Conversation

I once saw a print exhibition where one of the exhibits was a woodcut panel (the kind from from which limited edition prints are made), with a gash cut across it, to guarantee the limitedness of the edition. Is that a norm? If so, is the print or the panel more like an NFT?
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I guess the woodcut and the print are like a public/private key pair, except non-cryptographically secured, and limited use. In theory you could, at great cost, invert the print into a very precise new counterfeit block, to generate new prints.
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In this case I doubt you could fake it with machine learning. Not only is the training sample too small (say 100 prints in original run) but any production process short of a counterfeit wood block would be detectable as fake.
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That’s kinda what I’m trying to get at...like with woodcuts the tech stack to guarantee limitedness is just wood and chisels and a single person could run the guarantee infrastructure using commodity lumber.
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Replying to @vgr
if anything this sort of reveals how fungible NFTs actually are, because no one deletes the 3D file used to render the gif that becomes the token. or even: how many straight up copy-paste fakes end up uploaded. the paper (and plate) are inherently so much more genuinely unique
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But with NFTs there seems to be a deep, dispersed stack of players and technologies which even in the best case is very precarious. Even assuming best case technical execution of contracts, how/where digital assets are stored/referenced, etc.
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About half the stack seems solid, the other half, the part encoding how the contracts point to the artifacts and where they’re stored, not so much... see this thread.
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Out of curiosity I dug into how NFT's actually reference the media you're "buying" and my eyebrows are now orbiting the moon
Show this thread
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Several people have mentioned this — it’s unclear why url pointers are used at all? Why not just hash the artwork in question itself directly on the chain? Content-centric networking seems ideal here. Ditch the addressing problems altogether. Maybe I’m not getting something.
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Seems to be primarily a problem for obscure works that, in the stronger case, end up losing the only IPFS host hosting it. Popular works that many hosts have an incentive to keep a copy of seem to be an easier problem. No pointers needed. Just search via hash.
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Replying to
Yep, I have seen no good answers, even aspirational/conceptual to this so far. Weirdly, for once, techies seem more skeptical than the artist crowd which is usually at the forefront of the backlash.
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Replying to @vgr
i wrote about this a month or so ago, considered how the ipfs hash points to an ipfs data structure, not (directly) the actual content; posited that there is also the additional problem of multiple bitwise representations of the same content: doriantaylor.com/no-stuck-boat-
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I think there’s a there there with NFTs, but it’s technically only a 50% complete invention. And it’s hard to see this because the usual suspect backlashers who tend to spotlight such gaps are now eagerly on board because... for once they’re on the money side of a tech thing 🤔
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If the premise is similar to my original woodcut analogy, there’s a loooong way to go. Somebody has to invent digital wood basically and make it content-centric discovery. A substrate with a unique digital grain or something (eg . a jpg compressor with a key phrase coded in?)
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If the idea is NOT like any of the analogies people have used (baseball cards, woodcuts, autographs, name-a-star scams, diploma mills) then there’s a explanatory gap... what’s the right mental model.
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With the original crypto conversations, for many applications, the null hypothesis criticism “this should just be a database, blockchain adds nothing” had a lot of merit. Here the equivalent is “just use DRM.” Or basic PGP signing of slightly bespoke individual instances.
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Yes, and my point is those buying in are either too rich to care, too stupid to know better, or treating it as an altruistic priming of an unbuilt future pump, or market-maker types. And the artists I think mostly know this. None of these is a sufficient premise for me.
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Replying to @simondlr and @vgr
Asked another way. How many collectors are buying now and saying: "You know what, this NFT has a vanilla URI and not a multi-hashed content-addressed link. I'm not buying." For now. Very little.
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To be clear, I’m poking around not because I’m against this but because I’d like to jump on board at some point. I’m usually willing to deal with early adoption jankiness and grow with a medium. But this is an weird case where there’s too much wishful thinking in the water.
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I’m also waiting for more interesting distribution protocols on the spectrum between open circulation and must-have-key-to-view decentralized paywall. Like say expanding exclusivity/falling cost. Cost = $ X/serial number, and marginal exclusivity = X/serial number seconds?
