Uniqueness: Difference between revisions

}}The [[Blockchain]]’s unique selling point is ''[[uniqueness]]'': a single entry on the ledger is there, it is fixed, it is unique for all time and uneditable. Any facsimile of it is non-[[fungible]]. By contrast, the regular internet not only allows lossless copying, but encourages it and, in fact, is predicated on it. That’s at the heart of its packet switching, [[End-to-end principle|end-to-end]] architecture.

In this regard, [[blockchain]] and the regular internet are completely [[incommensurable]]. This is the price you pay for entering the [[distributed ledger]]: you get your uniqueness, but in return you must leave the flawed peer-to-peer world, and anything on it, behind. You can recreate the regular internet on the blockchain, but it is — well, ''different''.

Now if you create your artwork ''on'' the [[blockchain]], you get that same native uniqueness: any facsimiles of the artwork that exist ''off blockchain'' — copies floating around on the internet and so on — are, certifiably, ontologically ''inferior'' to the one on the ledger. That one is the real deal.

But — and maybe walled social media platforms on the internet, structured as [[decentralised autonomous organisation|DAO]]s are different; the JC doesn’t yet really understand them — mostly, a blockchain is a really crappy place to create art - rather like trying to create a word document in excel. Really limiting. Look, it’s one thing for David Hockney to do all his painting on an iPad: quite another to realise your whole ''ouevre'' in an electronic cashbook. Maybe this will change, but the blockchain as it is, is a clunky, slow, costly thing. It has only one advantage: uniqueness.

For anyone making art the old-fashioned way — paint and paper, sand and glue, inverting urinals and signing them — or even more so writing music or literature — whose artwork “natively” lives outside a [[distributed ledger]], or its [[value]] does not subsist in its [[substrate]], but rather in the abstract information the [[substrate]] carries (such as a book or a score) — having your artwork encoded on a [[blockchain]], in a unique substrate doesn’t really help you.