6 ms·

I've got some dumb questions about this whole NFT thing... Is the artwork actually stored in the token or does it contain a URL that isn't guaranteed to always

by dcl 6y ago

I've got some dumb questions about this whole NFT thing... Is the artwork actually stored in the token or does it contain a URL that isn't guaranteed to always exist? I'm guessing there is no mechanism to change the link if the host should go down or stop hosting the content. Are NFT's used to recognise a transfer of ownership of the intelectual property?

captn3m0 6y ago
Almost always a URL.
- dcl 6y ago
  I see. So what would you even really own once that URL goes down. The whole thing relies on a weird level of trust and belief in what other people believe to be valuable.
  - smitty1e 6y ago
    My limited understanding is the blockchain data are distributed enough to get past the "that URL" issue. You'd need to destroy "that unknown collection of URLs" to eradicate the NFT. The problem as I see it is that NFTs lack any potential energy. Their value is purely kinetic, and expressed in the transaction. If no one wants my NFT, it's so much binary noise.
  - davidgerard 6y ago
    The same thing you "owned" before: the token. An NFT is just a pointer. Unless you have a contract specifically transferring additional rights, you literally just bought the pointer.
  - Applejinx 6y ago
    In this way it's like the stock market to the Nth power. As money accumulates in larger and larger sums, and is abstracted farther and farther from tangible real-world power and resources, you get this. Things get increasingly weird. There's got to be some kind of equilibrium point between this stuff, and your basic anti-fiat-currency gold bug, but I'm not sure what it is, particularly since modern macroeconomics acknowledges the capacity to just print money and make it up pretty quickly in the increased economic activity that makes possible: austerity isn't really a functional solution. This crypto stuff really works by the same principle: if you get enough people into it, they CAN'T crash because the important people are too deeply enmeshed in the system and will cheat to any degree to preserve the value of their properties. I think it depends what is done with it. With macroeconomics, you can have entire countries spurred to activity and producing goods and services because they can transact with resources. With this crypto stuff, I very much wonder if it ends up being a small number of very privileged people demanding rights to increasingly silly abstractions that are said to be the value of entire cities, or countries. I'm not sure that's sustainable, politically. I'd ask, how convenient is it for the first crypto trillionaires to buy real-world mercenaries? Things could get very dark, albeit in a peculiarly cyberpunk sort of way that might appeal to some.
    - lottin 6y ago
      It's not at all like the stock market. Shareholders are own the underlying business. NFT holders don't own the underlying piece of art. They only own the NFT. It's like buying a "share" that is just a blank piece of paper, and paying millions for it!
      - isoskeles 6y ago
        I interpreted the comment to mean something more like the derivatives market. In the derivatives market, you start getting "weird" stuff like futures contracts, collateralized debt obligations, or credit default swaps. Last two examples are, admittedly, a biased reference to 2008 since those are sort of the poster-boys of that market crash. Futures contracts aren't really that weird, but certainly more weird than just owning stock in a company. So people might be trading (as in 2008) to "own" some N-th power representation of private debt that ends up going to zero because the underlying private debt itself was not sustainable. It's different from NFT, but for each degree of distance the financial instrument moves away from the real world, it looks increasingly weird, e.g. I own a share of insurance on a fraction of a bucket of debt people took out to buy their homes. (And I still think this is better than NFT unless the NFT has some underlying real-world thing tied to it.)
        Anon1096 6y ago
        Derivatives markets always have some claim to an underlying financial good. If you buy futures, you can redeem it later for the good the futures guarantees. NFTs have zero relation to the underlying asset they are being connected to. All you're buying is a pointer to a piece of art.
- capableweb 6y ago
  Wrong. Most NFTs contain a content-address (hash) that is pointing to data on IPFS. The buyer can pin and make sure the data stays alive for everyone. Kind of like torrents but for web.
  - spurdoman77 6y ago
    Though, there isnt guarantee that someone will keep hosting these? Similarly as with torrents the seeders might go away. Maybe marginally better than URL but not very much IMO.
    - capableweb 6y ago
      > Maybe marginally better than URL but not very much IMO. Vastly better than a URL. Content-addresses points to content that can be served from anywhere. URLs point to actual locations. Anyone can seed the content behind the IPFS hash, including the owner of the NFT. While with a URL, you cannot change it. If the owner wants to make it work after it disappeared, they would have to buy the domain name, make the hosting work again and then setup a server there, add the file so it can be served. While with a IPFS hash, the owner could just turn on their IPFS node and everything works as before. Big difference.
      - lottin 6y ago
        But this has nothing to do with the NFT.
        capableweb 6y ago
        But it does matter and has to do with the NFT. If you put a URL, whose content can change over time, the NFT that effectively be changed. At least what it's pointing to. If you're using a content-address hash, you can be sure that you can always get back the same result from that hash as when you got the NFT N years ago.
        lottin 6y ago
davidgerard 6y ago
* An NFT is just a pointer - could contain a URL, or just a number used by its smart contract. * The artwork is just pointed to, it's not on the blockchain. * The URL may or may not exist for any given length of time either. (Even some NFTs that tried to point to IPFS, actually pointed to an IPFS redirector.) * No other rights - copyright, moral rights, reuse rights, etc - are conveyed without an explicit contractual transfer. Even the Christie's deal says, once you dig through the 33-page sales agreement, that you are just buying the token itself, and not the image pointed to. Also, you have zero guarantee that the artist had anything to do with that particular NFT - and there's a lot of NFT grifters "minting" other people's art.
- coachsisyphus 6y ago
  1. Bury drugs in ground. 2. Take picture. 3. Sell pointer to consumer via some kind of token w/ geocache info. 4. Profit?
- qixxiq 6y ago
  A minor clarification about IPFS here: The metadata in the NFT can (and in my opinion _should_) point to an ipfs:// style URL. The websites displaying the NFT would have to use some redirector, but the actual token would have a URL that anyone could host (known as "pinning") on the IPFS network.
  - davidgerard 6y ago
    and now we're seeing the problem that even with that - or if you go look at the redirector URL and go directly to the IPFS link yourself - the artwork is frequently not present anyway. Remember that IPFS is functionally just BitTorrent with magnet: links. So if nobody's seeding the file ... it's not there any more. And it looks like a pile of literally the sites selling NFTs don't bother seeding the files they've sold, mere weeks later. Thread: https://twitter.com/jonty/status/1372169695277760519 https://twitter.com/jonty/status/1372169695277760519
TigeriusKirk 6y ago
IP is generally not transferred with an NFT. There's some NFT markets that offer that as an option, but I'm not sure how it would hold up legally. It should be noted that IP is not generally transferred with any physical art purchase. Very few current NFTs exist on-chain. A handful do, and there's the interesting case of generative art where the code that makes the art lives on-chain. There's a push to get things on Arweave, a solution that purports to be a perpetual storage solution. In the long run, I think all art NFTs will have to go in that direction to remain credible.
- ahepp 6y ago
  >Very few current NFTs exist on-chain. Are you saying the underlying asset isn't stored in the blockchain? Or that the "title" isn't stored in the blockchain? How is the title associated with the asset? Presumably the title is something like a sha256 hash associated with a wallet. How do you know that hash means "beeple artwork"?
  - EMM_386 6y ago
    > Are you saying the underlying asset isn't stored in the blockchain? Or that the "title" isn't stored in the blockchain? What even is the "asset" in a lot of cases? People are buying Tweets, which are generated in real time by querying a database and generating some HTML and CSS. Or some UI code on native platforms. Or some JSON via an API. What is the asset? The Twitter code that generates the Tweet? A JPEG of the Tweet itself? The text of the Tweet? If it's an image of the Tweet, does take into account whether or not my user agent is in light or dark mode? The rabbit hole is never-ending with such questions.
  - thebean11 6y ago
    I think a hash of the file itself is stored on chain. So you could prove that your title matches the "artwork", but still need to store the artwork yourself or rely on the seller/platform to keep hosting it
  - machawinka 6y ago
    It is bullshit all the way down to such details.
dgellow 6y ago
In general you serve the actual assets via IPFS or hyper, or another immutable, decentralized network, and reference its address.
Kiro 6y ago
It's one URL in the token pointing to a JSON file with the metadata. In the JSON file there's another URL to the image itself. So you need to go through two different centralized servers to access the image. The only permanent thing is the first URL to the JSON file but nothing prevents the hosts from changing the content.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
  Last I checked it's typically hosted on ipfs
  - Kiro 6y ago
    Hm, I had a look at the 5000 days token and it's indeed an IPFS URI: ipfs://ipfs/QmPAg1mjxcEQPPtqsLoEcauVedaeMH81WXDPvPx3VC5zUz (enter 40913 at https://etherscan.io/token/0x2a46f2ffd99e19a89476e2f62270e0a35bbf0756#readContract https://etherscan.io/token/0x2a46f2ffd99e19a89476e2f62270e0a... in tokenURI) With that said, I went through some random NFTs the other day and I saw a lot of tokenURIs pointing to a plain metadata.json on a regular server that I could access in my browser.
    - X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
      Yikes. I've been meaning to do a survey & look at NFT rot, including number of pins on IPFS. Just because something is on IPFS doesn't mean it'll stick around

by dcl 6y ago

captn3m0 6y ago

Almost always a URL.

dcl 6y ago
I see. So what would you even really own once that URL goes down. The whole thing relies on a weird level of trust and belief in what other people believe to be valuable.
- smitty1e 6y ago
  My limited understanding is the blockchain data are distributed enough to get past the "that URL" issue. You'd need to destroy "that unknown collection of URLs" to eradicate the NFT. The problem as I see it is that NFTs lack any potential energy. Their value is purely kinetic, and expressed in the transaction. If no one wants my NFT, it's so much binary noise.
- davidgerard 6y ago
  The same thing you "owned" before: the token. An NFT is just a pointer. Unless you have a contract specifically transferring additional rights, you literally just bought the pointer.
- Applejinx 6y ago
  In this way it's like the stock market to the Nth power. As money accumulates in larger and larger sums, and is abstracted farther and farther from tangible real-world power and resources, you get this. Things get increasingly weird. There's got to be some kind of equilibrium point between this stuff, and your basic anti-fiat-currency gold bug, but I'm not sure what it is, particularly since modern macroeconomics acknowledges the capacity to just print money and make it up pretty quickly in the increased economic activity that makes possible: austerity isn't really a functional solution. This crypto stuff really works by the same principle: if you get enough people into it, they CAN'T crash because the important people are too deeply enmeshed in the system and will cheat to any degree to preserve the value of their properties. I think it depends what is done with it. With macroeconomics, you can have entire countries spurred to activity and producing goods and services because they can transact with resources. With this crypto stuff, I very much wonder if it ends up being a small number of very privileged people demanding rights to increasingly silly abstractions that are said to be the value of entire cities, or countries. I'm not sure that's sustainable, politically. I'd ask, how convenient is it for the first crypto trillionaires to buy real-world mercenaries? Things could get very dark, albeit in a peculiarly cyberpunk sort of way that might appeal to some.
  - lottin 6y ago
    It's not at all like the stock market. Shareholders are own the underlying business. NFT holders don't own the underlying piece of art. They only own the NFT. It's like buying a "share" that is just a blank piece of paper, and paying millions for it!
    - isoskeles 6y ago
      I interpreted the comment to mean something more like the derivatives market. In the derivatives market, you start getting "weird" stuff like futures contracts, collateralized debt obligations, or credit default swaps. Last two examples are, admittedly, a biased reference to 2008 since those are sort of the poster-boys of that market crash. Futures contracts aren't really that weird, but certainly more weird than just owning stock in a company. So people might be trading (as in 2008) to "own" some N-th power representation of private debt that ends up going to zero because the underlying private debt itself was not sustainable. It's different from NFT, but for each degree of distance the financial instrument moves away from the real world, it looks increasingly weird, e.g. I own a share of insurance on a fraction of a bucket of debt people took out to buy their homes. (And I still think this is better than NFT unless the NFT has some underlying real-world thing tied to it.)
      - Anon1096 6y ago
        Derivatives markets always have some claim to an underlying financial good. If you buy futures, you can redeem it later for the good the futures guarantees. NFTs have zero relation to the underlying asset they are being connected to. All you're buying is a pointer to a piece of art.
capableweb 6y ago
Wrong. Most NFTs contain a content-address (hash) that is pointing to data on IPFS. The buyer can pin and make sure the data stays alive for everyone. Kind of like torrents but for web.
- spurdoman77 6y ago
  Though, there isnt guarantee that someone will keep hosting these? Similarly as with torrents the seeders might go away. Maybe marginally better than URL but not very much IMO.
  - capableweb 6y ago
    > Maybe marginally better than URL but not very much IMO. Vastly better than a URL. Content-addresses points to content that can be served from anywhere. URLs point to actual locations. Anyone can seed the content behind the IPFS hash, including the owner of the NFT. While with a URL, you cannot change it. If the owner wants to make it work after it disappeared, they would have to buy the domain name, make the hosting work again and then setup a server there, add the file so it can be served. While with a IPFS hash, the owner could just turn on their IPFS node and everything works as before. Big difference.
    - lottin 6y ago
      But this has nothing to do with the NFT.
      - capableweb 6y ago
        But it does matter and has to do with the NFT. If you put a URL, whose content can change over time, the NFT that effectively be changed. At least what it's pointing to. If you're using a content-address hash, you can be sure that you can always get back the same result from that hash as when you got the NFT N years ago.
        lottin 6y ago

