Cryptographic Digital Art Tokens, a concept

I'm not an artist, but I do support and commission a bunch of them. I definitely fall into the "collector" bucket you mention, considering I even have my own booru/wiki for such things, so I'd already have a place to display any CDATs with a few tweaks. There's some potential there, since YCHs ("Your Character Here"s) and adoptables have been "things" on DeviantArt and other sites for decades now.

I should begin by saying that as a techie and a collector of art, I absolutely love the idea. But...

I floated the idea by a few artists and art communities I know, though, and the replies have been... well, let's say "less than stellar". I immediately had to explain how these aren't NFTs, so much so that I had to begin prefixing stuff I went people with "just because it has "cryptographic" in the name doesn't mean it's cryptocurrency-related". One person thought I had my account hacked for a bit. Even then, people were on high alert and making comparisons.

This is a collection of responses I got, and who you'd basically have to convince to adopt CDATs.

One person mentioned:

<[redacted]> I mean I'm not an artist, but tokens seem unnecessary for commissions
<Liru> How so?
<[redacted]> Because even if the artist doesn't acknowledge it in a post, I already have a token that says it's mine: the receipt
<[redacted]> Even if there's no actual transaction, if it's requested on behalf of someone else there will be a way to trace it. So it just seems excessive and like they're trying to get more artists in on NFTs

...at which point I posted the text from this post you made, and their response was

<[redacted]> Maybe I'm just unfamiliar with the processes involved, but I can't really imagine a situation where an NFT gives you more than the artist writing a thank you or this belongs to in the description. In the situation where someone is buying the art to support the artist, that sounds no different than a standard NFT sale just reframed.

A conversation with an artist:

<Z> Well unfortunately just like crypto currency I gotta ask: what's the point?
<Z> We already have currency to exchange
<Liru> It's not currency
<Liru> It's more like a way of saying "I, the artist, am stating that person X bought/commissioned this art"
<Z> Uh, okay, is there a reason the artist can't just... ya know, say it?
<Z> o.o
<Z> Just smacks to me of "NFTs but under a different name"
<Z> I read how they wanna do a version that is ecologically responsible which is... okay I guess?
<Z> The whole concept though is just kinda unnecessary though

Finally, one that encapsulates most artists I asked:

idc, couldn't care less

A lot of the artists that were willing to engage seem to be concerned about proving authenticity, ie "someone else can just do the same thing with this art and point the key URLs and work URLs elsewhere". Quoting another artist, "[...] i am not registered with every website there is - somewhere out there may be a [$ARTIST_NAME] rping as me i have no idea of existing". You'd basically be fighting the taint of NFTs the whole way through.

Okay so A and B have their public keys hosted on their personal websites and if I want to verify that B owns the piece of art I can check the signatures and verify they match.

So C comes along and creates a personal website where they put the artwork and claim they made it. They can just sign it with their own private key. Sure they can't generate a signature that matches A's, but their website says they own it and they have their own fancy math fingerprint.

It only really works if people know how to identify which signature is the real one that comes from A. Which, judging from the NFT space right now, people don't give a shit about.

Contracts, commissions and sponsorships already exist. I could hire an artist right now and agree to pay them for their work. And we can link to each other on our websites already. If I pay them enough they'll probably even be willing to put a big "Sponsored By" notice somewhere.

Seems like a lot of work and the only real benefit I can see is that it lets A and B both prove they agreed to the sale. So like if A and B had reason to distrust each other in the future and one of them thought the other was untrustworthy. But I don't think that would provide legal remedy beyond what is already available through contract law.

Unless I'm missing something?

But I'm glad your proposed solution doesn't require proof of work. Fuck everything about proof of work, it's such a god-damn waste.

The workflow sounds to me a little like buying a license of IntelliJ IDEA. When you buy a license with a credit card, as part of the payment flow they get your name and email and after the purchase they email you a license file. You separately download the software and start it up, select an "add license" menu item and paste the license in. And then when you launch it, there is a dialog box saying "Licensed to <your name>." You keep the license email and that way you can reinstall the software on a different machine.

There are probably a lot of shareware programs that work similarly?

Based on this analogy, I think sending an email with the license after purchase would be good for having a backup of the license but I'm not sure that the cross-signing step needs to happen that way. Maybe that could be done with an API call when the customer installs the license. That is, assuming it's needed. I guess it's confirmation of a successful install and good for tracking the artist's audience? It seems like this needs to be optional depending on how ok you are with letting the artist know something more about you.

Also, it sounds like you're assuming the artist is manually processing each order (at least at first) but I expect something closer to buying music online might make sense, where the artist has some kind of e-commerce system for selling files and generating and sending the CDAT is part of the order flow?

Although this is intended as an open protocol, I think it would be more likely to become popular if it were integrated with nice software for art collection and management like iTunes. I guess that could be online with your CDAT hosting service.

A question would be where the art files (mp3's or whatever) are hosted or cached and how you can get another copy if needed. I guess they could be downloaded again from the artist's site but you probably want backups in case the artist disappears. Maybe the CDAT hosting service would keep backups? Having an online place to store your collection that doesn't back up the media file seems like it might be confusing to some, because it looks like you have a copy but actually you don't, it's just the CDAT file.

I think ideas like this, including NFTs, have great value in so that they can make us reconsider what "ownership" of art, and perhaps even "ownership" as a general concept, mean in the first place —if anything. When an artwork can potentially have infinite indistinguishable copies of itself, rendering the vulgar notion of authenticity/originality dubious, does it still make sense to see its value as predicated on its scarcity? While NFTs seem to double down on valuation based on scarcity this idea of CDATs seems to get closer to a healthier, more true-to-ourselves transvaluation; could it be that when we wish to "own" an artwork we really seek to establish a validated feeling of kinship to the artist, to prove such a connection or likeness? If this is so, is a signed "copy" significantly less valuable than an "original"? I contend that if we stick to conventional absolutist notions surrounding "ownership" of art we'll eventually find that in order to own the art we'd have to own the artist, which seems implausible and rather absurd.

Anyways, sorry if the above makes little sense or sounds half-baked, it can be hard to elucidate such musings. Whatever the case, I think there's something interesting to be explored here.

On a practical note, someone else commented that proving the identity of the artist could become an issue since anyone could pose as them to sign CDATs, I think something like Keyoxide could prove useful in that front.

Good work!

I'm thinking that this runs into one of the problems that NFTs have, which is that this does not confer any sort of legal ownership of the artwork. It doesn't seem particularly harmful like NFTs are, so I don't really have a problem with it, but it doesn't seem to me that the technology actually solves any problem that hasn't already been solved through commissions and contracts.

First, I like how the cryptographic signature is base64-encoded hammering on a keyboard ;)

I'm a bit confused about the scheme though.

I'm not exactly a fan of proof of work, but this does kind of seem like a blockchain. If Beth wants to sell the artwork to Charlie, they go through the signature dance, and voila, you have a mini blockchain of cryptographic proofs, linking Adam to Beth to Charlie, just one without proof of work.

You say this is for collectors to display their support for artists, but I think that unless you make second-party sales impossible, this will create the same speculation market as NFTs (though tbh I don't know that much about NFT markets, so this could be completely wrong).

Another thing I don't quite get is what prevents Adam from selling the artwork multiple times to different collectors. What if they promise to only ever sell one, get a lot of money for it, and then decide to renege and sell the artwork a bunch more times?

And if the Artwork is hosted on a website, doesn't that make it impossible to guarantee its availability? You'd need something like IPFS, at which point I fail to see the big difference to NFTs...