CORRECTION: On July 22, I corrected the context around the statements made by Michael Hirsch about dupe sweeping and made them more accurate. The dupe sweeping was not implemented in the Cryptomarcs contract by Hirsch directly. The dupe sweeping elements and the conversation had with Middlemarch were in the context of Hirsch’s earlier creation of a template that can be used by anyone using the Indelible Labs contract to create their own smart contract. Such was the case in the creation of the Cryptomarcs contract. The questions that come out of it are not to do with Hirsch’s use of it, but of the implementation of ANY code in the “real world.”

ORIGINAL ARTICLE WITH EMENDATIONS

The link to this NFT shows an NFT that used to look very different.

It used to look like this, Cryptomarc #162, which is owned by EmpathAcrobat:

It now looks like this, Cryptomarc #4695:

This is the first known demonstration of dupe sweeping technology on the Cryptomarcs contract, but it gets wilder.

The banner image of this article shows two of what are actually four very similar looking Cryptomarcs NFTs that were minted this week: numbers 2083; 3231; 3232; and 4292.

Cryptomarcs are the brain offspring of ClaudiaKrypto, an artist who collaborated with Jason Cline to mint the 5000-Marc strong series. They are a satirical sendup of a16z co-founder and VC investor Marc Andreessen, who is famous for inventing Netscape, but also for the shape of his head.

Three of the “Marcs,” as they are called, were minted to three separate wallets, and are literally the same NFTs. They are triplicate.

The Marcs that are triplicate are: 2083, 3232, 4292

3231 is a Marc that is differentiated by the existence of black lipstick. You cannot see that unless you look at the traits.

EmpathAcrobat owns: 3231; 2083; and 3232.

The existence of these triple NFTs is an unbelievable but not quite improbable example of an engineering accident.

In onchain minting, the method used in the Cryptomarcs reveal is something referred to as an “instant reveal.” Because the reveals happen instantly, there is a small probability that someone minting at the same time can mint the exact same NFT.

To solve this problem, the Cryptomarcs team used the Indelible Labs product created by Hirsch to create its smart contract. That template product uses dupe sweeping code, created by Middlemarch.

I won’t go into the technical details of how this dupe sweeping works as code, but I will later in my book, Hidden Renaissance, which is out in October. This thing you are reading now will be part of the chapter on it.

The interesting thing about dupe sweeping is that the original creation of dupe sweeping works as code, but it apparently did not consider one context -- what happens when someone buys the duplicate or triplicate on secondary, thinking it’s a rare?

Since anyone can “re-roll” a duplicate, or a triplicate, even someone who does not hold the NFT in their wallet, this opens up a realm of questions about who is really in control of the NFT, and also it begs several philosophical questions about intentionality when one holds an NFT, when one sells it, when one mints it and, arguably, when one develops a contract for minting NFTs using code that comes from open source.

When the re-roll happens, the oldest mint, or the lowest number of the series, stays with the first holder, but the others are burnt. The burnt tokens go away and in their place, the holder of the now-burnt token ends up with a new NFT.

CORRECTED: In using Middlemarch’s dupe sweeping code in the template for Indelible Labs, Hirsch did not consider what would happen if someone bought one of the duplicates on a secondary exchange. It was probably not part of the consideration for the original creation of the code. The focus was on building and implementing smart contracts for minting a series.

Here is what Middlemarch has said about it.

Hirsch: “The original idea was if the creator of the collection and the majority of holders didn’t want dupes in the collection then if it was left to the token holder it could get stuck,” says Hirsch, when I discussed the existence of the triplets with him in a group DM called Reroll Marcs. EmpathAcrobat was the other person in the chat.

“That’s how I was going to do it, but had my mind changed by some people saying it could get stuck with dupes if you did that. Which is true.”

The conversation Hirsch is referring to is his separate conversation with Middlemarch about using the code snippet in his creation of the Indelible Labs template product. This product allows anyone to create a smart contract.

