Non-fungible tokens could help artists make a living

I didn’t realize that my art was non-fungible but that was because I didn’t know what the word fungible meant. Until recently, fungible was rarely used outside legal circles.

image: Decrypt

Now, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have become all the rage.

Fungible things can be exchanged for something else of the same kind: they are equivalent. A twenty dollar bill is fungible because it can be exchanged for a ten and two fives. A house is not fungible because you can’t exchange it for a garage and two sheds. They are not equivalent.

My art is non-fungible. One of my acrylic paintings can’t be exchanged for a charcoal sketch and two plastic-fork mobiles.

Tokens that are non-fungible raise the level of abstraction beyond that of abstract art.

A non-fungible token is entirely virtual. It’s a bit of information stored on a blockchain, the same technology used to record cryptocurrencies. Blockchains can be used to store indelible records about almost anything, from the grocery store produce in as it moves through the supply chain to medical records.

And digital art can be stored as a token using blockchain -a record of provenance that establishes ownership and authenticity.

Artists are reaping the rewards of the craze. Michah Dowbak from Thunder Bay, Ontario, never heard of NFTs or digital art a year ago. Dowbak, who goes by the name Mad Dog Jones, recently sold a piece of digital art for US$ 4.3 million. He was stunned at the sale:

“How do you describe making $4-million in five minutes?” Dowbak said a few days afterward. “My hands were numb, for one. I couldn’t feel my fingertips. My whole body was shaking.”

Even the old-school auction house, Christie’s, is riding the wave. It sold a work by the digital artist known as Beeple for US$69 million.

Making a living as an artist has always been a struggle. I wanted to become a commercial artist when I left high school but I quickly learned that would be tough.

After working for a year as an arts and crafts instructor for the City of Edmonton in after-school programs, it became clear that I needed to develop another career path.  That’s when I decided to study electronics and it became the story of my life.

I’ve never stopped being an artist. But because I don’t have to make a living from art, I exchange my art for donations to charity.

For artists who immerse themselves in their art, making a living is hard; especially when they are unknown.

NFTs could help artists bypass the middlemen -the galleries and agents who take a cut of sales- and allow artists to market their work directly to buyers.

NFTs could solve another problem that struggling artists face: resale. Artists often sell their work to art speculators for very little. Then the speculators sell the art for many times more than what they paid. NFT contracts could include a clause that requires a percentage of the resale price go to the artist.

With a background in art and technology, I take some satisfaction in seeing this marriage of art and NFTs. As a teenager, little did I know that technology could lead to digital art and that digital art could be owned exclusively as a token.

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Can blockchain save Robin Hood?

The Robin Hood Co-op was started by a group of artists at the University of Aalto outside Helsinki in Finland. It’s a hedge fund like no other, formed as a piece of “economic performance art.”

image: Information Age

Problems started when the artists began to raise money and invest in the stock market. The university administration took issue with the concept and forced the co-op to shut down.

Instead of shutting down, the artists left the university to venture out on their own.

Since then they focused on building a global network of countercultural investors from Helsinki to California.

The Robin Hood Co-op doesn’t exactly steal from the rich to give to the poor. The goal is to distribute profits to worthwhile causes globally. “Part of the profit generated by the fund is invested into projects building the commons,” according to their website.

They have no regular offices and meet in different places, often abandoned buildings, to hold workshops in conjunction with a local host group.

Reporter Brett Scott went to one of these places in a graffiti-strewn former slaughterhouse in Milan occupied by a radical arts group called Macao. He writes:

“In the hall is a naked woman painted blue, wearing a gas mask, dancing to the sonic violence of industrial deathmetal music. Next door is a punk street-theatre collective manufacturing artificial vomit in buckets to throw at a protest (CCPA Monitor, Nov/Dec, 2018).” Among the assembled were hackers, coders, designers and artists. The meeting had the feeling of the blend of an intellectual salon, a hackathon and a political campaign meeting.

Not your average corporate boardroom.

Portuguese artist Ana Fradique, who co-manages the fund, describes Robin Hood as “artivism”—a mix of arts and activism.

Robin Hood has its critics like Serbian activist Branko Popovic. “I understand you’re trying to be like a vampire on the market,” he says, “but why be a vampire on vampires? They have nothing to give us.”

That’s an ongoing tension amongst activists: do you work within the system to build a more equitable world or tear down the system and rebuild it from scratch?

I many respects, Robin Hood Co-op is conventional. They invest in the Wall Street stock exchange using an algorithm they invented called “The Parasite.” Assets in the co-op are called Robyns. In the first year of investment, they made double-digit returns.

