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

They are technically complex, but socially promiscuous in a way only much simpler digital things, such as plain text files or JPEGs, have been so far. As we’ve discussed, they’re also kinda content-free. They bear no necessary payloads, pointers, programmed affordances, or rights. All those things are optional extras. The NFT itself is just a token... 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

So the parsimonious mental model of an NFT based on what we’ve discussed so far is that it is a promiscuous and vacuous digital social object. A thing that contains no substance itself, not even reliable pointing properties, but has an identity and can be traded, transferred, mixed and matched indiscriminately with other things in a social context.

The NFT does not by itself convey ownership of the underlying thing in either a legal or practical sense. It conveys ownership in some more metaphysical sense: If you buy a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT, then the people who are part of the BAYC NFT community will treat you as the owner of your ape. This is essentially a social fact and can be true even ... See more

NFTs mean that for the first time, we have something like digital objects on the Internet. The importance of this change goes way beyond the kinds of things that are currently popular in the crypto space. It’s not contained to art markets, collectibles, or even gaming. The existence of programmable, interoperable digital objects will fundamentally ... See more

NFTs make less sense when there isn’t a purpose to digital ownership, such as for managing physical collectibles, where people presumably want to receive the objects themselves.