The thing I don’t get about NFTs in general is that they don’t actually seem trustless to me. You need some sort of trusted source that says “this NFT is genuine and not just a bootleg”… and at that point you might as well just have that trusted source track ownership.
NFTs are trusting a single authority, which is the consensus of all of the nodes/miners of the blockchain. Sure, if you go to opensea and try to find the owner of a NFT, they could lie and become an accomplice in a double-spend scheme; but in general you could also download and watch the entire transaction chain and search through it locally (with trusted and auditable OSS) to verify ownership and transfers.
> NFTs are trusting a single authority, which is the consensus of all of the nodes/miners of the blockchain.
That's only for the in-chain history. To actually be able to trust that the NFT is what it's represented as, you also need outside third-parties. For example, many artists are having to deal with NFTs fraudulently claiming to represent their work or benefit the artist, which is not something you can validate using only information on the blockchain.
Once you have a way to confirm the authenticity of the NFT, you also don't need the blockchain because the actual trust is coming from the artist's own statement.
Well yes, but the technology behind NFTs is explicitly just for solving the problem of double-spend/duplication. The authenticity is always provided off-chain since identity and reputation is still managed off-chain, so while "is this NFT real or impersonating an existing contract" is off-chain, the "who is currently owner" question is answered on-chain and requires no further trust or approval of the original artist.
Assuming the artist only makes one copy, then it does constitute ownership of the work of art. You might not have copyright over it - an artists selling a painting today doesn't give up copyright (unless they sign it away at sale) - but you effectively own the work of art as if it were a painting. In either situation, you're hoping the original artist doesn't go and recreate it to sell it again.
Not without a legal contract. If you don’t have an explicit assignment of ownership, an NFT won’t give it to you. If you do, the NFT isn’t adding anything.
You don't need an explicit contract, you can purchase something from someone locally with cash and own the item you purchased - it's a legal assignment of ownership in that there was a verbal agreement to purchase something at a specified price.
With NFTs, the purchase is even stronger than a verbal agreement since the 'legal contract' is the agreement to sell the NFT as a specified price in digital currency. Once again, ownership doesn't have to mean owning the intellectual property, with an NFT you 'own' the combination of bytes that you purchased, even if you don't have exclusive rights to those bytes and even if the original seller can keep making more of the exact same thing you purchased. It's like how you might 'own' a pair of sneakers - chances are those sneakers weren't produced for your exclusive use and tens of thousands of people also own a pair that looks just like yours, but you have every right to sell your pair and transfer ownership to someone else.
Again, the NFT itself is not adding anything. If you have possession of a physical object or an agreement from someone else transferring rights to you, you don't need an NFT. If you have an NFT, you still need the documentation showing that the person who sold you the NFT had the legal rights to transfer the referenced object as well as the NFT — otherwise you've paid for a receipt for “Bridge, Brooklyn x1”.
That seems like a totally different sense of “trust” though, and not one that you could reasonably expect any blockchain or traditional market to solve. Like, yes, you do need to make some small effort to make sure that you’re buying what you are intending to buy, but I can’t imagine that being difficult to do, especially if you’re buying a piece of art from an artist you follow closely.
They’re collectibles, so…you would pay a ton of money for them if you really like collecting those things, or if you want to speculate that the value will increase.
They're only collectibles when they convey legal rights — otherwise you're bidding up a receipt, possibly one of many. Speculation has generated some activity but it's not enough to sustain the market without some kind of value.
But you can determine NFT authenticity by only examining onchain data. You can for instance check the program ID that executed the mint and that it is verified (in the case of Solana, at least), it's a pretty simple verification system that is using entirely onchain data for validation.
It’s a problem, I agree, but because the “authenticity information” can be expressed somewhat succinctly (it’s just a smart contract address), the trust element can be decentralized. Artist might post it on their Twitter, Instagram and website — if they all agree, and you as a buyer trust that the author is actually managing their Instagram, Twitter and website — then there might be enough to create real world - digital world trust bridge. This is particularly easy if an artist is working primarily online and their digital identity already is the main contributor to their fame.
The kicker that amazes me is that when artists register their incredulity and their offense about this (and OpenSea seems to tacitly be A-OK with the whole practice), the randos pile into their mentions asking why they won't work with the people misappropriating their work in this way.
Ah yes, they're not scammers masquerading as the artist, they're authors of genuine artisanal hyperlinks, flawlessly typed with the same hands they lovingly Ctrl/C Ctrl/Vd the image to the handcrafted hyperlink endpoint.
The point of the NFT technology is to keep record of who a notary was. "So and so said this link is authentic, per their own definition of authentic." Whether that notary is important is for humans to decide. A counterfeiter can be the notary, and if people believe in them, then they create some value. Just as some art counterfeits have their own intrinsic value for whatever reason.
e.g. that's why famous nft artists either have their ENS name in their Twitter bio or as their name. With that, you know that e.g. if shaq.eth minted an NFT, it's indeed the real shaq o'neal as otherwise the imposter shaq.eth registrar would have had to have the access to the real shaq o'neal's Twitter account.
no because similar to PGP keys it really doesn't matter where you publish your fingerprint or how you connect your identities. If shaq had a popular website, he could do it there too. E.g. I have my PGP fingerprint on my website: https://timdaub.github.io
In other words, your trust is anchored by Twitter or GitHub. I have to gauge that the key I got was uploaded by you rather than someone else and the thing building that trust is by linking it to an identity established on those services.
PGP had the same problem: the web of trust didn’t scale well outside of existing communities – and where people signed keys for strangers, they also relied on trusted third parties (driver’s license, student ID, etc.) to establish that.
