeg's code and remove any such tricks.  A jpeg is a text file with instructions to graphics programs on what to do with it.

 

I paid $20 for an original painting here.  That's a non-fungible item.   I have prints of some of my photos on my wall that cost me more to reproduce, but they're infinitely reproduce-able. 

 

 

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As i said in December some people do not like NFT's etc, that's fine. We are living more and more in a digital world, crypto, NFT's and the Metaverse are not going to disappear. I find NFT's interesting because you can see how in the future the blockchain could be used as a way for artists/photographers to sell digital art and goods, its a very very new 'scene' so it's worth watching closely. I am now seeing higher profile photographers starting to dip their toes into the NFT scene, i think back to the start of the internet and how that was perceived, i remember an article in one of the uk newspapers at that time telling people that it was just a passing fad. I will look at NFT's and how the scene develops and see if it can be a outlet for my work, to be honest does selling images from an agency have a future if contributors fees go lower and lower. 

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On 21/01/2022 at 09:43, Lynchpics said:

As i said in December some people do not like NFT's etc, that's fine. We are living more and more in a digital world, crypto, NFT's and the Metaverse are not going to disappear. I find NFT's interesting because you can see how in the future the blockchain could be used as a way for artists/photographers to sell digital art and goods, its a very very new 'scene' so it's worth watching closely. I am now seeing higher profile photographers starting to dip their toes into the NFT scene, i think back to the start of the internet and how that was perceived, i remember an article in one of the uk newspapers at that time telling people that it was just a passing fad. I will look at NFT's and how the scene develops and see if it can be a outlet for my work, to be honest does selling images from an agency have a future if contributors fees go lower and lower. 

 

I looked at one of my JPeg files with a text reader.  I'm temped to see what happens if I cut and paste chunks of of two different files together.  My impression is that most of the enthusiasts are not particularly knowledgeable about either programming or economics.  People who claim this is like the start of the internet are lying.  Telegraph, very 19th Century, was the beginning of the internet, everything else has been refinement of the interface.  First photos transmitted by wire were before my birth. in 1935.   Telegraph was the first near lightspeed network, just that the code was clunky. 

 

Recommended reading: Attack of the 50 foot Blockchain by David Gerrard.  Also, his blog entries on what been happening in El Salvador.  

 

I don't think anyone who used the early network protocols thought the internet was a passing fad, or that a writer who claimed that wasn't just trying to get a rise out of readers.

 

NFT -- looks like it's a named copy of a link to a web-hosted jpeg, only non-fungible because it's got a crytographic unique code attached to the link.    Encrypting a graphic so that only a person with the right key can see it seems do-able in various ways already, and has been for a while.  

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31 minutes ago, Rebecca Ore said:

I'm temped to see what happens if I cut and paste chunks of of two different files together. 

In Notepad cutting out even a single "character" gets you "invalid image". I think you'd have to know what the nonsense characters actually signified.

Edited by spacecadet
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5 hours ago, Lynchpics said:

An interesting article, especially the bit about licensing photos https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/why-the-future-of-nfts-goes-far-beyond-gaming-and-digital-art-work

 

I'll stick to talking to people who've been watching the El Salvadorean dumpster fire first hand, and people who are not propagandists for the BitCoin boys.   Also, people who know what precisely a cryptographic signature is and isn't.  Or how useless a deed is if the nation you're buying in doesn't allow foreigners to own beach front property or land within a certain distance of a international boundary.

 

Artists getting hustled is ancient.  People in Greece wrote plays for possible awards at once a year public festivals.  No royalties.  

 

One of the problems those of us who were technical had with those people who were melting down because they'd been pirated was explaining that if you could see something or hear something, you could copy it.  And that basically all that protects us is a sufficient number of people who pay a reasonable amount for a copy rather than download it for free.  The fantasy with NTFs is that everything will be more valuable because of a registered ownership.

 

I can find some of my books on Russian servers.  Chasing that infrignment would be more trouble that it's worth.

 

Copyright enforcement requires chasing an infringment.   Having signed anything is evidence in court, but not necessarily useful if the owners of the servers are behind their own cryptography and cut-outs.   Other people have made NFTs of work they don't own and put them for sale on NFT and crypto sites, which ends up forcing artists to pay more than trivial amounts of money to make their own NTFs first if they don't have block chain experience and a computer sufficient for running the cryptography.

 

My cost for a copy of one of my photos is trivial, sunk costs.  If I had to pay $10 US per photo to get a NFT for each photo, that would be more than I've made from three years of licenses with 1100 photos at my highest number.  But the prices I can find for this are between $70 and $100.  The folks who'll make out will be the people who create the NTFs. 

 

There are easier ways to prove copyright. 

 

The hustling of people who imagine that having an NTF will make their work valuable is also part of the game.  A lot of amateurs imagine that they're far better than they are, that what they need is promotion and contacts.  Some even don't send work out because they believe publishers will steal it (publishing costs are high enough that if anyone looks like they're producing commercially useful work, it's less of a hassle to buy the book and tie the writer's next book to that publisher).  

