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NFT always felt ridiculous to me, but I though I understood the mechanism: "it's like baseball cards but in the blockchain". This week I learned it's not. NFT

NFT always felt ridiculous to me, but I though I understood the mechanism: "it's like baseball cards but in the blockchain". This week I learned it's not. NFT are Non Fungible Tokens, which means tokens that can't be divided, unlike crypto currencies like Bitcoin that can be divided in Satoshis. So you exchange the totality of it, or not. Basically it's a unique number in the blockchain you change ownership by applying cryptographic signatures during a transaction. Most of the time it's an ethereum smart contract address + a token id. But wait, where are the pics ? The gifs ? The videos ? I mean, opensea.io does allow you to mint (the term for magically turning a media into an official NFT backed by the blockchain) up to 100MB of content. So where is it? Not in the blockchain, obviously, it's already fat enough with tiny transaction data. Well, it's just stored in the centralized platforms like opensea, rarible, etc. Basically, the NFT is not even that piece of art, baseball card or whatever, it's just the number linked to the proprietary, centralized, privately own trading platform that hosts the content. The platform disappears, or bans you, or changes policy, or is blocked, or whatever, and your NFT is back to being a bare-bone blockchain contract number and a token id. It's even more bullshit that I though! You don't even have control on whatever you make believe to virtually own. It's madness. But you know what, the week I spent in this weird universe was also so much fun. There is an atmosphere of creative WTF, a mix of scams, community bonding, money laundering and genuine experimentation all bathed in some frenetic craziness that reminds me of the early days of the internet. Despite all that crap, I kinda like it.

hanklazard 5y ago
> I mean, opensea.io does allow you to mint (the term for magically turning a media into an official NFT backed by the blockchain) up to 100MB of content. So where is it? Not in the blockchain, obviously, it's already fat enough with tiny transaction data. Well, it's just stored in the centralized platforms like opensea, rarible, etc. You’re right that this is the way many have been created so far, but that will not be the case for long. Already people have pointed NFTs to IPFS/Filecoin which will give them much more staying power. And this can be done without using a centralized platform like opensea, check out nft.storage and metaplex (1) as starting points. 1. https://github.com/metaplex-foundation/metaplex https://github.com/metaplex-foundation/metaplex
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  Agreed, and I hope it will become more popular. But right now, since you can't browse IFPS with firefox or chrome, and manual minting is harder than clicking a button on open sea, I wager private platforms will keep their appeal. Maybe when decentralized service will do all the decentralized hard work for you, take your metamask, upload your content on IFPS, mint it, then let you sell it, it will take on.
  - antasvara 5y ago
    I think the key here is that we've already as a society given up a lot of our ownership for the sake of convenience. Most people buy their phones through a mobile carrier, locking them in through the life of their contract. I'm not totally sure about how Google accounts work, but I'd wager that getting your Google drive data back if you're banned is difficult. Kids these days are even purchasing skins for video games with the full knowledge that if they get banned, all of those skins will be gone. A lot of what we own these days is not "owned" in the traditional sense. Opensea is no different from purchasing a video game that you could be banned from in that both purchase prices aren't ownership, but rather a price to access a product.
  - nyhc99 5y ago
    Actually this is quickly becoming the standard. Once you mint an NFT on opensea, you have the option to "freeze" the metadata, which transfers the image and everything else to IPFS storage.
- rtkwe 5y ago
  Don’t those still rely on the gateway for wherever you mint it on IPFS staying up? The NFT link only points to a gateway which can go down then you’re at the mercy of it being replicated across nodes right?
  - hanklazard 5y ago
    Correct, it still only exists as long as someone on the IPFS network wants to keep it up. Similar to bittorrent in that way. Still, in the long-term, it seems that having the actual image/video/audio/other data replicated on a decentralized network rather than hosted on a single domain makes more sense to me (but then again, I'm very bullish on the future of IPFS/Filecoin).
BukhariH 5y ago
Not quite right. The assets aren’t necessarily stored on OpenSea. You can see how OpenSea gets the metadata like asset url via the docs: https://docs.opensea.io/docs/metadata-standards https://docs.opensea.io/docs/metadata-standards If you scroll down you’ll see that the assets can be hosted on decentralised networks too like IPFS. Also, not all NFT projects are built the same. I suggest you check out Pak’s Poets project - it’s a very exciting piece of performance art built around game theory. Disclaimer: I don’t own any NFTs but that doesn’t mean I’m not excited by what they’re doing.
