[Moims-dai] NFTs

[kearneysolutions at gmail.com]

I've been reading layman articles on NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), wondering
if and how they will relate to OAIS, and whether they might someday surface
in OAIS standards.  Today one in particular in Wired magazine. 

 

https://www.wired.com/story/www-code-nft-tim-berners-lee-auction/

(Wired only allows you to view 4 or 5 articles without a subscription)

 

.caught my attention when it said:  

"Nothing could be a greater cultural and ethical shock to archives than
NFTs." Prelinger argues that monetizing historically significant holdings
could make important documents less accessible to genealogists and other
scholars without deep pockets. Weber shares those concerns, as the Computing
History Museum doesn't have the deep pockets of independent
crypto-millionaire collectors; if minting code as an NFT becomes a standard,
collecting historically significant copies of code for the museum's software
library could become more difficult. In some NFT sales, the original digital
artifact is subsequently removed from the web.

 

And in the conclusion:

While this won't change the way anyone uses the web, it is likely to have
ripple effects in how archivists and collectors approach the storage of
digital objects-and how the next generation of computing geniuses decide
what to do with their achievements.

 

If fabricating an NFT did not have such high cost and environmental impact,
I could envision a future time where NFTs are so widely accepted that
anything less is considered "inferior provenance."  But then high cost and
environmental impact haven't stopped society from other questionable
activities, so NFTs could become "standard" regardless.  

 

Perhaps a topic for a side discussion in our DAI telecons.  (Which
unfortunately I won't be able to attend for the next two weeks.)  

 

   -=- Mike

 

Mike Kearney

Huntsville, Alabama, USA 

 

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