A Bitcoin for GIFs Aims to Make Digital Art Ownable
Art buyers don't tend to buy digital art, except for a website or domain name here and there. It's hard to put a price on a GIF if it can be copied with a keystroke.
But maybe digital currency can change that.
At Rhizome's Seven On Seven conference at the New Museum last Saturday, multimedia artist Kevin McCoy and entrepreneur Anil Dash suggested a way that a cryptographic block chain like the kind used to track bitcoin transactions could also be used to establish that a particular digital artwork is "original," confirm its author, and, they hope, develop a market for it.
After a day of brainstorming and hacking, the pair took a GIF, authored by Kevin and his partner Jennifer McCoy, and registered it in a Namecoin wallet. It was likely the first time anyone has given a work of art a place on the blockchain. Dash bought it for the four dollars he had in his pocket.
The idea to combine digital currency and digital art has lately been brewing in some sort of hive mind. Both McCoy and Dash had imagined it separately. Back in October, McCoy started a thread on the subject in a Bitcoin forum—though to a fairly unenthusiastic response from the cryptocurrency community....MORE
The first blockchain-verified GIF