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So if I price a tweet at $1, first person pats $1 and gets exclusivity for 1 second, second gets 0.5s exclusivity for 50c, etc. I’ve seen schemes like this discussed in auction literature. You own place-in-queue memorabilia, an autographed ticket stub basically.
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A smooth microstructured progressively accessible distribution kinda like Hollywood movies (theaters —> dvd (?) —> premium streaming —> basic —> free/cheap archival streaming)
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Tbf the art-like market dynamics that prevail now are a turn off for me. I’ve never wanted to make or own original art. Where technical medium constraints (sculpture, oil on canvas for eg) make the original form distinct from digital, and hard to mass produce, I’ll go to museums.
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I’m temperamentally digital native, where there is literally nothing special about the “original” unless you impose specialness. But clever distribution mechanisms that ride various pragmatic tradeoffs? Yes.
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Maybe there can be artistic merit to clever distribution protocols though. A serial time-rights auction where viewers get access in an artistic rather than random (lottery) or utilitarian (highest bidder) order? An essay that’s released in order of Myers-Briggs types?
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That would be fun. An essay of mine that’s released ESFJ to INTP order should behave differently than one released in the reverse order. Or astrological signs. Scorpios first.
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Distributional artistry is rare. Banksy for eg. But in a world of aggregation theory, reach-o-nomics, and distribution being more important, maybe go from dumb to smart to artistic distribution?
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Distribution as performance art is the only way I can think off to make digital art substantively unique, rather than ascriptively unique with bolted on artificial scarcity and vanity markets driving it. You could genuinely reshape how a potentially historic work makes history.
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One reason I’ve kept most of my work free or really cheap is that “people who can pay” is almost never an interesting audience. And the higher the price the less interesting the conversation.
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A $5 substack is already a significantly less interesting audience conversation loop than free. A $18 print book is enough to break the loop entirely for all but the biggest works. A $1 million painting in a billionaire’s private collection is basically dead.
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(subscribers of *my* various newsletters of course, are uniquely interesting, high IQ, exceptionally attractive, superior humans)
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(and I do get that since I’m not dependent on my writing for a living, I can afford to be more picky about how/where/when I play, unlike artists entirely dependent on art, with minimum-wage jobs being the backstop)
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In a related vein, I wonder what’s the proportion of NFT-issuers who are: a) working artists who really need the $ b) people with alt income sources like me c) trusties d) primarily crypto people moonlighting as creators e) other — corporate funded stunt marketers etc
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A very good litmus test of how your aesthetic sensibilities shape your commercial posture is to ask, as a thought experiment, what sort of restaurant you’d open? Let’s make this an in-line poll, why not.
  • Exec chef to billionaire
    4.8%
  • High-end fine dining
    29%
  • Chain franchise
    12.1%
  • Street food cart
    54%
124 votesFinal results
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I’m definitely on the street-food end. Ideally serving up a “locally world-famous” unique signature item under $5. But not super unique. Something like my spin on a well-known thing. Like a dosa cart with a unique filling.
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“Locally world famous” is not a joke. It describes many street foods. Locals take out-of-town visitors there, who become new fans. And people who leave retain strong memories and try to get it shipped to them worldwide at great cost. It’s a good metaphor for subcultural capital.
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The locally world-famous food metaphor btw points to unique distribution as an angle. There’s often a story to the story of food getting out if local neighborhoods. For eg. friends hand-carrying it on flights, then dividing and mailing the stash as part of care packages.
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Now that’s an NFT among chips. Once when I randomly found a few bags at a Home Goods in the Seattle area, I was elated like I’d discovered a Picasso at a garage sale. They really are very good. If you’re a potato chip connoisseur, seek them out.
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Wonder if this could work digitally. A blog post that’s only findable in a network neighborhood (set of whitelisted requesting static IPs?) but also randomly posted on sites elsewhere. Can you in fact impose such a terroir on a network topology?
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Maybe the real innovation needed here is a digital network embedded in a continuous metric space with digital geofencing and exponential drop-off in trust as you retreat from a node. That would be a canvas for NFTs par excellence.
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