“I didn’t think about this particular scenario,” he says.

So this ability to re-roll something you don’t own creates something like a prisoner’s dilemma, or a Marc’s Dilemma, in this case.

If you had the power to burn a duplicate NFT, even if you did not own it, would you do it?

It creates a host of philosophical questions about art and collecting, as well as code itself, when used in art: Can code carry a subtext or context? Or is code just an absolutist idea shaper?

Art certainly does carry subtext and contexts, but if code shapes how we view or transact with art, many of these ideas are at risk of being pitched on their heads, if code is only seen as an implementation of an action. And on the blockchain, it becomes even more stark, since on the blockchain everything is just a permanent record, to be shared without bias.

Let’s explore a few of these fascinating questions (all of which are at the heart of The Hidden Renaissance book out in October).

What Does It All Mean!?

In the NFT world, rarities are considered the barometer of a mint’s value. Take an NFT series of 10k or 5k, or even 100 NFTs, for example. In that mint, probabilities are weighted so that the action of minting randomly assigns traits attached to the visual side of an NFT.

The idea is that you want to collect something that is the most rare. Something that looks the same as something else lowers your self-interest in selling it for profit, because who wants something that someone already has?

You want something like the Claudia Bot Marc.

The idea of burning someone else’s NFT may seem alarming to some, but it is also an idea that has considerable value to someone like an engineer, who approaches the creation of NFT smart contracts as a challenge to make something as perfect as possible. Some engineers believe that NFT mints should be “clean,” or should not have duplicates at all.

Artists and collectors, however, sometimes differ on this idea. Artists think that misprints like a duplicate are an important part of a series’ provenance, giving the misprints more value, and also drawing attention to the series as a whole.

Accidents in the art world lead to aesthetic and personal discoveries. They are part of an artist’s process. An artist’s accidents also can be a point of distinction and something that you recognise them for. There are literally many ways to look at this issue.

Dupe Sweeping is an interesting art / engineering problem for three reasons. It forces us to ask three questions:

1. What actually makes an NFT rare?

2. What makes an NFT a form of art?

3. Is Blockchain / NFT engineering an art form?

The First Question -- What Makes an NFT Rare?

While rarities might make something rare in terms of visual appearance, there are many other reasons why things you cannot see make the NFTs rare. And this is one example of that. The fact that three of the exact same NFTs exist at the same time, all held by three different people, is an historically interesting facet of the series provenance.

In the art world, this unique provenance would make the art valuable. Very valuable. Why? Well, it’s all about the mindset of a creative artist.

For artists, art is about bending the rules of physics, perception, ideology, culture, history, and philosophy, all at once. Artists attempt to deal with an inefficiency that might arise outside of the artist, or to deal with an inefficiency that might arise within the artist, at the moment of genesis. The point of the art is to make some kind of impact. I think it’s fair to say that while some people who do art might be perfectionist, most artists would probably agree that a “happy accident” while making art may lead to the type of impact one desires.

An artist does not typically work in a mindset of immutability.

He or she works in a moment of supreme flux, forming mistakes into something positive and part of the history of the object being created. To erase that is a rather severe limitation on creativity. In the current context, to be able to do this with a piece of visual art attached to an NFT, after it has been probabilistically generated suggests erasure and censorship.

But in the NFT world, not everything works that way, at all.

The point of an NFT is to be immutable. What happens on the blockchain stays there forever, so the mindset is, “This needs to work.”

Soo….

The Second Question -- What Makes an NFT Art?

Whether you are talking about modernist art, or Renaissance art, I believe that what you see in the visual field, or the picture, is not really the art. What you think about when you encounter the object is the art. And that has a lot to do with code.

This is a fundamentally interesting concept in NFTs, because digital art, by rights, is always a copy of what exists. Every time you click on a link to look at something on the internet, you are being served a copy. The existence of NFTs is meant to solidify ownership of an image. It’s the NFT, the token, that really bears the qualities of art. It represents all of the context and subtext of the object.

In regarding things in this sense, it seems true that the real art in NFTs is about how the code interacts with the visual object. And in the Cryptomarcs mint, the thing worth considering is that the dupe sweeping technology is being used.

Because it’s being used, the rather unintentional “art” about these objects is the philosophical attention that must be paid to what one is looking at, or what one is not looking at.

Think of just these few questions that come up when looking at the smart contract or the existence of triplicates:

1. Do the holders of these NFTs know they are triplicates?

2. If they know, what are they going to do about it?

3. If nobody does anything by the time Cline seals the contract, does that not mean that a different kind of art may exist other than one in which the triplicates are destroyed?

4. Does this mean that the blockchain is NOT immutable?

5. Is the series in fact a commentary on the blockchain?

6. Who has a right to destroy an NFT? What happens if someone destroys something you bought thinking it was rare?

I could go on, but you see, maybe, that the questions that arise are clearly different than the appearance of the Marcs. I mean, look at them.

Kind of boring, right?

This brings us to the third question.

The Third Question -- Is Blockchain / NFT Engineering an Art Form?

I think so. But, I think this comes with a caveat, or a sub-consideration. Clearly engineering is an art. Leonardo DaVinci did so much more than paint a lady in a portrait.

To think about hard computer science problems requires a mindset that is different than but not antithetical to art. Someone like Middlemarch is a creative genius, of his type. ClaudiaKrypto, the artist of the Cryptomarcs is a different kind of genius.

Art should be about accidents. But I think that the art world will have to contend with something very important -- What do you do with an accident?

I won’t answer that question. I think that it is the most important and purpose-driven questions of the NFT art ecosystem and it is not mine to answer alone. It’s up to the artists and the engineers.

So, what are we looking at when we look at NFT art? Are we actually paying attention, when we do see? Check out this screen-grab below.

Happy hunting!

CORRECTION: On July 22, I corrected the context around the statements made by Michael Hirsch about dupe sweeping and made them more accurate. The dupe sweeping was not implemented in the Cryptomarcs contract by Hirsch directly. The dupe sweeping elements and the conversation had with Middlemarch were in the context of Hirsch’s earlier creation of a template that can be used by anyone using the Indelible Labs contract to create their own smart contract. Such was the case in the creation of the Cryptomarcs contract. The questions that come out of it are not to do with Hirsch’s use of it, but of the implementation of ANY code in the “real world.”

ORIGINAL ARTICLE WITH EMENDATIONS

The link to this NFT shows an NFT that used to look very different.

It used to look like this, Cryptomarc #162, which is owned by EmpathAcrobat:

It now looks like this, Cryptomarc #4695:

This is the first known demonstration of dupe sweeping technology on the Cryptomarcs contract, but it gets wilder.

The banner image of this article shows two of what are actually four very similar looking Cryptomarcs NFTs that were minted this week: numbers 2083; 3231; 3232; and 4292.

Cryptomarcs are the brain offspring of ClaudiaKrypto, an artist who collaborated with Jason Cline to mint the 5000-Marc strong series. They are a satirical sendup of a16z co-founder and VC investor Marc Andreessen, who is famous for inventing Netscape, but also for the shape of his head.

Three of the “Marcs,” as they are called, were minted to three separate wallets, and are literally the same NFTs. They are triplicate.

The Marcs that are triplicate are: 2083, 3232, 4292

3231 is a Marc that is differentiated by the existence of black lipstick. You cannot see that unless you look at the traits.

EmpathAcrobat owns: 3231; 2083; and 3232.

The existence of these triple NFTs is an unbelievable but not quite improbable example of an engineering accident.

In onchain minting, the method used in the Cryptomarcs reveal is something referred to as an “instant reveal.” Because the reveals happen instantly, there is a small probability that someone minting at the same time can mint the exact same NFT.

