Blockchain is a fascinating technology with massive implications to many industries. Art is just another frontier blockchain industrialists intend to explore and revolutionize. Because of the rise of Cryptokitties, non-fungible tokens are ushered into the front stage of art as a means to create provenance and ownership. While I agree that blockchain helps to solve problems with provenance that have troubled the art space for decades, I believe that the industry have brought out a few misnomers on the capabilities of blockchain in regards to digital ownership.
For specificity, this blog is a critique on a post on Artnome by Jason Bailey.
The paragraph that particularly urked me is the following:
“A big problem with producing and selling digital art is how easily it can be duplicated and pirated. Once something is copied and replicated for free, the value drops and the prospect of a market disappears. For things to be of value they need to have scarcity. Blockchain helps solve this for digital artists by introducing the idea of “digital scarcity”: issuing a limited number of copies and tying them back to unique blocks proving ownership.”
-Jason Bailey
Blockchain doesn’t SOLVE any of the problems brought up earlier in the paragraph. It, as a technology, does NOT create “digital scarcity” in the way described above. Blockchain operates as a ledger, a way to keep track of things; while it can record the ownership of assets, the scope of “scarcity” is strictly limited to interacting with the chain. The moment a user bring any assets off chain, digital scarcity is impossible to enforce.
What do I mean by my point?
Cryptocurrencies, the likes of bitcoin, ether, litecoin operate successfully due to a fundamental idea: a token’s utility is only when the owner participates with the blockchain network. The only way to exchange a cryptocurrency between addresses is by sending a transaction on the blockchain. If a user takes their wallet account balances offline and attempts to copy and paste the wallet a few times to “generate” more of each asset, it is futile. The moment the owner wants to transfer tokens, the false wallet is void due to the discrepancy of the false wallet’s balance and the blockchain’s recorded value. There is no point or incentive for owners of a cryptocurrency to replicate, duplicate, or manipulate their balances offline.
Digital media, in its current form, is data that has utility in an off-the-blockchain setting: pngs, gifs, or mp3s can be “viewed” without interacting with the blockchain. One can turn airplane mode on and view images, animations, movies, or listen to music. Unlike a cryptocurrency digital media, replicating, duplicating, or manipulating the data without consenting with the blockchain has value. I can send the master copy artwork to my friends, put my music on torrenting websites, upload my gifs to Imgur. All of these following actions do not interact with the blockchain and in this way, makes digital scarcity unenforceable by means of a distributed ledger.
What does it mean to “mint” 200 copies of a digital artwork on the blockchain? Does that mean that 200 copies of the artwork only exists around the internet? Currently, no technological means have been developed that can enforce the data is scarce. I can instantly replicate a digital artwork and create a 201th copy that is not recorded by the blockchain. And to many, it doesn’t matter if that 201th copy is “on the blockchain”. I can use it just as well as the 200th or the 199th …
The point I am trying to make is not to discredit the works of awesome startups in the cryptoart space. I intend to highlight the limitations and the false statements I hear around the space. Blockchain is not a silver bullet.
Let’s look at how modern industry has attempted to resolve the problem of distributing data and still find means to monetize. More specifically, I am referring to the software-as-a-service model operated by many cloud businesses today.
Utility of creative cloud, firebase database, segment API, provides features on a rental basis. They do not sell the data or product specifically, but sell access to their utility/features. Each of these products create an internal ledger of sorts to record how much of their services a user has used and charge their credits cards on an agreed rate.
In this case, the private ledger held by each company doesn’t store ownership, but rights to utilization. The companies operate as landlords and you are a renter. While any web3.0 supporter would squirm in distaste of a centralized pay for a service model, their are ideas that we can steal in the decentralize applications space.
To clarify some wording I later use, I will highlight it here:
- offline features: features of an asset that can be utilized without interacting with the blockchain. Think viewing a digital image, printing the image, or manipulating the image.
- online features: features of an asset that can only be utilized when interacting with the blockchain. Think transferring a cryptocurrency to buy a good or service.
Owning an asset on the blockchain should do either of the two:
- Tokenize an asset that has utility ONLY when online. (Think cryptocurrencies)
- Tokenize an asset that provides online features that OUTWEIGH or circumvent an asset’s offline features. (Think of any API service; you can copy paste the response and send it to anybody, but the ability to get data from the API anytime with any parameter far outweighs the offline feature of downloading and distributing the data.)
In the world of NFTs, some tokens fall in category one. Game based NFTs provide a suite of features to the gamer only when the game can verify one truthfully owns each asset they claim they own.
Digital artworks fall into the second category of tokenized assets. They have a powerful and meaningful experience offline: listen to the track of a new artist, printing out an artwork to hang on your wall, or share your favorite images to your friends. Currently, many tokenized artworks do not have any online features.
WeeeArt’s vision is to create a model for digital artworks to have a suite of “online” features that are accessible by the owners of the tokens. We introduced our first on-the-chain feature that I boringly dubbed the “WeeeArt render network”. Every artwork have a lower resolution render of the artwork distributed freely, but we provide owners the ability to request a higher resolution render of their artworks. After verifying ownership with the blockchain, and recording the owner’s request, we give the owner the render for their use.
In the future, we hope to work with more artist to create innovative and out of the box “online” features that will compliment the “WeeeArt render network”. In a bold statement, WeeeArt wants to create a genre of artwork that is “complete” once the artwork has an owner. (Take the statement in any way, its meant to be vague)
Wait, but couldn’t owners still just distribute their higher resolution renders?
Yes, and I would refer you to a earlier piece I wrote that addresses that question. Read up here.
I will not argue that WeeeArt is a correct solution in any means. The point of the piece is to highlight the illusions I commonly hear when people discuss tokenizing art. I write this to inform other of the limitations of blockchain and the problems that passionate folks in this industry needs to address, not toss to the side.
-David Sun
Follow us on twitter @weeeart
