One of the claims being made is that “visually indistinguishable painting conveys the same historical value to the viewer”. Atleast in the fictional example that springs to my mind from Man In the High Castle that the historical value of the item can be very extrinsic to the item itself. Selling bogus artifacts there was about telling a riveting story and forging documents of sale to establish (a fake) chain of custody. Historical artifacts have the addtional property that they naturally come with non-historical counterparts. For every sword used to execute a famous person there are a ton of similar swords that were not used for that.
I would imagine that percieved value of being in the chain of custody of a piece of art is that in some peoples minds they link it to participating in the art process itself. Under that theory it is not the good but the participation that is bought. The scarcity then comes in that the story of the piece of art is a singular one. Copies / forgeries then mainly provide a connection to the copying event ie only up to the creation of the copy.
One can copy only aspects one can percieve. With digital content there is a special stance in that we can be confident that the whole piece is captured. Contrast this with chain of custody for evidence where we can sample and safekeep evidence and only later develop methods to get useful information out of them. We can benefit from DNA samples from before DNA sequencing was invented. In this way originality or the way of relatedness to previous things might be important for aspects which are unknown at this point. For example a visual forgery will have the wrong carbon dating but there is no limit to the wildness of tests to impose on the original. Even if a forgerer is very thorough on which aspects are copied it is next to impossible to prepare for aspects not yet considered by anyone. In this aspects a lot of the “intuitive” reasons to care about chains of custody are mooted with NFTs. There is no possibility of there being “hidden pixels”
I would argue that the story serves the main purpose of creating a Schelling point distinguishing one particular object as the one endowed with the the property of not being fungible with the non-historical counterparts. In other words, the cooler the story is to the kind of person that pays lots of money for historical swords, the more it’s worth and the less fungible it is with other cool swords. Nobody actually cares, in and of itself, whether their sword has the right isotopes of carbon, or whether the scratches are exactly right. The purpose of these tests is to identify one “special” instance of the class of objects. Since I postulate that the point of this entire thing is mostly to form a Schelling point about which instance doesn’t funge, we can interpret NFTs as sidestepping this whole appraiser thing entirely. The key is that beyond the purposes of identifying which one is the original/historical one, these complicated tests actually serve no purpose otherwise. Rather than relying on weird tests to tell which one is the one that you buy if you want to buy the cool thing, even though you can’t tell with your eyes, NFTs just flat out declare by fiat that this sword is the cool one and if you want to buy the cool sword you buy this one. Except that since with digital things it doesn’t really matter which copy you own since they’re identical, you really end up owning the pure essence of whatever it is that makes the cool sword different from all the non-historical ones, divorced from any physical instantiation of the objects themselves.
The historic artifact conman is also trying to declare by fiat that the thing in his posession is the cool one. What if different NFTs declare different swords cool? Or in the case that multiple NFT systems designate the same sword as cool, whose proof of it is the most “legitimate”. In the case of real swords I would expect the word of national museum or something like that to have the heftiest word on what is and is not cool. But that is broken because they have academic interest and otherwise are likely overdetermine it (ie even when nobody is contesting anything they have multiple professionals doing such assignments). Random certification mechanisms just for certifications sake might not have natural grounding.
As an analog one might think of guinness book of records vs olympic comittee. Where olympic comittee says anything it is unlikely anybody would take guinnesses word instead. On the other hand if you had a upstart competitor “general recordkeeper” then that would probably get overshadowed by guinness. But if the differences in establishmentness is small then it is not clear if the authorities list different champions whether that would be worth influencing. Just because a system is a A recordkeeping is not a very good guarantee or clue that it will be THE recordkeeping in the future.
One of the claims being made is that “visually indistinguishable painting conveys the same historical value to the viewer”. Atleast in the fictional example that springs to my mind from Man In the High Castle that the historical value of the item can be very extrinsic to the item itself. Selling bogus artifacts there was about telling a riveting story and forging documents of sale to establish (a fake) chain of custody. Historical artifacts have the addtional property that they naturally come with non-historical counterparts. For every sword used to execute a famous person there are a ton of similar swords that were not used for that.
I would imagine that percieved value of being in the chain of custody of a piece of art is that in some peoples minds they link it to participating in the art process itself. Under that theory it is not the good but the participation that is bought. The scarcity then comes in that the story of the piece of art is a singular one. Copies / forgeries then mainly provide a connection to the copying event ie only up to the creation of the copy.
One can copy only aspects one can percieve. With digital content there is a special stance in that we can be confident that the whole piece is captured. Contrast this with chain of custody for evidence where we can sample and safekeep evidence and only later develop methods to get useful information out of them. We can benefit from DNA samples from before DNA sequencing was invented. In this way originality or the way of relatedness to previous things might be important for aspects which are unknown at this point. For example a visual forgery will have the wrong carbon dating but there is no limit to the wildness of tests to impose on the original. Even if a forgerer is very thorough on which aspects are copied it is next to impossible to prepare for aspects not yet considered by anyone. In this aspects a lot of the “intuitive” reasons to care about chains of custody are mooted with NFTs. There is no possibility of there being “hidden pixels”
I would argue that the story serves the main purpose of creating a Schelling point distinguishing one particular object as the one endowed with the the property of not being fungible with the non-historical counterparts. In other words, the cooler the story is to the kind of person that pays lots of money for historical swords, the more it’s worth and the less fungible it is with other cool swords. Nobody actually cares, in and of itself, whether their sword has the right isotopes of carbon, or whether the scratches are exactly right. The purpose of these tests is to identify one “special” instance of the class of objects. Since I postulate that the point of this entire thing is mostly to form a Schelling point about which instance doesn’t funge, we can interpret NFTs as sidestepping this whole appraiser thing entirely. The key is that beyond the purposes of identifying which one is the original/historical one, these complicated tests actually serve no purpose otherwise. Rather than relying on weird tests to tell which one is the one that you buy if you want to buy the cool thing, even though you can’t tell with your eyes, NFTs just flat out declare by fiat that this sword is the cool one and if you want to buy the cool sword you buy this one. Except that since with digital things it doesn’t really matter which copy you own since they’re identical, you really end up owning the pure essence of whatever it is that makes the cool sword different from all the non-historical ones, divorced from any physical instantiation of the objects themselves.
The historic artifact conman is also trying to declare by fiat that the thing in his posession is the cool one. What if different NFTs declare different swords cool? Or in the case that multiple NFT systems designate the same sword as cool, whose proof of it is the most “legitimate”. In the case of real swords I would expect the word of national museum or something like that to have the heftiest word on what is and is not cool. But that is broken because they have academic interest and otherwise are likely overdetermine it (ie even when nobody is contesting anything they have multiple professionals doing such assignments). Random certification mechanisms just for certifications sake might not have natural grounding.
As an analog one might think of guinness book of records vs olympic comittee. Where olympic comittee says anything it is unlikely anybody would take guinnesses word instead. On the other hand if you had a upstart competitor “general recordkeeper” then that would probably get overshadowed by guinness. But if the differences in establishmentness is small then it is not clear if the authorities list different champions whether that would be worth influencing. Just because a system is a A recordkeeping is not a very good guarantee or clue that it will be THE recordkeeping in the future.