For something like the Beeple NFT, Beeple says "I am Beeple, this NFT represents this work of art." "Work of art" is a smart contract in this case: it says "whoever wins this auction at Christie's owns the legal rights specified." It might also say "and if it's sold within the next 10 years Beeple gets 10% of all proceeds" or "Ownership cannot be subdivided" or "but Beeple retains the rights to reproduce the image in question for non-commercial purposes" or "but only so long as the buyer has a virgin daughter" or "only on days that end in -y" or "so long as the moon is in Aquarius." For something like NBA Top Shot, "work of art" is a smart contract that says "this particular video clip or image as defined on the Flow network cannot be bought or sold on the Flow network except by you and it is the only token on the Flow network that will ever represent this particular video clip or image." Think of it like land in SecondLife - it's been for sale for nearly 20 years without pissing off nearly as many people as NFTs do. For something like a Breitling Superocean, "item" means "Superocean A2332212/B635" as recorded on the caseback. For various degrees of "visible" and "trackable" depending on how Banksy wishes to tokenize it, yes. Remind me - did your VX800 come with a title? Ever played salvage title games? You've got this bike, it's got a serial number, the title is nowhere to be seen, you do a song and dance demonstrating that nobody else owns it, you pay for the State to dig around and see who owned it last and they try to get ahold of them, and then eventually you get a salvage title that says "this motorcycle belongs to Goobster as of January 13 2018 with an odometer that we totes can't verify." NFTs are TITLES. That's it. They're CERTIFICATES OF AUTHENTICITY. But instead of having to play reindeer games with the state and the manufacturer, the title is indelibly on every computer running a copy of the blockchain. It's right there for anyone to look up. It can't be forged. It can't be forgotten. It can't be lost. Can you sell a motorcyle without a title? Not legally, no. Out here in the world it might take a while to figure that out, though. Put a blockchain on it? And the minute someone scans the QR code of a stolen motorcycle the app can report the geoID of the camera that snapped it and flag it for the PD to come investigate. Could you forge a new serial number for that bike? Not without Suzuki's cooperation you can't because if you use an existing Suzuki number that was sold in Idaho and you're scanning it in Florida, it's easy enough to elevate the surveillance on that serial number. So when you go to register it to yourself the cops are already there waiting wanting to know what you're doing buying a bike with a Florida plate on it that still has valid Idaho registration. NFTs allow total, 100% dependable title transfer and surveillance on shit that is absolutely not worth it otherwise. We don't title mopeds and scooters because who fucking cares they're tiny. NFTs allow you to title anything with a serial number. This goes for intellectual property, too - right now we've got legions of zombies filing DMCA against anything the robots flag as copyright infringement on Youtube. Want an example of how fucking pervasive this shit can be right now? Got Spotify on your phone? Shazam? Apple Music? RIGHT NOW you could code any of those to listen to your environment, ID "music", feed that "music" through GraceNote, cross-reference your GeoID with an IP address, decide if you are in a residential or commercial environment, surveil across other providers to find out who you're streaming from, discover you're playing a John Mellencamp CD, notify Warner-Chappell, whose software looks up your business, determines you have a capacity of 40 people, assigns the correct rights violation and sends you a bill for mechanical royalties under threat of lawsuit. That's effectively what DMX/AEI/Muzak did for decades, only with people. On the other hand, if I have an NFT saying "I wrote this song with the help of my buddy John and a bunch of licensed samples from Synphobia" the utility of a smart contract can go "every time this song is played in front of more than 50 people the rights holders are entitled to a nickel" and transfer a nickel's worth from the business' account to the contract, which gives 33% to you, 33% to your buddy John, 5% to Synphobia, 5% to Gracenote, 5% to UNICEF and 18% to your daughter's college fund because that's how you set it up. And it'll only happen once for every time that song is played because anyone else's cell phone will see that rights have already been paid because of the timestamp. Banksy says "that wasn't me" and everything done by that address is forever disavowed. Meanwhile Banksy has gone through the trouble of verifying what addresses are his and they're vouchsafed until such a time as Banksy is kidnapped by rogue art forgers at which point he does it again. Compare and contrast to what we have now: There's a great bit in The $12m Stuffed Shark about the extraordinarily shitty records Andy Warhol kept, combined with the ridiculously prolific and shitty quality of his output. What was or was not a Warhol was largely arbitrated through secret meetings of a shadowy cabal that effectively got sued out of existence because they were basically trying to assign value through diktat and art collectors got pissed. On the other hand - every single one of Damien Hirst's insufferable spot paintings could be an iphone snap that depicts something unique about that spot painting which has its own NFT. There will never again be a spot drawing that might be a Damien Hirst. NFTs, smart contracts and the blockchain allow titular custody that is impossible to forge, trivial to implement and endlessly flexible as far as rights and instructions. That's it. That's the whole enchilada. But I mean - IMPOSSIBLE: "impossible" as in "helium is a superconductor at absolute zero" not "impedance goes down when it's cold." Impossible means IMPOSSIBLE. - TRIVIAL: "Trivial" as in "a couple snippets of javascript in a browser can establish permanent provenance for anything with a unique identifier" not as in "why wouldn't I just get a certificate of authenticity from the Franklin Mint" - ENDLESSLY FLEXIBLE: "Flexible" as in "if you can write it you can do it and the same thing that makes it impossible to forge makes it impossible to renege on the contract, because if the contract can't be executed perfectly IT CAN'T BE EXECUTED. _________________________________________ Blockchain concepts actually aren't hard, we've just got this "whoa the people who went to business school are scared of it and they've never done us wrong before therefore I'm going to be an asshole about it to everyone so that I too fit in" attitude towards it. Once you've made the conceptual leap that a blockchain doesn't prevent, but prohibits forgery the rest of it becomes obvious.So the NFT defines the owner of the item... but not the provenance.
So if someone - Banksy, let's assume - creates a new digital artwork and wants a clear line of ownership from him through each owner of the piece, a blockchain could be (assigned to it?) that would make every transaction visible and trackable.
So where does the NFT come in?
How do we know the NFT that Banksy assigned to his artwork is not just someone who set up a Banksy Twitter account and claimed that this piece was now and forever to be defined by this NFT?
I'm missing something here ... help me connect the dots between the blockchain and identifying the chain of custody, and why an NFT is needed if the blockchain is already evidence of the chain of custody and ownership?
Perfection. Thank you. I've got it at a visceral level, now. The Suzuki and Spotify examples were the ones that really helped me nail it down and wrap my head around specific instances I am very familiar with. In fact, the Suzuki just got passed on to its new owner last week. Friend of mine who is going to take the large basket of parts I gave him, and make it a motorcycle again. Hopefully just about the time I get the title sorted. :) Moving Forward... So I am a musician. I've written some songs. They are on SoundCloud right now. How do I attach an NFT to my song, "Monsieur Bon", so when it gets picked up and becomes the fave song of French bistros across the world, I get to retire a nickel at a time? It would seem to me that a single blockchain could be established that was "goobster's music" and any time I write a new song I could add it to that chain. But for that to be "real" that blockchain needs to be hosted in many places, by people who neither know me, or are motivated to help me out. And... what physically happens to my song "Monsieur Bon"? Is there a steganographic encoding of its serial number/blockchain in the audio file itself? A metadata field? Assuming YouTube wanted to do the right thing and flag copyright infringement when someone downloads my song and uses it for their YouTube channel's theme song... what is YouTube looking for, and at, to confirm ownership of that track? (And honestly, I think they WOULD want to do this, because it is impossible/trivial/flexible and much easier than paying a bunch of people to listen to and manually flag tracks.)