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  I agree, you can store it on IPFS. But most people don't, they don't even know it's possible. I mean, most people could host their own video, but they upload on youtube, and just youtube. Well, this is the same, only even more niche, so the easy "upload" on open sea is very, very attractive. I'd wager if one the most popular NFT trading plateform disapear, 99% of all NFT would go poof.
  - miracle2k 5y ago
    The majority of all NFTs are stored in IPFS; source: I run a platform indexing NFT media files. Also, the art is the token. Data storage is a orthogonal problem entirely.
    - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
      > The majority of all NFTs are stored in IPFS Oh, I would never have believed it. Thanks for the info. Most people that I know don't even know what IPFS is. Are those human uploaded, or bot uploaded? > the art is the token Yes, but why isn't the token displayed in the centered of the page on most popular platforms? Because human needs a symbol that represent that token. For most people, the animation and the number are the same. NFT work because people share a believe about them, after all. And all the strong believe in humanity are sustained using symbols. BTW, what's the name of your platform?
    - BrianOnHN 5y ago
dls2016 5y ago
I think the best explanation is that NFTs are a very fancy system of provenance (which the art world already takes very seriously).
- Jensson 5y ago
  NFT's doesn't prove anything though. The art world care a lot about originals, but an NFT cannot prove that something is an original. Nothing would prevent the author from just issuing a lot of NFT's pointing to a lot of copies of the same art piece. They are even worse than that, NFT doesn't even represent the piece of art, if the service it is connected to goes down then the NFT points to nothing, you can't even prove that it at one time pointed to a specific image. Lastly, there is no reason for a service provider to issue NFT's. Service providers earns a ton from taxing the market when people trade items, there is no reason for them to give this away by issuing NFT's. Rather every service I've seen issue NFT's did it to sell items that will never be valuable, but that NFT enthusiasts now think will be valuable thanks to the NFT. Anyway, best case NFT's are just an untaxed market associated with a game or service content. That is the absolutely best case, in what way does that sound novel? Edit: The untaxed part probably means that governments will shut it down if it becomes too popular. So even less reasons to invest.
  - Sargos 5y ago
    >Nothing would prevent the author from just issuing a lot of NFT's pointing to a lot of copies of the same art piece Nothing prevents an author from just issuing a lot of duplicate art and claiming they are the original copy. Except it's fraud and people would likely figure it out over time. That's the exact same scenario as the blockchain except it's even harder for the artist to cheat as everyone can see the blockchain so when the artist makes copies and tries to sell them then everyone can easily see that they are frauds. >you can't even prove that it at one time pointed to a specific image Most NFTs use IPFS which uses hashes to uniquely identify files and even if the file disappears from the internet it can be recovered by anyone who still has the original file and be back online.
seanhunter 5y ago
Non-fungible doesn't mean something can't be divided, it means a specific one just can't be substituted for another one. An example: If I trade oil, one barrel of oil with a certain spec[1] is fungible with another barrel of oil with the same spec. If I sell you some oil you don't care which specific barrel you get as long as it's the same kind of thing. Likewise if you borrow 10 dollars from me you can pay me back with any combination of notes up to the value of 10 dollars, you don't have to give me back the specific bills I gave you. On the other hand, things like art are not fungible. If I loan a Van Gogh to a gallery I very much want the same piece to be sent back to me after the exhibition is done. It's not ok for them to send me something else. Even if it's "sunflowers" (since Van Gogh painted a few of those and they are quite similar), I want the actual one I loaned to be sent back to me. Normal bitcoins or ETH are fungible whereas NFTs are non-fungible. The specific one you have matters usually because it represents a digital proof of ownership of some specific resource (a bored ape or whatever). [1] The spec for oil types standardises particular grades and then people trade a standard barrel size (called a bbl which is short for "blue barrel" because they used to be painted blue). "Brent" and "WTI" are different grades. A barrel of brent is fungible with another barrel of brent but not with a barrel of WTI because that's a different grade.
