Rachel O' Dwyer on Thu, 18 Mar 2021 11:19:47 +0100 (CET)


[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: <nettime> what does monetary value indicate?

The best smart contract code is the cryptokitty code! Information on cattributes and cloning etc.
But yes. With a few exceptions where people actually encode images into the hash (see https://cryptograffiti.info) the only thing you own with cryptoart is the act of ownership itself. People sometimes draw comparisons between owning cryptoart and owning a collectible like a baseball card (you own 'this' card but you don't have any rights to the image etc) but in this case, you don't even own the card. To me this is emblematic of a shift from the artwork as commodity to the artwork as a financial asset or increasingly as a financial derivative. 

On Thu, Mar 18, 2021 at 10:10 AM Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com> wrote:
Last post in this subject, I promise.

The NFT in the blockchain, recorded for eternity, does not contain
artwork itself, but metadata pointing to the art work. It basically
says, the file over there is the 'originalcopy' and I own it. Of course,
everyone can still copy the art work over there (assuming it's a public
location), but only that file on that location is the "original" one. Of
course, if that server disappears, then the meta data point to nowhere,
and becomes impossible to distinguish between the copies that might
float around somewhere.

One way to sidestep this is not to point to a location, but to a hash,
which can stored anywhere in a decentralized file system.

In Beeble's case, the token contains metadata that points to such a hash
(a IPFS file). This has the advantage that it's not depended on a server
which may or may not be around for very long, so it removes the
dependency of the particular entity which host the server mentioned in
the token.

So, so this is the file that the token points to:

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmPAg1mjxcEQPPtqsLoEcauVedaeMH81WXDPvPx3VC5zUz

{"title": "EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS", "name": "EVERYDAYS: THE
FIRST 5000 DAYS", "type": "object", "imageUrl":
"https://ipfsgateway.makersplace.com/ipfs/QmZ15eQX8FPjfrtdX3QYbrhZxJpbLpvDpsgb2p3VEH8Bqq",
"description": "I made a picture from start to finish every single day
from May 1st, 2007 - January 7th, 2021.  This is every motherfucking one
of those pictures.", "attributes": [{"trait_type": "Creator", "value":
"beeple"}], "properties": {"name": {"type": "string", "description":
"EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS"}, "description": {"type": "string",
"description": "I made a picture from start to finish every single day
from May 1st, 2007 - January 7th, 2021.  This is every motherfucking one
of those pictures."}, "preview_media_file": {"type": "string",
"description":
"https://ipfsgateway.makersplace.com/ipfs/QmZ15eQX8FPjfrtdX3QYbrhZxJpbLpvDpsgb2p3VEH8Bqq"},
"preview_media_file_type": {"type": "string", "description": "jpg"},
"created_at": {"type": "datetime", "description":
"2021-02-16T00:07:31.674688+00:00"}, "total_supply": {"type": "int",
"description": 1}, "digital_media_signature_type": {"type": "string",
"description": "SHA-256"}, "digital_media_signature": {"type": "string",
"description":
"6314b55cc6ff34f67a18e1ccc977234b803f7a5497b94f1f994ac9d1b896a017"},
"raw_media_file": {"type": "string", "description":
"https://ipfsgateway.makersplace.com/ipfs/QmXkxpwAHCtDXbbZHUwqtFucG1RMS6T87vi1CdvadfL7qA"}}}


Which, again, is just metadata pointing to, well, a webserver
(makersplace.com). In other words, the seller, in order to have any
object at all, is dependent on makersplace.com to remain online. In this
case, it doesn't really matter, because buyer and seller is, in effect,
the same person. But in other cases, the buyer becomes dependent on the
seller for as long as s/he hold be token. Of course, the "originalcopy"
could also be stored in decentralized file system, but apparently, this
is not done very often. Some people have called this structure
"long-game extortion."

See, https://twitter.com/jonty/status/1372163423446917122

On 16.03.21 10:41, Florian Cramer wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 5:49 PM Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com> wrote:
>
>> I'm sure many have followed the NFT art saga over the last couple of
>> months and seen today's headline that somebody just paid $ 69,346,250
>> for a NFT on a blockchain, meta-data to claim ownership of the
>> "originalcopy" of a digital art work.
>
> Thanks to Amy Castor's article (which you also mentioned/linked to,
> https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beeple-art-buyer-and-his-nft-defi-scheme/),
> we now know that the buyer didn't actually pay $69,346,250, but "$60
> million in ETH and $9 million in fees, also in ETH" - a significant
> difference IMHO. The whole Christie's sale thus boils down to a conversion
> of one type of ETH token into another type of ETH token within the
> portfolio of a crypto currency investment firm, and using the art market
> transaction as means of pumping the value of the latter.


--
| |||||||||||||||||| http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:


--
http://www.rachelodwyer.com/

+353 (85) 7023779
#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: