Kind: captions
Language: en
While most chased profits one early
Bitcoin user saw a different kind of
potential and helped invent what would
become one of crypto's most famous uses
I'm an artist and I've been an artist
for a long long time but I wasn't always
I studied philosophy and literature and
that was my main kind of Interest
early 2000s Kevin and Jennifer McCoy
were successful digital artists
their Works shown by prestigious
galleries
but unauthorized copies were appearing
all over the internet
they realized there was no such thing as
a digital original that they could
actually own and control
in a digital environment of course it's
always a copy and it proliferates uh you
know everywhere
um and and you know and so there is no
original
gave Kevin
created for the first time an idea of
digital scarcity all of a sudden the
everyday Norm that you had about digital
technology that it's infinitely
reproducible that is everything is just
copy and paste that didn't apply in this
case if I send you my Bitcoins I don't
have them anymore and you have them
that's scarcity it's not everywhere it's
only somewhere and so I had this
realization that if it was possible via
Bitcoin to create uh uniqueness around
currency and there had to be a way that
you could create uniqueness around a
digital artwork but I didn't know how
I'm really excited about this last
pairing Kevin attended a conference
where each artist was paired with a tech
partner and given 24 hours to develop a
new idea they'd present to an audience
what we wanted to talk to you about
today is this idea we have monetized
graphics
uh and how we can put digital artworks
in Chains so almost immediately after I
was paired up with Kevin McCoy he and I
sat down and started sketching out ideas
for how could you make an assertion on a
blockchain to say that a certain digital
work was an original unique item
all night coding session
build Dash and cut
blockchain
it was a segment of a video work that
Kevin and Jennifer McCoy had created
together and I actually found it
mesmerizing and this was our onstage
example of taking this file and creating
a blockchain based record of that we've
created a system that will establish
verification and provenance over digital
files digital artworks that provenance
is a chain of ownership and Neil and
Kevin created a record of ownership that
would live on the blockchain
whoever held the key to access it owned
the digital original we did pull
together in a couple hours so given that
it was something we sort of did over the
course of an evening and into a late
night uh it was a pretty good first
version do you got 20 bucks and we sort
of said we'd negotiate a price for it I
can't pay you in U.S dollars sure all
right that's cool with me
I have four dollars
really it was the first transaction of
something that would eventually come to
be called a non-fungible token or nft