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  Thank you for the correction. I particularly appreciate the kind tone, it's rare on the internet.
- 3np 5y ago
  To make a parallel to the social media economy: upvotes are fungible, reshares are not
- int_19h 5y ago
  So you can split NFT tokens and e.g. resell them separately?
  - Traster 5y ago
    Oh do I have a scam for you! So, no, obviously you can't divide an NFT, but what you can do is create a new fungible token (or smart contract not sure about the exact details) that represents partial ownership of the NFT. So you can issue 1000 of these fungible tokens that represent partial ownership of the NFT.
cableshaft 5y ago
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the NFT thing (I get the base concept, and I know originally it was thought of for digital ownership of home deeds, etc, which makes perfect sense to me, but everything that I'm seeing from it lately just seems like beanie baby collecting, like art and avatars and buying with the sole expectation of selling to a bigger sucker later). Where are you going to immerse yourself into this universe and seeing the community and experimentation? I don't know where I'd even start with that.
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  I have a lot of crypto nerds as friends, they have a trading platform, and so they are on all the reddit/discord/telegram important channels. I wouldn't know where to begin, because I just got dunked into it a few days ago when one my friends asked my help to code a platform to create vanity user pages. I had nothing to do, it came to me :)
  - cableshaft 5y ago
    Gotcha. I've been into cryptocurrencies for a long time, but I've been feeling like a bit of a luddite when it comes to NFTs, or like most people who call crypto a ponzi scheme (some coins pretty much are, but not all), and that probably means I'm missing something. I know where to go to find good information about crypto, but not NFTs.
jameshart 5y ago
So I do wonder whether the NFT divide (between people who get it and people who don’t) might be a generational split, related to a larger societal shift away from ‘owning things’. We’ve definitely passed ‘peak thing ownership’. For those of us old enough to have grown up with the idea of ‘buying a book’, ‘buying a toy’, ‘buying a CD’ or ‘buying a magazine’ we have a particular mental framework for ‘owning’ stuff. But people stopped buying those things a while ago (people stopped buying toys? Not completely, but certainly some of that spend now goes on apps right?). So for people who have grown up in a digital-subscription world, they might just have a fundamentally different mental model of ownership - one which is more compatible with NFTs as a reasonable idea than the paradigm us old ‘thing owners’ have. Like, consider some of the things you likely have bought recently: a ‘twelve month Netflix subscription’, a ‘Steam library game’, an ‘app’… you bought those things with no expectation you could resell them later because you don’t think of those as ‘things’. And because you haven’t yet adjusted your mental model to the reality that this is what you spend your wealth on now - ephemeral digital rights you won’t be able to pass on to your kids when you’re gone. But if you grew up digital native and the only things you’ve ever been able to buy are non transferable digital pointers to rights to use something, maybe the idea of a transferable digital rights pointer seems like a crazy innovative new idea that changes everything?
- jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
  The difference between most[1] NFTs and Netflix/Steam/Apps is with the latter, you are buying access to something. With most of these NFTs that are just a picture, owning the NFT doesn't confer any special right to you. We can all enjoy the Disaster Girl meme, you don't have to have bought the NFT. The owner of the first ever tweet cannot actually do anything with it, edit it, destroy it, put it in a private collection so only they can look at it. The only thing buying one of these NFTs gives you is I guess "bragging rights" but I think it remains to be seen why anyone should care that you paid money for 0x3B3ee1931Dc30C1957379FAc9aba94D1C48a5405,25046. [1] The only exception is maybe these NFTs that interact with something on the blockchain like an item or place in a videogame, in that case owning the NFT provides some sort of utility.
  - 5y ago
MR4D 5y ago
My favorite description, heard just this week: “Here’s a receipt for the Mona Lisa that says that you own this receipt of the Mona Lisa”.
- kabdib 5y ago
  "This is a picture of four dogs playing poker, with the words 'Mona Lisa' written on the back in crayon." "You have a receipt for it, what's the problem?"
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  "...which says you believe you own this receipt, and at the time of purchase, you believed that the issuer of this receipt believes in your ownership of it too".
