APP, NFTs, and the Myth of Permanence — A Friendly Autopsy (with Receipts) Date: 2025-09-02

Date: 2025-09-02
Series: APP / Devlog / Critical Notes

We’re building APP (the AOF Provenance Protocol) and we’re not going to sell it to you as a utopia. This post is a friendly autopsy — of NFTs, of our own system, and of the myths both camps use. If this is going to be worth anything by 2027, it has to survive criticism first.

What NFTs said they’d fix (and what actually happened)

The promise: permanence, provenance, scarcity, decentralisation, and artist sovereignty.
The reality: much of the media sits off-chain (links to web servers or IPFS gateways), marketplaces gate the experience, and the market has whiplash. Recent research shows a heavy reliance on centralised or semi-centralised metadata storage, which undermines the “on-chain forever” story.

On the economics: the froth is gone. By early 2025, reports show “art NFT” volumes down around 90%+ from the 2021 peak (with periodic rebounds, still far below the top). In other words, survivorship bias is doing most of the talking now.

On energy: Bitcoin remains energy‑intensive; Ethereum cut its footprint by ~99.95% after the 2022 Merge — a genuine improvement worth acknowledging — but the wider ecosystem’s sustainability claims often outrun the data.

So why APP at all?

Because we want provenance without the exchange tokens, KYC hoops, and platform risk. APP uses old, boring tools:

• a hash (SHA‑256) as the file’s fingerprint,
• a public timestamp (a Ghost page or zine),
• and where possible an analogue anchor (print, sketch, instax, ledger).

Hashes are a NIST‑standard way to prove a file hasn’t changed; we publish them because verification should be public, not priestly.

For resilience, we lean on library logic: LOCKSS — Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe. Multiple copies, across different admins and mediums, beat any single ledger (including ours).

Where NFTs still win (and we should say it out loud)

• Global liquidity: a token can be traded 24/7. (Whether that’s good for art is another story.)
• Censorship resistance (sometimes): Bitcoin‑style systems are hard to shut down.
• On‑chain composability: smart contracts let you wire royalties/logic (even if, in practice, marketplace policies break that promise).

We’re not anti‑artist. If someone finds real utility in NFTs, good. This project is for those who want provenance without being pulled into that market logic.

Where APP could fail (and how we design against it)

1. Human error: hash the wrong file or forget to log the first sketch; the provenance trail breaks.
   Design response: checklists + reproducible SOPs + versioned PDFs. (Boring saves futures.)
2. Centralisation creep: if the “AOF ledger” becomes the ledger, we reproduce the same gatekeeping we’re critiquing.
   Design response: plural ledgers by design (yours, ours, zines, eBay timestamps, archive mirrors). We are documentation, not bottleneck.
3. Link rot / platform death: URLs die; Ghosts vanish.
   Design response: embed hashes in printed artefacts, mirrored PDFs, and third‑party records (auctions, web archives). LOCKSS over vibes.
4. “Not decentralised enough”: true; APP isn’t a blockchain.
   Design response: we don’t pretend. APP is an archival standard, not a currency. Different tool, different job.
5. Regulatory shifts: AI provenance marks and “content credentials” may become mandatory for some platforms; our system must coexist with (or export to) those labels.
   Design response: watch C2PA/Content Credentials and the EU AI Act transparency rules; map clean bridges so APP artefacts can carry those labels when needed.

Energy, quickly (without hand‑waving)

• Bitcoin: still a major power draw; Cambridge tracks it continuously. Debate exists about renewables share, but the scale remains large.
• Ethereum: after the Merge, energy use fell by ~99.95–99.99%. That should change how we talk about Ethereum‑based art specifically. Improvement and critique can coexist.
• APP: our footprint is the footprint of paper, hosting, and human process. Not zero; just legible.

“Art from consciousness” (the uncomfortable centre)

APP’s anchor is the first translation of consciousness — the doodle, the voice note, the shutter click. Everything after is a derivative (including AI remixes). That’s not a moral claim; it’s a practical one: you can only protect what you can name and capture first.

The risk: creators must learn to mint the seed before they share. That’s a habit change, and habits are hard.

Where this intersects with industry standards

We aren’t reinventing crypto proofs; we’re piggybacking on standards:

• SHA‑256 for integrity (NIST FIPS 180‑4).
• LOCKSS for preservation culture.
• C2PA for optional media credentials when platforms demand them.

If regulators require labels (EU AI Act), APP content can carry them without moving the archive to a corporate ledger.

What we’ll measure (so this doesn’t drift into utopia)

• Time‑to‑mint a seed (from sketch to hash + public timestamp).
• Redundancy count per artefact (how many independent copies/records exist).
• Dispute rate (how often provenance is challenged, and outcomes).
• Survivability drills (verify we can reconstruct a record if a site disappears).

If this can’t survive contact with reality, we’ll publish the failure — that’s part of the archive too.

TL;DR

• NFTs solved some problems and created new ones; the market shrank and the storage reality is messy.
• Ethereum’s energy story improved drastically post‑Merge; Bitcoin’s hasn’t.
• APP is an archival protocol: hash + timestamp + analogue anchor + lots of copies.
• We expect criticism; we’re publishing this so it can begin.

Sources / receipts (selected)

• Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI); ongoing estimates and comparisons.
• Ethereum post‑Merge energy reductions (~99.95–99.99%).
• NFT metadata centralisation risks (arXiv 2024).
• NFT market contraction (DappRadar analysis, academic summaries).
• C2PA / Content Credentials standard.
• NIST FIPS 180‑4 (SHA‑256).
• LOCKSS preservation principle (Stanford).

Key (Acronyms & Terms)

• APP – AOF Provenance Protocol. A system for minting and recording provenance without blockchain.
• AOF – Art of Faceless. The parent project/publisher of APP.
• NFT – Non-Fungible Token. A digital token used to mark ownership of a digital asset, often on Ethereum.
• ETH – Ethereum, a blockchain platform and cryptocurrency.
• BTC – Bitcoin, the first major cryptocurrency.
• SHA-256 – Secure Hash Algorithm 256-bit. A cryptographic function that generates a unique fingerprint of a file.
• KYC – Know Your Customer. Identity checks required by financial services and crypto platforms.
• LOCKSS – “Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe.” A digital preservation principle pioneered by Stanford Libraries.
• C2PA – Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity. An industry standard for embedding provenance in media files, backed by Adobe, Microsoft, and others.
• EU AI Act – European Union legislation (2024/25) that includes transparency requirements for AI-generated content.

Document: AOF Provenance Protocol (APP) – Critical Notes Post
Version: v0.1 (2025)
Date of Issue: 2025-09-02
Publisher: Art of Faceless (AOF)
Licence: © Art of Faceless 2025. Personal use permitted. Commercial use requires written licence.