None of which in any way responds to what I said. NFTs, by design, have no fraud prevention mechanism and no mechanism for getting your money back if you were scammed. They allow for arbitrarily many tokens to be minted of the same thing, with no obvious mechanism for people to realize that's what's happening.

Smart contracts can and do limit the amount which can be minted. And fraud exists everywhere, regardless of institutional controls - this is where community matters.

But you can just make a new smart contract that does the same thing, no? Smart contracts themselves can just be copied.

And saying that the "community" will take care of the fraud issue - isn't this a step backwards?

Sure, but it has a different address...there is no possibility of confusion. Something from the 1950s is not going to be confused with something from the 1980s, especially with a blockchain timestamp.

Funny how community came up in the article as one of the ways NFT is really just MLM...

Community comes up in every facet of life...what's your point here?

In the real art world replicas are... well replicas. Regardless of how good they are, they're not exactly the same, a trained eye can tell them apart.

That's not the case when making a copy of the file. You get a perfect one-to-one replica that nobody can tell apart in any way.

On the other hand, it's trivial to show that an NFT is authentic and not a replica. The difficult part, as always with cryptography, is linking a public key to a know identity.

If you have a trusted channel from the artist (e.g. their twitter feed) it's trivial for them to indicate that a given public key/wallet address is theirs and therefore anything minted on there is authentic and anything minted elsewhere is not.

Determining if a real world piece of art is a replica or authentic can be fairly expensive. Determining if an NFT is authentic is much much cheaper.

I think you are confusing providence for provenance here

Ah yeah edited, thanks!

EDIT: oh the window has passed.