There are a several moving parts here: - Your music has been uploaded to SoundCloud. Soundcloud doesn't appear to subscribe to anyone's audio fingerprinting services. Let's instead suggest that you've put it up on iTunes because now it's in GraceNote, which means it's everywhere. - IF there were an agreement between GraceNote and all of its subscribed vendors, whenever one of those vendors queried the GraceNote database and found your song, and - IF there was a mechanism in place that allowed GraceNote to access the location where it was queried - THEN Gracenote could query that location to see if it had signed onto a mechanical royalty contract with ASCAP/BMI/Whoever, - AND - IF you had registered with ASCAP/BMI/Whoever, - THEN ASCAP/BMI/Whoever throws you a nickel worth of mechanical royalties. You'll notice that we have yet to hit a smart contract or NFT. This is mostly you kowtowing to the man, a bistro kowtowing to the man, Soundcloud collecting rent for middle-manning shit and ASCAP/BMI/Whoever shaking everyone down for a nickel. This is probably one reason outfits like Spotify and iTunes haven't moved forward with this; it's a consumer nightmare and nobody wants it. Instead, let's launch Don-b-a-dick.tunes, which has a dapp running on the Ethereum mainnet. - You upload your music, which Donbadic fingerprints. Each tune has an NFT that says it's your music within the Donbadic universe. - Donbadic has millions of NFTs, each specifying who owns what track. It's also got a fingerprint database. - The Donbadic app allows all users to browse all content (or, for example, content that the rights holders permit based on whatever their contract specifies - I could lock out residents of Kentucky if Donbadic gives me the opportunity to geofence for Kentucky, for example, or I could mark my shit as explicit and require an opt-in from users). You dump ten bucks into Donbadic and set how much you're willing to pay to listen to a song. Donbadic looks up your payment, the payment specified in your NFT, and executes the transaction between the user and you. - Here's where things could be simple or complicated: Donbadic could only show you songs you can stream for $0.000002 or songs you can stream for $0.02 or songs you can stream for free. You could unlock an artist for ten cents a month. You could specify any unique IP could listen to any unique NFT four (and only four) times. You could go Wu Tang on it and put a track up there that can be played once by the first person to pay you a million dollars and then deletes itself from the database forever. - On the performative side you could set up your bistro's Donbadic player to adjust your royalty payments based on the number of IPs your router is reporting at any given moment. As a Donbadic member, your Donbadic player might have a microphone on that listens to whether or not any other Donbadic music is playing, regardless of whether or not it's coming from your player. You could do obnoxious things like charge more for it being loud enough for more than three people to hear. You could do things like adjust your playlist based on how whether the mechanical rights for any given song cost more than the formula you've specified. Artists could do things like insist that their goth metal can only be played after local sunset. - And the amount it costs Donbadic to run their contract depends on how much code they're executing on the blockchain. That's the true genius of Ethereum - you pay per clock cycle. Ether is the big number, gwei is what you pay gas in and gwei is the currency that allows you to literally buy computational power on the blockchain. Most of this? You'll offload it somewhere it doesn't cost you anything but rights execution you want to run as lean and mean as possible where it can be verified. Might not be the main net, might be a side chain, might be a private chain - but if it's on the ETH mainnet then you're burning a certain small amount of gwei to do the work. And if your gas price is too low your app stops. And if your gas price is too high you go out of business. - But if you get it in that sweet spot? Then the money automatically goes from the guys playing to the guys composing through whatever complicated route they've set without you having to do a thing. And it always works. And you can charge 1% or 0.5% or 0.005% and if you've got a bigger pool to work from, you win and if you have a smaller pool but lower fees, you also win and ASCAP/BMI/Whoever STARVES because fuck those guys, truly. Register the fingerprints with anyone who brokers your music and you're done. The whole point is to make sure that your rights are managed by an organization that will enforce them. New song, new fingerprint. Do it with one NFT(contract), do it with many. Put some songs on one organization, some on another. It's still mechanical rights, there's still mechanical royalty management, you're just no longer reliant on an organization squeezing the falefel shops for playing Britney Spears. The falafel shops are gonna have to get squeezed - don't get me wrong. But considering the overwhelming marjority of money collected by ASCAP/BMI/Whoever went to ASCAP/BMI/Whoever, you've now got Jerry's Falafel paying Goobster .000003 cents per song because he likes you but kleinbl00 he only plays because the music ain't bad... for free. Maybe Friday and Saturday nights he splurges up to $1 an hour for music because it matters and donbadic throws a bunch of cool stuff at him that he doesn't hear otherwise. So he takes that playlist, brings it home where he isn't going to pay anything (he's a private