To solve this problem, the Cryptomarcs team used the Indelible Labs product created by Hirsch to create its smart contract. That template product uses dupe sweeping code, created by Middlemarch.

I won’t go into the technical details of how this dupe sweeping works as code, but I will later in my book, Hidden Renaissance, which is out in October. This thing you are reading now will be part of the chapter on it.

The interesting thing about dupe sweeping is that the original creation of dupe sweeping works as code, but it apparently did not consider one context -- what happens when someone buys the duplicate or triplicate on secondary, thinking it’s a rare?

Since anyone can “re-roll” a duplicate, or a triplicate, even someone who does not hold the NFT in their wallet, this opens up a realm of questions about who is really in control of the NFT, and also it begs several philosophical questions about intentionality when one holds an NFT, when one sells it, when one mints it and, arguably, when one develops a contract for minting NFTs using code that comes from open source.

When the re-roll happens, the oldest mint, or the lowest number of the series, stays with the first holder, but the others are burnt. The burnt tokens go away and in their place, the holder of the now-burnt token ends up with a new NFT.

CORRECTED: In using Middlemarch’s dupe sweeping code in the template for Indelible Labs, Hirsch did not consider what would happen if someone bought one of the duplicates on a secondary exchange. It was probably not part of the consideration for the original creation of the code. The focus was on building and implementing smart contracts for minting a series.

Here is what Middlemarch has said about it.

Hirsch: “The original idea was if the creator of the collection and the majority of holders didn’t want dupes in the collection then if it was left to the token holder it could get stuck,” says Hirsch, when I discussed the existence of the triplets with him in a group DM called Reroll Marcs. EmpathAcrobat was the other person in the chat.

“That’s how I was going to do it, but had my mind changed by some people saying it could get stuck with dupes if you did that. Which is true.”

The conversation Hirsch is referring to is his separate conversation with Middlemarch about using the code snippet in his creation of the Indelible Labs template product. This product allows anyone to create a smart contract.

“I didn’t think about this particular scenario,” he says.

So this ability to re-roll something you don’t own creates something like a prisoner’s dilemma, or a Marc’s Dilemma, in this case.

If you had the power to burn a duplicate NFT, even if you did not own it, would you do it?

It creates a host of philosophical questions about art and collecting, as well as code itself, when used in art: Can code carry a subtext or context? Or is code just an absolutist idea shaper?

Art certainly does carry subtext and contexts, but if code shapes how we view or transact with art, many of these ideas are at risk of being pitched on their heads, if code is only seen as an implementation of an action. And on the blockchain, it becomes even more stark, since on the blockchain everything is just a permanent record, to be shared without bias.

Let’s explore a few of these fascinating questions (all of which are at the heart of The Hidden Renaissance book out in October).

What Does It All Mean!?

In the NFT world, rarities are considered the barometer of a mint’s value. Take an NFT series of 10k or 5k, or even 100 NFTs, for example. In that mint, probabilities are weighted so that the action of minting randomly assigns traits attached to the visual side of an NFT.

The idea is that you want to collect something that is the most rare. Something that looks the same as something else lowers your self-interest in selling it for profit, because who wants something that someone already has?

You want something like the Claudia Bot Marc.

The idea of burning someone else’s NFT may seem alarming to some, but it is also an idea that has considerable value to someone like an engineer, who approaches the creation of NFT smart contracts as a challenge to make something as perfect as possible. Some engineers believe that NFT mints should be “clean,” or should not have duplicates at all.

Artists and collectors, however, sometimes differ on this idea. Artists think that misprints like a duplicate are an important part of a series’ provenance, giving the misprints more value, and also drawing attention to the series as a whole.

Accidents in the art world lead to aesthetic and personal discoveries. They are part of an artist’s process. An artist’s accidents also can be a point of distinction and something that you recognise them for. There are literally many ways to look at this issue.

