Thread by @isyourguy

here's a piece of art. is it cryptoart? if so, who owns it, what edition is it, what marketplace was it sold through and where is its "ownership" recorded?

cryptoart doesn't solve digital provenance. it's techbros stealing legitimacy from an already corrupt fine art market.

okay fuck it. out of curiosity, i took at a look at a contract. lots of junk about timestamps and ids and whatever. i'm here for the actual art though. let's look at this one on rarible.

it's a tulip. moving on.

i can see who owns it pretty easily using etherscan, but that's not what i'm interested in. where's the art, the thing that my token represents the value of!?

oh there we go. no idea what ipfs is but it's a regular https url so lets go.

oh okay its json. the daonomic domain just forwards me to rarible. what, why? i thought this was meant to be decentralised? i also don't really see who made this here. maybe that's back in the contract?

anyway where's the art? what's this ipfs junk?

interplanetary file system. probably some elon musk thing. oh no wait, it's like bittorrent. so it's not on the blockchain?

oh well, that's pretty decentralised. okay lets install this ipfs software and download this image!

that legit took like, 6 minutes. for a 10mb file. where the crap is this hosted? checking the rarible terms... they run their own ipfs node. sounds pretty centralised. hopefully they've configured it so it doesn't start "garbage collecting" 😅

okay but it's like, distributed right? first i think we need to see how many chunks its in, so.. 40 chunks. now lets see how many providers for each chunk.

oh okay just the one. second chunk? same one. it takes about a minute to check each chunk so i'm not doing them all.

decentralised? you've just centralised it in lots of places! you need to trust that rarible stays up since they're hosting the IPFS node that stores the stuff. you need to trust that IPFS is secure, and that all these domain names are maintained. just... buy a print dude. god.

isn't this just like, a torrent that you're paying for? you're buying magnet links for thousands of dollars and you aren't even checking that the seeder is still there?

please for the love of god can someone with more knowledge and patience than me go through this crap. i just, i can't look at this any more. like even as a system, this seems to really suck?

oh i went back and checked to see if i could find the creator of the piece in the token? it was there. it's a big unsigned int. maybe it's a wallet or something? no idea where their name is.

took a peek at rarible's roadmap. 🙄

why keep up the lie?

your tos specifically says they don't own the image, so why would you let people think that? why would you implement features that suggest that?

i guess i'm still doing this. more shit to add: artist royalties.

seems like they're basically broken right now. if you sell on the same platform you bought the piece, that should work. otherwise there's no guarantee it'll be paid. artists are chasing royalties off platform.

i suspect that even if platforms solve this, they still can't guarantee royalties. party A could privately "gift" an NFT to party B, then party B in a separate transaction could "gift" party A a certain amount of currency.

here is someone pointing this out A YEAR AGO and two people saying it's not a problem with the system.

"works as designed"

this should be easy enough to see then calculate how much money is roughly being "stolen" from artists. @memotv is it technically possible to see 0ETH NFT transfers and look for some amount of ETH moving in the opposite direction within ~1 day? this is way over my head.

more weird shit from the superrare "tips for artists" page.

who would think about art in this way? why should your average price factor into the value of any given piece?

"sell with us here, don't listen to other platforms. remember you ONLY get royalties with us."

🤔🤔🤔

anyway i stole the tulip from @mcuban. plucked it right from rarible's servers. happy to sell a link to this png for like, a cool joke that you can tweet me.