customer now, not a business) and he decides his business is willing to pay $3 to stream Cat Power whenever he feels like until Easter. Sky's the limit. Sure could be. It all comes down to the proper balance of trust, enforceability and portability. You aren't putting your music on the blockchain, you're putting a legal representation of your music, as well as the legal terms and conditions for its playback, on the blockchain. Youtube is very deliberately not looking. That's the important distinction: The DMCA gives rights holders the right to petition for any material in violation to be taken down. No petition? No takedown. Because it's a user-centric platform, it lets people upload whatever. Meanwhile rights holders hire mercenaries to cruise around looking for their content. Youtube will most assuredly take your fingerprints... and for a fee (of course for a fee!) they'll enforce your rights for you but that's power-of-attorney shit and just another grift for them. My roommate would spend his weekends looking for bootleg NFL and NBA games for $15 an hour but NHL? Who cares those guys are cheapskates. It comes down to who's willing to pay. Imagine instead UsTube. You upload your content as well as setting your rights. People browse videos and if they watch yours, some pathetic microtransaction bounces between their account and yours (which might only have funds because advertisers have topped you up in exchange for watching the MyPillow guy eight times a day). UsTube takes money for hosting, or maybe they don't, maybe UsTube is just an index with pointers. Maybe UsTube's smart contract will automagically transfer the ownership of any clip from you to Universal if the fingerprint matches any portion of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Instead of people with an incentive to not do the right thing, the "right thing" is mathematically bound. Smart contracts aren't a magic bullet. What they are is a mechanism whereby the sticky stuff that we pay zombies and flacks to do happens automatically when certain conditions are met. It turns every transaction into escrow, eliminates the trust, eliminates the verification, eliminates the overhead. Youtube is a big-ass company with lots of employees. Once UsTube is coded, it's an autonomous program that only needs to be maintained. Donbadic is mostly marketing - you're getting enough creators and enough users to rub dicks together so that magic happens. That's really what we're seeing right now: the network effects on NFTs are juuuuust high enough that the normies are going "WTF is this shit I hate it" whereas before they were at "you spent how much for a picture of a cat LOL kill yourself." Thing is? Spotify pulled in eight billion dollars last year. With smart contracts you could do it for AWS hosting and give the rest back to the musicians. Or split the difference - charge half as much as Spotify and give half back to the musicians. Or write a whole 'nuther smart contract that does the advertising. We're absolutely surrounded by SaaS bullshit that's entirely parasitic on our lifestyles. NFTs and smart contracts can completely fucking eliminate almost all of it. Right now? We're at the "when I stuff the earpiece of my phone in this screamy box I can play Zork on my typewriter" stage of adoption. NFTs and smart contracts are the thing that gets us to the thing.So I am a musician. I've written some songs. They are on SoundCloud right now. How do I attach an NFT to my song, "Monsieur Bon", so when it gets picked up and becomes the fave song of French bistros across the world, I get to retire a nickel at a time?
It would seem to me that a single blockchain could be established that was "goobster's music" and any time I write a new song I could add it to that chain. But for that to be "real" that blockchain needs to be hosted in many places, by people who neither know me, or are motivated to help me out.
And... what physically happens to my song "Monsieur Bon"? Is there a steganographic encoding of its serial number/blockchain in the audio file itself? A metadata field?
Assuming YouTube wanted to do the right thing and flag copyright infringement when someone downloads my song and uses it for their YouTube channel's theme song... what is YouTube looking for, and at, to confirm ownership of that track?
(And honestly, I think they WOULD want to do this, because it is impossible/trivial/flexible and much easier than paying a bunch of people to listen to and manually flag tracks.)
So George Gilder is a neocon's neocon. Co-founded the Discovery Institute (of "teach the controversy" "intelligent design" fame). Laffer Curve? Voodoo Economics, for sure, but also a mathematical expression of the moral underpinnings of Morning in America. We're talking about a guy who thinks the best thing for America is men working without taxes to support women because God wanted it that way. He recently wrote a little book that basically says we don't need to worry about Facebook, Google or Amazon because smart contracts and NFTs are going to make them all extinct within ten years. He wasn't sure if it was going to be Ethereum or Ripple that we'd all use; he made room for the idea that there's no need for one blockchain to rule them all and that Bitcoin would probably go to a million simply because banks are obsolete. Either way, his take was that blockchain tech allows people to do that stuff we rely on big tech to do, without big tech siphoning off our privacy and money. It's worth a read, neocon viewpoint notwithstanding. There's an odd bit in there that's basically "the ballad of Robert Mercer."