Dupe Sweeping is an interesting art / engineering problem for three reasons. It forces us to ask three questions:

1. What actually makes an NFT rare?

2. What makes an NFT a form of art?

3. Is Blockchain / NFT engineering an art form?

The First Question -- What Makes an NFT Rare?

While rarities might make something rare in terms of visual appearance, there are many other reasons why things you cannot see make the NFTs rare. And this is one example of that. The fact that three of the exact same NFTs exist at the same time, all held by three different people, is an historically interesting facet of the series provenance.

In the art world, this unique provenance would make the art valuable. Very valuable. Why? Well, it’s all about the mindset of a creative artist.

For artists, art is about bending the rules of physics, perception, ideology, culture, history, and philosophy, all at once. Artists attempt to deal with an inefficiency that might arise outside of the artist, or to deal with an inefficiency that might arise within the artist, at the moment of genesis. The point of the art is to make some kind of impact. I think it’s fair to say that while some people who do art might be perfectionist, most artists would probably agree that a “happy accident” while making art may lead to the type of impact one desires.

An artist does not typically work in a mindset of immutability.

He or she works in a moment of supreme flux, forming mistakes into something positive and part of the history of the object being created. To erase that is a rather severe limitation on creativity. In the current context, to be able to do this with a piece of visual art attached to an NFT, after it has been probabilistically generated suggests erasure and censorship.

But in the NFT world, not everything works that way, at all.

The point of an NFT is to be immutable. What happens on the blockchain stays there forever, so the mindset is, “This needs to work.”

Soo….

The Second Question -- What Makes an NFT Art?

Whether you are talking about modernist art, or Renaissance art, I believe that what you see in the visual field, or the picture, is not really the art. What you think about when you encounter the object is the art. And that has a lot to do with code.

This is a fundamentally interesting concept in NFTs, because digital art, by rights, is always a copy of what exists. Every time you click on a link to look at something on the internet, you are being served a copy. The existence of NFTs is meant to solidify ownership of an image. It’s the NFT, the token, that really bears the qualities of art. It represents all of the context and subtext of the object.

In regarding things in this sense, it seems true that the real art in NFTs is about how the code interacts with the visual object. And in the Cryptomarcs mint, the thing worth considering is that the dupe sweeping technology is being used.

Because it’s being used, the rather unintentional “art” about these objects is the philosophical attention that must be paid to what one is looking at, or what one is not looking at.

Think of just these few questions that come up when looking at the smart contract or the existence of triplicates:

1. Do the holders of these NFTs know they are triplicates?

2. If they know, what are they going to do about it?

3. If nobody does anything by the time Cline seals the contract, does that not mean that a different kind of art may exist other than one in which the triplicates are destroyed?

4. Does this mean that the blockchain is NOT immutable?

5. Is the series in fact a commentary on the blockchain?

6. Who has a right to destroy an NFT? What happens if someone destroys something you bought thinking it was rare?

I could go on, but you see, maybe, that the questions that arise are clearly different than the appearance of the Marcs. I mean, look at them.

Kind of boring, right?

This brings us to the third question.

The Third Question -- Is Blockchain / NFT Engineering an Art Form?

I think so. But, I think this comes with a caveat, or a sub-consideration. Clearly engineering is an art. Leonardo DaVinci did so much more than paint a lady in a portrait.

To think about hard computer science problems requires a mindset that is different than but not antithetical to art. Someone like Middlemarch is a creative genius, of his type. ClaudiaKrypto, the artist of the Cryptomarcs is a different kind of genius.

Art should be about accidents. But I think that the art world will have to contend with something very important -- What do you do with an accident?

I won’t answer that question. I think that it is the most important and purpose-driven questions of the NFT art ecosystem and it is not mine to answer alone. It’s up to the artists and the engineers.

So, what are we looking at when we look at NFT art? Are we actually paying attention, when we do see? Check out this screen-grab below.

Happy hunting!