I Just Issued My First Rare Digital Art Via Ascribe.io (Steem Exclusive Art Giveaway - Only 5 in Existance!)

You could be the owner of my first ever verifiable, tokenized rare digital artwork. I’m giving away one of the five copies of one of my favorite personal artworks, The Art Factory:

This was the art for my song of the name same (available on bandcamp). I love this thing and I’d love for you to win the free copy, so keep reading. First let's detour to learn about the wonderful world of rare digital art:

Rare Digital Art? Wut?

Shoutout to @Shortcut’s original thread about this earlier today

You can buy and sell exclusive copies of digital art via blockchains. Each digital artwork is issued as a limited number of “editions”, with each edition having its own verifiable hash on the bitcoin blockchain. This is like an author who autographs exactly ten copies of her book. The autographed copies contain the same text and imagery, but thanks to the signature, they are uniquely valuable. Limited edition digital ownership tokens do the same thing to digital artworks.

The most famous example, or maybe infamous, are the "rare pepes"

_gross

You buy, sell, and trade rare digital artworks just like you do with your steem rewards. Anybody can see the public data on the blockchain, but only you have the private key that controls the token and allows you to send it to people. Your token serves as a certificate of ownership which cannot be forged or faked.

This might sound silly. Isn’t it all arbitrary? Well the answer is no. It turns out that rare digital art is fucking awesome.

As soon as you issue the tokens for an artwork, it feels real. You’d think it is dumb, but there is a genuine sense of ownership over the artwork. If you collect digital artworks over time, you can hold a digital exhibit of works that you genuinely own. This is interesting to me.

There are a few more reasons I can think of why rare digital art is cool:

• It’s fun to trade digital stuff back and forth.

• You could theoretically earn money if the rare digital artworks appreciate in value.

• This is better patronage model than donations. Artists can fund work by selling ownership of the digital artwork tokens to a limited number of buyers/patrons. The buyers get the cred of publically showing off their support for the art via displaying their ownership certificate.

• I suspect that rarifying digital media may be necessary for humans to handle the information overload that will only get worse in coming decades. We can rarify the artworks we want to remember.

Steem Exclusive Rare Art Giveaway

As a reminder from earlier in this post — I’m giving away one out of five editions of my first ever rare digital artwork:

I gave away my second edition of this art to @shortcut, the guy that brought this whole idea to my attention. In return, he traded me the 2nd edition of a 10-piece run of his “Zero Knowledge” work.

_Brilliant.

That’s my certificate of ownership. I now own one of the only ten digital editions of this artwork in existence.

Now it’s your turn. Sign up for an account at https://www.ascribe.io (it’s free and no hassle) to get started. This site will be your digital wallet for artworks.

The third edition of my “The Art Factory” is now up for grabs! All you have to do is leave a comment saying that you want to be entered into the raffle. I’ll use a random number generator to make the final pick 48 hours after posting.

Here’s a list of all five editions:

Edition 1: My own personal copy
Edition 2: Traded to @shortcut for his own artwork “Zero Knowledge”
Edition 3: Giving this away to one Steemian in the comments
Edition 4: Purchased by @lemony-cricket
Edition 5: On Sale For 2 Steem

The fourth and fifth editions are first come first serve. If you want to guarantee that you can get a copy of this art, I recommend buying it ASAP because once these editions are gone, there will be NO new editions printed.

To purchase one of the two remaining editions, transfer me 2 steem with “The Art Factory” in the memo. If you try to buy it after it sells out, I will return the money ASAP.

What do you think of rare digital artwork as a concept in general? Very curious to hear your thoughts on this one, steem crew.