Yes exactly! It was the fact that you received that email from an ‘issuer’ you trusted, and that’s a event of emotional and social value in return for the decent price you paid for the work and the appreciation you showed. …
Maybe you chose to share that treasure with others, adding your narrative of what it means to you… That’s how powerful movements can form and how ideas can shape, in a commons of expression.
Nowadays we have many, more useable crypto tools (not just blockchains or NFTs) to protect and make your treasured event proveable and secure, with selective disclosure of only the parts you wish to share.
It’s between the issuer (the artist) and you the holder (recipient of the treasured communication or personalised media) … and a verifier (any other third party you want to prove it or share it with). That tech is called ‘verifiable credentials’ and you don’t necessarily need a blockchain at all… especially one that costs the earth to do it… or, in some cases, irrevocably place personal info on them.
That’s why we are using the VC web standard, open source, to do our Community Credentials project, not a proprietary blockchain.
Now, if we wanted to create an internal marketplace for art or music or information objects so we could sell and trade those precious trusted moments in exchange for money, a blockchain based market and wallet system is indeed great for those who can access it and play in that economic system.
But do we really want to do that?
That economic system is about capital speculation and accumulation, where generally people with money, buy stuff to sell in order to get more money. I think there’s quite enough of that sort of system in the world, and plenty of markets already, many of them scams, where art is tokenized and monetised, made scarce and put in a marketplace for display in collectors private gardens.
I think we need to focus on our core mission of providing a decent reward to artists for their work and contributions. Proofs of authenticity (protecting artists from rip offs and impersonation) and of purchase (digital receipt of decent reward) can all be part of that.
It’s about human rights and the commons, rather than property rights.
Nathan Schneider puts it very nicely…
."…many of the visions for this emerging technology take us straight down the road of dystopia, where everything is for sale and nothing is shared."