Alex3917 5y ago
> The platform disappears, or bans you, or changes policy, or is blocked, or whatever, and your NFT is back to being a bare-bone blockchain contract number and a token id. So what? You can obviously right click to save the JPEG, so if the platform goes down it doesn't really matter. What you're buying is ownership of the NFT of the JPEG, not the JPEG. Even if the platform goes down, you'll still be able to see the name of the piece in the metadata.
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  No because the nothing link the contract to that jpeg anymore.
  - Alex3917 5y ago
    You can store a hash in the contract if you really want them to be linked.
dnautics 5y ago
I kinda hate NFTs: But, the analogy to a "certificate of authenticity" for "real pieces of art" or "memorabilia" is reasonable. It's not "actually the art". the "centralized platform" blocking you is kind of immaterial. The point is that other people can see that the token matches. Though one difference from CoAs is that the "centralized platform" could remove the art. I don't know how opensea works, but one could in theory hash the digital content, drop it onto bittorrent (or whatever, use the bittorrent hash id) and lock that up with the token. Is that how opensea works?
jrochkind1 5y ago
Did the early days of the internet have as much scams and money-laundering in the mix? Not in my neck of the early days of the internet woods.
- rednerrus 5y ago
  There were a lot less idiots on the internet in the early days of the internet. It was a function of the difficulty of getting on the internet.
- jboy55 5y ago
  The early days of online payments (paypal) maybe. Unless they're talking about usenet selling, in which case I don't remember it being 'thrilling' to get a money order in the mail.
  - sireat 5y ago
    I sold/bought music CDs as well as anime model kits on the usenet (on the .marketplace ones) around the time of "Eternal September". It was pretty thrilling to get money order in the mail. There was little to no scamming goin on. If someone wanted to be a bad actor, they'd be run out of town pretty quickly. I miss those days.
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  Many of the early ISPs played shell games with ad companies. NetZero is one of the most famously documented of the 90s dot-com age promising "free internet" with ads/MLM schemes, but they were one of the pack. The few I can recall today to google on the Bings, including NetZero, surprisingly still exist and survived the dot-com implosion as more traditional ISPs, but NetZero is the most useful example to give as it still bears the scars of its early scam-like history its own brand name. I don't think they've offered actual "zero dollar" service in more than a decade, but that's where their name originated. I recall so many fly-by-night ads and ads+MLM schemes in the early internet, a lot of which I watched in Slashdot takedowns and teardowns at the time.
bserge 5y ago
Isn't it more like if you see an image you own anywhere, you can claim ownership based on your NFT? Could be hilarious if you ask someone to remove it from their site. You own 1% of it? Which pixels do you want recolored? :D
tomtato 5y ago
There are certainly a chunk of NFTs that the media only exists on one centralized server somewhere. Someone forgets to pay the bill and poof there goes your art. You can download the image but the contract's `tokenUri` function still points to that old location. Then the next tier up would store their media on IPFS, if you purchase the NFT you're expected to be responsible for pinning that IPFS content somewhere. That's not communicated too well though. The benefit there is if the original minter stops paying for IPFS hosting but you still have yours pinned, it's still available. I think most of the "Mint as a service" platforms will use IPFS by default. Then there are projects that are storing the images entirely on chain. These are obviously more costly to create but don't require another service/protocol/platform.
silexia 5y ago
Anyone who buys these things is getting scammed and I feel sorry for them. I have friends who regularly fall for MLMs and other scams like this, and they never seem to learn. Is there any way to get through to them?
caeril 5y ago
> community bonding, money laundering and genuine experimentation To be fair, the real-life art auction world is basically all money laundering, too.
raindropm 5y ago
Your second last paragraph perfectly summed up my feeling about it. :p I don't want to touch it at first, since its scam/money laundering smell is very strong(and also environment impact) also I think overall thing is pretty stupid. But after some time that I,um, "participate" in it, I can feel the lots of weird creative energy flowing in there, collectively. Not a thing we see often in today's world. It's quite rejuvenating, and crazy.
kinddongzilla 5y ago
This is so wrong, I made an account to comment. While you are right that the NFT is just an entry to the blockchain with a URI to the actual media file, the file is NOT stored on a centralized platform. While it is possible to use a regular server to store the media file, it is certainly very bad practice and defeats the whole point of NFTs. The media files are stored on IPFS, which is a decentralized peer-to-peer storage network. This ensures that the media file that a NFT represents, will always be available, since it is hosted by many people on the network.
