NFTs & The Mona Lisa Thought Experiment
A History of NFTs
In 2017, Matt Hall and John Watkinson, engineers who ran a mobile startup company called Larva Labs in New York, decided to procedurally create 10,000 unique avatars that paid homage to the punk scene in London. Although the original idea was to use it in a mobile game, they decided to conduct a social experiment instead: they would sell ‘ownership’ of these assets and record them on a blockchain. Anyone could continue to use any of the avatars but only one person would truly own the original.
This is not a foreign concept in itself. Consider the Mona Lisa. Everyone can own a print of it but only the Louvre owns the original.
However, it’s easy to figure out which one’s an original and which one’s a fake with physical artwork. Digital art requires a conceptual leap. It is impossible to state which copy of digital artwork is the original. They’re identical and indistinguishable. One way to assign ‘ownership’ is to record it in a public, write-only database for posterity. That way, people can continue to use exact replicas of digital assets but only one person could truly own the original (and prove it).
But is this good enough? Apparently, it is. People are willing to pay tens of millions of dollars for avatars that I copy-pasted into this article for free. They’re doing this so it is recorded in a public database (in this case, the Ethereum blockchain) that they and they only ‘own’ the original.
This is not a one-off thing though. The image you see above (which I again copy-pasted for free) sold for $69 million. We are now living in the world of NFTs and digital art collectors. However, is this just a fad or will it revolutionize the creative industry and how we think of ownership?
To be honest, I do not know. And I am writing this article to ask you this question and initiate a discussion. I want to do this through a thought experiment.
The Mona Lisa Thought Experiment
Imagine you are John Doe, an extremely wealthy art collector. You have just found out that the Louvre Museum has decided to auction off the Mona Lisa. There are two different ways this pans out in two parallel universes.
Case 1
Here, the painting is auctioned off in a standard way. You win the bid and you agree to pay $1 billion dollars to buy the Mona Lisa. Louvre hands over the original to you. You can now choose to do whatever you want with it.
In the place where the painting originally hanged, a plaque states that the painting has been sold off. It, however, makes no mention of your name.
Case 2
In this universe, a machine exists that can create exact replicas of products. It does it in such a way that the original and the duplicate are indistinguishable. For instance, if the Mona Lisa was duplicated with this machine, things contained in the original such as (for instance) Da Vinci’s fingerprints and DNA would be copied exactly onto the duplicate. In other words, it is scientifically impossible to determine the replica from the fake.
Louvre decides to create 100,000 copies of the Mona Lisa using this machine. Due to a mishap, the original gets mixed with the replicas. There is absolutely no way of knowing which is the original anymore.
Louvre now decides to conduct an auction. If you win, Louvre will put up a plaque stating that you, John Doe, are the original owner of the Mona Lisa. They will give you the option of taking one of the copies home. They will continue to hang a copy at the museum. And they will sell the remaining at their gift shop for $1 apiece.
We can never know if the original is hanging at the Louvre, was picked by you, or by someone at the gift store for a dollar. But a plaque will always exist at the Louvre stating that the original Mona Lisa belongs to John Doe, thus ascribing ownership to you.
Now, answer the following two questions.
- If you were willing to pay $1 billion in case 1, how much would you be willing to pay in case 2?
- Why did you choose this amount? Why was it higher/lower/the same?
Please let me know in the comments or the Google Form below.
Form link: https://forms.gle/Pnryjga1fmCsuZ1k6