Some of its first distributions went to the autonomous arts space Casa Nuvem in Rio de Janeiro (€5,000) and the activist broadcaster Radio Schizoanalytique in Greece (€6,000).

However, Robin Hood Co-op members are impatient to grow. They plan to expand the model beyond the Parasite algorithm to implementing blockchain. “Robin Hood 2.0.” will be “even more monstrous” than the first incarnation said one of the co-founders.

Rather than being based in Finland, they wants to transform Robin Hood into a decentralized global cryptofund using blockchain -the underlying technology of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

While Bitcoins are turning out to be a bit of a dud, the technology of blockchain is promising. It’s an indelible ledger in which anything can be permanently recorded, including shares in an activist hedge fund. The advantage of blockchain is that it’s decentralized and global.

It’s a big leap. Implementation of blockchain will require a change in the culture of the co-op and paid staff.

Time will tell whether this chimera of art and capitalism will prosper.

 

Blockchain could revolutionize global banking

The era of globalization is drawing to a close. Evidence of that has been made clear by President Trump’s withdrawal from global affairs, his attempt to build an economic and physical wall around the United States. It’s a clumsy attempt to express the genuine concerns of Americans who have been left out of the prosperity reaped by a few.

     image: Urban Forex

Two billion people around the world have no access banking. They are unable to make loans to start small businesses; they have no credit, and no means of sending or receiving money.

And the rest of us have is rigged banking system. We are nickeled and dimed in every banking transaction and pay exorbitant interest rates on credit cards.

We are told that a healthy banking system is fundamental to a healthy economy. Yeah, right. Banking funnels money into the pockets of the rich who have so much that it just lays around in piles, uninvested, while worthwhile social programs and enterprises go threadbare.

When U.S. banks failed during the Great Recession of 2008 -because of bad business practices- they were bailed out with taxpayer’s dollars. They were rewarded for bad investments while homeowners who couldn’t pay bank-approved mortgages were thrown out on the street.

Not only is there an asymmetrical relationship between banks and clients in terms of wealth distribution, there is also an imbalance of transparency. While banks know exquisite details about us, we know practically nothing about them. Social scientist Shoshana Zuboff calls this one-sided, extractive interaction “surveillance capitalism.”

The technology of blockchain holds promise to restore balance and eliminate excessive fees through use of a universal digital currency, or cryptocurrency.

The first digital currency, Bitcoin, leaves people wondering. It has a reputation of being highly speculative.  But there are many versions of cryptocurrencies that would work and many possible versions of blockchains –the digital ledger which records transactions.

The advantages of cryptocurrencies over banking are that your money is held in a digital wallet and easily accessed; credit card payments are quicker and less expensive; you remain relatively anonymous (pseudonymous) with minimal information shared; you are the master of your money, there are no banks or boundaries to the flow of money.

If it all seems to be too good to be true, there are hurdles. One is just who controls access to your digital money. If banks control applications that access cryptocurrency wallets, we can expect business as usual. Cultural anthropologist Natalie Smolenski explains:

“This is the crux of blockchain’s catch-22: the public won’t use blockchains without user-friendly applications. But user-friendly applications often achieve that ease through centralization, which replicates the conditions of control that blockchains sought to circumvent (Scientific American, January, 2018)”

A new era would bring public control of cryptocurrencies. As Bitcoins have demonstrated, we already have a blockchain that is open-source and maintained by a global network of volunteer core developers. We have a network of individually-owned computers that process the indelible transactions –a process called “bitcoin mining.”

“Creating digital identities whose existence is independent from governments and corporations is the next grand challenge that blockchains both pose and could help solve,” says Smolenski.

With the dawn of the era of a “Universal New Deal,” cryptocurrencies could redistribute wealth and put money in the hands of those who will spend it.

The future of blockchain mining in B.C.

Blockchain mines look nothing like copper mines. They are banks of computer that toil away at solving complex calculations. Blockchain is the digital ledger used by many cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Because the computers generate heat, they could be used to warm the greenhouses to grow the tonnes of marijuana needed for Canada’s budding legal market.

  image: coindesk.com

Blockchain is a revolutionary way of tracking secure, indelible transactions of any sort not just cryptocurrencies. Experts say it will revolutionize businesses in every field. Manav Gupta, chief technology officer of IBM Cloud Canada, is enthusiastic:

“We view blockchain as having the potential to change all of technological interactions the same way that the internet changed communication in the nineties (Walrus magazine, Jan/Feb, 2018).”

Where the value of Bitcoins is highly speculative, the value of blockchain is solid. Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop blockchain from being caught up in a goldrush mentality. Irrational investors are madly rushing into some dodgy speculations. Convinced that anything with “blockchain” in the title is “the next big thing,” investors threw $2 billion into blockchain startups worldwide. One company saw shares rise 394 per cent by just adding “blockchain” to its name.

