The Laboratorium (2d ser.) (I Do Not Think That NFT Means What You Think It...)

Historically there was no way to separate the “owner” of a digital artwork from someone who just saved a copy to their desktop. Markets can’t operate without clear property rights: Before someone can buy a good, it has to be clear who has the right to sell it, and once someone does buy, you need to be able to transfer ownership from the seller to t... See more

NFTs [1] are not just cat pictures that people trade on blockchains. Today digital art [2], collectibles [3], and in-game assets [4] are the most visible use cases for these nifty non-fungibles. But the market holds an inconspicuous secret: there is a staggering diversity of online digital content that can be placed on a blockchain in the form of N... See more

Digital art suffers from perfect reproducibility, and hence, a lack of scarcity. There is no “real” version — even in the artist’s studio, copies proliferate in backups, on shared drives, and in cache files. For decades, we have experimented with watermarks and anti-piracy tech to try and enforce a physical, world-of-atoms scarcity on digital goods... See more