Excellent article! A clear-headed explanation that places NFTs within the larger picture of financial instruments and investments. Well-written, amusing, informative, and appropriately snarky.
Discussions around NFTs frequently involve someone making statements about URLs, followed by a defence along the lines of "every real NFT project uses IPFS, and every real buyer checks this". I picked a random artblock project and looked at its contract:
Yes, you are missing something. Take a look at the `projectScriptInfo` and `projectScriptByIndex` methods. The JS source injected into the generator page (https://generator.artblocks.io/233000985) can be retrieved through those methods.
The artblocks.io site is just a convenience. You could build your own site that derives exactly the same data as what it provides entirely from contracts.
Let's say you create a website that autogenerates neat art. How would you as the artist who created that website go about monetizing it? How would you sell your work? How would I as a buyer know what I'm buying whether it's unique or one of many? Please think about how you would build such a system before continuing.
Here's what Artblocks is accomplishing:
1. The JS source for a particular artwork is uploaded to the contract on publish. It is immutable and available available as long as ethereum exists. Even if artblocks itself disappeared tomorrow, all the art is still preserved.
2. The algorithm for the art requires a source of randomness that the artist uses to control what the output would be. The actual pieces are created on "mint", the transaction hash is used as the seed for the algorithm and the piece is transferred to the user who paid the mint fee. The hashes are random and immutable, once created they cannot be changed.
3. The smart contract ensures there cannot be more pieces created than what the artist intended.
4. The smart contract also defines the royalties the artist wishes to collect on secondary sales.
5. Now you have a brought into existence a limited supply generative art collection created (and stored) natively on the blockchain that can be traded 24/7, globally, in a single currency (ETH in this case), available on multiple platforms (OpenSea, Rarible, LooksRare), with perfect provenance, and the artist receive royalties on every re-sale automatically.
I do not think you can build this without the help of blockchains.
I agree with the sentiment. That entire website seems like an excuse to wrap robot generated art into NFT.
Just look at the description of one of the piece
THE SOURCE CoDE is a new techno-mystical framework that channels knowledge from source creation to our digital present. The medium of this knowledge is a set of unique 1024 “karma” cards minted in the Genesis phase of THE SOURCE CoDE. The Hash is a unique entity that drives all aspects of a single card.