 

Any number of teachers of classes, agents who charge reading fees, contests that charge entry fees, and people who charge to ghostwrite using fool's ideas make more money than the people who imagine they are better than they are, or who have ideas that are really first rate.   People who'll make NFTs for $70 to $100 will be another set of people making more than most of their clients.

 

 

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6 hours ago, spacecadet said:

In Notepad cutting out even a single "character" gets you "invalid image". I think you'd have to know what the nonsense characters actually signified.

 

 I think I've played with some of these before, and yeah, you have to know what the code is to do anything useful.

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Following this thread, I've digged into the NFT matter a little bit, today. I grasped the basics, yet there is a point I really don't get.
If NFTs are (also) a way to prove the real authorship of a digital asset, say a digital photo; who guarantees that the first person who mint on Open Sea a NFT linked to that asset is the real artist and not someone who have just rightclicked it on FB or - even worse - legitimately downloaded it from Alamy? 

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48 minutes ago, riccarbi said:

who guarantees that the first person who mint on Open Sea a NFT linked to that asset is the real artist and not someone who have just rightclicked it on FB or - even worse - legitimately downloaded it from Alamy? 

Good question, some answers here perhaps:

 

https://news.trust.org/item/20220118122426-mv9tu/

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A few years ago i caught someone selling prints of one of my images on ebay claiming they had made the image, they had downloaded it from an agency. If you are buying artwork anywhere, you should do your due diligence and make sure you know what you are buying and who you are buying it from. There are scammers everywhere, before NFT's were around there were plenty of stories about photographers and artists getting ripped off too. 

Edited by Lynchpics
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33 minutes ago, Harry Harrison said:

Good question, some answers here perhaps:

 

https://news.trust.org/item/20220118122426-mv9tu/

 

From other things I've read, Deviant Art has been trying to ID the fakes, and OpenSeas has a bad reputation for not really blocking people who do this. 

 

I've blocked a number of BitCoin people on Twitter. One thing I've noticed is they often make outrageously wrong statements about Nicaragua and how it handled Covid by not mandating masking, vaccines, or quarantines.  Sigh.  The FSLN has some political reasons (see 2018) to not put the National Police in the position of enforcing masking and quarantines, some good reasons not to have lock-downs (people work day to day and many work outside), and mandatory vaccines (if you refuse them after medical teams call on your house twice, you are allowed).  The military has uniform masks, and private enterprise can require customers to wear masks (and have billy clubs or shotguns for anyone who wants to argue).  Dumb asses who want to say Nicaragua successfully got through Covid by ignoring it are called "gringos locos" by Nicaraguans.  Add BitCoin and crypto advocacy to that means instant block.   The promoters of this crap are evil or very foolish.  

 

NFTs adds another level of exploiting artists and wannabes.   And the whole mess in Honduras is proof that desperate people don't just turn to Herbal Life (which we have in Nicaragua).

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

A very interesting YouTube video on a potential route for stock on the block chain. I have not posted the video because in the end he is looking at a potential business opportunity and my intention is not to provide anyone with advertising BUT very interesting.

 

On YT search "Royalty Free Stock Licensing NFT Explained"

 

 

 

Edited by Panthera tigris
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  • 7 months later...

He was always going to have to do this in order to create 'value' in the NFTs and so he turns the actual burning of the artworks into a piece of performance art, of course he would. 10,000 paintings at $2000 each, all sold, and now the game is to see which hold their values. It's actually quite interesting to see that 5,149 buyers chose the artwork against 4,851 going for the NFT but that's when the interest fades for me, but then I'm certainly not the target market.

 

Thankfully I don't see very much about NFTs in my photography related Twitter feed any more, even the number of 'name' photographers that got involved seem to have shut about it now, as if it never happened, they've made their money I suppose. Quite where the buyers they were enticing to jump on board have ended up is another matter and I think that Damien Hirst's 'The Currency' was really turning that whole tension into a game that has still got some way to run.

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  • 2 months later...
33 minutes ago, Harry Harrison said:

"Investors convert ‘totally worthless’ NFTs into tax write-offs"

 

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/29/unsellable-worthless-nfts-tax-write-off

 

How it ended? I wonder.

 

 

Interesting to consider the possible potential relevance to stock images. 😜

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48 minutes ago, geogphotos said:

Interesting to consider the possible potential relevance to stock images. 😜

You're speaking in jest I know, but only a few weeks ago a major picture agency (not library) 'dropped' their new NFT collections and when he was chancellor our own PM instructed the Royal Mint to create their own, whatever happened to that I wonder.

 

It is actually a great selection of images, I think the Reserve was 1 'Eth' which currently is worth $1,196, many seem to be unsold and those that have been sold seem to be up for sale speculatively, sometimes at many multiples of the original reserve price.

Edited by Harry Harrison
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  • 2 weeks later...

Just like tangible uses of blockchain to create financial systems, the tangible and worthwhile uses of NFT blockchain tokens will become more apparent to us in the future. Right now it's just people trying to use the technology for a quick buck rather than a worthwhile use. 

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