You know what the crowning irony of the whole NFT fiasco is?
Okay, so: what an NFT purports to provide is a provenance for digital assets â a documented chain of curatorship or ownership, going all the way back to the pieceâs original author.
Like a provenance for physical art, an NFT isnât going to do anything to prevent anyone from duplicating the associated digital asset; all it does is provide a public, theoretically non-falsifiable documentation of who notionally âownedâ that digital asset at any given point in its history.
Leaving side the question of whether establishing provenance for digital assets is a sensible thing to want, thereâs also a more basic issue here.
Namely: how can you establish that the stack of documentation youâve got in your hands actually pertains to the piece of art you say it does, and not some other piece of art?
Well, ideally, youâd want that documentation to contain some uniquely identifying information about the piece itself, right?
And thereâs the problem; remember when I said that NFTs purport to provide a provenance for digital assets?
To be 100% clear, NFTs totally could provide such a provenance, if they were competently structured.
Most NFT exchanges are not, in fact, competently structured.
Rather than documenting any uniquely identifying information about its associated digital asset, your average NFT merely documents the public-facing URL at which that asset is located.
For example, suppose you purchase a piece of art thatâs been uploaded to the URL https://example.com/my-nifty-art.jpg, with an associated NFT.
If you examine the chain of ownership documented in the NFT, youâll find that the only fact it records about your digital art is that it resides at the URL https://example.com/my-nifty-art.jpg.
Basically, what youâve purchased is a provenance of the URL itself, not whatâs located at it.
Somebody could sell you an NFT, then overwrite the associated digital asset with a photo of their ass, and you could never prove that it wasnât always a photo of their ass, because all your shiny new blockchain-backed provenance documents is that you own whatever file happens currently to be located at the recorded URL.
And the hell of it is, the vast majority of artists who are selling NFTs probably donât even realise that theyâre ripping people off in this way, because itâs never occurred to them to check what their NFTs are actually documenting.
Itâs clowns all the way down.
pixelskylines
romaincrisis
germansingergirl