davidgerard 6y ago

* An NFT is just a pointer - could contain a URL, or just a number used by its smart contract. * The artwork is just pointed to, it's not on the blockchain. * The URL may or may not exist for any given length of time either. (Even some NFTs that tried to point to IPFS, actually pointed to an IPFS redirector.) * No other rights - copyright, moral rights, reuse rights, etc - are conveyed without an explicit contractual transfer. Even the Christie's deal says, once you dig through the 33-page sales agreement, that you are just buying the token itself, and not the image pointed to. Also, you have zero guarantee that the artist had anything to do with that particular NFT - and there's a lot of NFT grifters "minting" other people's art.

coachsisyphus 6y ago
1. Bury drugs in ground. 2. Take picture. 3. Sell pointer to consumer via some kind of token w/ geocache info. 4. Profit?
qixxiq 6y ago
A minor clarification about IPFS here: The metadata in the NFT can (and in my opinion _should_) point to an ipfs:// style URL. The websites displaying the NFT would have to use some redirector, but the actual token would have a URL that anyone could host (known as "pinning") on the IPFS network.
- davidgerard 6y ago
  and now we're seeing the problem that even with that - or if you go look at the redirector URL and go directly to the IPFS link yourself - the artwork is frequently not present anyway. Remember that IPFS is functionally just BitTorrent with magnet: links. So if nobody's seeding the file ... it's not there any more. And it looks like a pile of literally the sites selling NFTs don't bother seeding the files they've sold, mere weeks later. Thread: https://twitter.com/jonty/status/1372169695277760519 https://twitter.com/jonty/status/1372169695277760519

TigeriusKirk 6y ago

IP is generally not transferred with an NFT. There's some NFT markets that offer that as an option, but I'm not sure how it would hold up legally. It should be noted that IP is not generally transferred with any physical art purchase. Very few current NFTs exist on-chain. A handful do, and there's the interesting case of generative art where the code that makes the art lives on-chain. There's a push to get things on Arweave, a solution that purports to be a perpetual storage solution. In the long run, I think all art NFTs will have to go in that direction to remain credible.

ahepp 6y ago
>Very few current NFTs exist on-chain. Are you saying the underlying asset isn't stored in the blockchain? Or that the "title" isn't stored in the blockchain? How is the title associated with the asset? Presumably the title is something like a sha256 hash associated with a wallet. How do you know that hash means "beeple artwork"?
- EMM_386 6y ago
  > Are you saying the underlying asset isn't stored in the blockchain? Or that the "title" isn't stored in the blockchain? What even is the "asset" in a lot of cases? People are buying Tweets, which are generated in real time by querying a database and generating some HTML and CSS. Or some UI code on native platforms. Or some JSON via an API. What is the asset? The Twitter code that generates the Tweet? A JPEG of the Tweet itself? The text of the Tweet? If it's an image of the Tweet, does take into account whether or not my user agent is in light or dark mode? The rabbit hole is never-ending with such questions.
- thebean11 6y ago
  I think a hash of the file itself is stored on chain. So you could prove that your title matches the "artwork", but still need to store the artwork yourself or rely on the seller/platform to keep hosting it
- machawinka 6y ago
  It is bullshit all the way down to such details.

dgellow 6y ago

In general you serve the actual assets via IPFS or hyper, or another immutable, decentralized network, and reference its address.

Kiro 6y ago

It's one URL in the token pointing to a JSON file with the metadata. In the JSON file there's another URL to the image itself. So you need to go through two different centralized servers to access the image. The only permanent thing is the first URL to the JSON file but nothing prevents the hosts from changing the content.

X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
Last I checked it's typically hosted on ipfs
- Kiro 6y ago
  Hm, I had a look at the 5000 days token and it's indeed an IPFS URI: ipfs://ipfs/QmPAg1mjxcEQPPtqsLoEcauVedaeMH81WXDPvPx3VC5zUz (enter 40913 at https://etherscan.io/token/0x2a46f2ffd99e19a89476e2f62270e0a35bbf0756#readContract https://etherscan.io/token/0x2a46f2ffd99e19a89476e2f62270e0a... in tokenURI) With that said, I went through some random NFTs the other day and I saw a lot of tokenURIs pointing to a plain metadata.json on a regular server that I could access in my browser.
  - X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
    Yikes. I've been meaning to do a survey & look at NFT rot, including number of pins on IPFS. Just because something is on IPFS doesn't mean it'll stick around