Blockchain can be used to secure any vital records such as medical files, business deals, legal agreements, tracing shipping containers, farm-to-market food security; even professional and academic records which are now open to fraud. Walmart and Nestle have already invested in blockchain.

Bitcoin miners loan their computers to solve the complex blockchain calculations required for each transaction. Miners are paid in Bitcoins in return. Drew Taylor has a Bitcoin mining operation in his Montreal house. He earns about $3,000 a month and pays additional costs of $200 for electricity. The computers generate a lot of heat. “But essentially it is free heat for at least one room,” he told CBC Radio’s The Current.

The amount of power used for each Bitcoin transaction is shocking high. Alex de Vries monitors the power used in Bitcoin mining. Just one transaction uses as much energy as the average B.C. household uses in 13 days. That’s 300 kilowatt-hours for each transaction. Researchers are looking for ways to reduce the power consumption.

The best place to locate Bitcoin mines is in places where the electricity is cheap. Montreal has relatively cheap hydroelectricity. Iceland has a large mine because the majority of their energy comes from geothermal and steam. Unfortunately, not all cheap energy is as green. China and India do most of the mining where the electricity is cheap but produced by burning dirty coal.

Once B.C.’s Site C dam is completed we will have lots of cheap, surplus electricity that could be put to use in blockchain mining.

Blockchain mining is comparable to copper mining because both use a lot of electricity. Highland Valley mine near Kamloops uses as much electricity as 60,000 homes, about twice what Kamloops uses.

An advantage of blockchain mining is that a secondary industry could use the waste heat. Marijuana greenhouses could use the computers as heaters so that not one kilowatt hour would be wasted. In addition, blockchain mines could be located near the dam to avoid the cost of transmitting electricity.

The digital mine would employ workers close to home in small towns in B.C. Instead of using our dam power to run LNG compressors, we could put people to work mining digital dollars and growing marijuana for Canadian’s burgeoning market.

Blockchain could improve food security

The future of cryptocurrencies such as the bitcoin might be unclear but the technology behind it is solid. Blockchain is the digital ledger where bitcoin transactions are kept. It’s transparent, secure and open for all to see.

    image: Realty Biz News

The origin of blockchain is mysterious. Some person, or group, with the anonymous name Satoshi Nakamoto is credited with inventing blockchain. Who this person is remains obscure.

Blockchain’s usefulness goes beyond cryptocurrencies. Its property of transparency could improve food security. Sylvain Charlebois, professor in food policy and distribution at Dalhousie University explains:

“Blockchain technology allows for users to look at all transactions simultaneously and in real time. In food, for example, a retailer would know with whom his supplier has dealt. Additionally, since transactions are not stored in any single location, the information is almost impossible to hack (Globe and Mail, December 13, 2017).”

If you are buying pork chops in a grocery store, for example, and wanted to know the complete history the animal before you buy, you could scan the QR code on the label and within seconds know the date of the animal’s birth, use of antibiotics, vaccinations, and where the animal lived. (QR codes are a type of bar code in the shape of a square.)

The Public Health Agency of Canada reported earlier this month that 21 people became sick after eating romaine lettuce. While PAHC knew what caused the illness (E. Coli 0157) they didn’t know where the lettuce came from. Tracing contaminants can be a matter of life and death.

“Every year, more than four million Canadians get food poisoning. In recent years 474 cases of [the deadly disease caused by E. Coli 0157] have been reported annually,” says foodqualitynews.com.

Big Food is considering blockchain as way of tracing contaminates. Wal-Mart sells 20 per cent of all food in the U.S. and tested blockchain compared to standard methods of tracing food. They traced the source of mangoes in one of their stores using the standard method and it took six days, 18 hours, and 26 minutes to trace the fruit back to its original farm. Using blockchain technology, it would take 2.2 seconds for anyone –consumers and suppliers alike- to find out anything they want. And it would prevent good food from being thrown out.

“During an outbreak of a food-related health scare, six days is an eternity,” says Prof Charlebois, “A company can save lives by acting quickly. Blockchain also allows specific products to be traced at any given time, which would help in the reduction of food waste. For instance, contaminated products can be traced easily and quickly, while safe foods would remain on the shelves and not in landfills.”

Blockchain won’t be implemented without the involvement with everyone along the food chain. The record will only be as good as the data entered. Giants like Wal-Mart can force supplier participation.

Governments could also force compliance. With the health of consumers at stake, regulated participation would make the records complete and useful.

Cryptocurrencies may be a fleeting gimmick to have investors part with their money but let’s not throw the blockchain out with the bitcoin.