- bofh23 5y ago
  > This ensures that the media file that a NFT represents, will always be available, since it is hosted by many people on the network. I’m pretty sure this is incorrect. IPFS is not permanent storage unless you host the content yourself or pay a pining service to host it. It may be cached on many computers but those caches are finite and get cleared. Persistence | IPFS Docs https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/persistence/#long-term-storage https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/persistence/#long-term-storage « Long-term storage Storing data using a personal IPFS node is easy, but it can be inconvenient since you have to manage your own hardware. […] […] paying a pinning service to store data is a convenient workaround, it still requires someone to bear the cost of storing that data. […] While IPFS guarantees that any content on the network is discoverable, it doesn't guarantee that any content is persistently available. »
Grustaf 5y ago
As stupid as it is, what you describe IS exactly "baseball cards in the blockchain", because each individual card/nft can only be owned by one person at a time. The difference with baseball cards (apart from not being physical) is that most nft projects are combinatorial, so they make 10000 different cards, constructed from combinations of a much smaller number of "traits". That way the artist only has to draw say 25 faces, 20 hats, 20 eye glasses etc. With baseball cards you'd instead make 100 different cards, and then print 1000s of copies of each. You could do that with NFTs, but you don't. The reason for that is probably that you can't sell NFTs in sealed packages where 95% of the cards will be uninteresting. I guess you could, but again you don't.

hanklazard 5y ago

> I mean, opensea.io does allow you to mint (the term for magically turning a media into an official NFT backed by the blockchain) up to 100MB of content. So where is it? Not in the blockchain, obviously, it's already fat enough with tiny transaction data. Well, it's just stored in the centralized platforms like opensea, rarible, etc. You’re right that this is the way many have been created so far, but that will not be the case for long. Already people have pointed NFTs to IPFS/Filecoin which will give them much more staying power. And this can be done without using a centralized platform like opensea, check out nft.storage and metaplex (1) as starting points. 1. https://github.com/metaplex-foundation/metaplex https://github.com/metaplex-foundation/metaplex

BiteCode_dev 5y ago
Agreed, and I hope it will become more popular. But right now, since you can't browse IFPS with firefox or chrome, and manual minting is harder than clicking a button on open sea, I wager private platforms will keep their appeal. Maybe when decentralized service will do all the decentralized hard work for you, take your metamask, upload your content on IFPS, mint it, then let you sell it, it will take on.
- antasvara 5y ago
  I think the key here is that we've already as a society given up a lot of our ownership for the sake of convenience. Most people buy their phones through a mobile carrier, locking them in through the life of their contract. I'm not totally sure about how Google accounts work, but I'd wager that getting your Google drive data back if you're banned is difficult. Kids these days are even purchasing skins for video games with the full knowledge that if they get banned, all of those skins will be gone. A lot of what we own these days is not "owned" in the traditional sense. Opensea is no different from purchasing a video game that you could be banned from in that both purchase prices aren't ownership, but rather a price to access a product.
- nyhc99 5y ago
  Actually this is quickly becoming the standard. Once you mint an NFT on opensea, you have the option to "freeze" the metadata, which transfers the image and everything else to IPFS storage.
rtkwe 5y ago
Don’t those still rely on the gateway for wherever you mint it on IPFS staying up? The NFT link only points to a gateway which can go down then you’re at the mercy of it being replicated across nodes right?
- hanklazard 5y ago
  Correct, it still only exists as long as someone on the IPFS network wants to keep it up. Similar to bittorrent in that way. Still, in the long-term, it seems that having the actual image/video/audio/other data replicated on a decentralized network rather than hosted on a single domain makes more sense to me (but then again, I'm very bullish on the future of IPFS/Filecoin).

BukhariH 5y ago

Not quite right. The assets aren’t necessarily stored on OpenSea. You can see how OpenSea gets the metadata like asset url via the docs: https://docs.opensea.io/docs/metadata-standards https://docs.opensea.io/docs/metadata-standards If you scroll down you’ll see that the assets can be hosted on decentralised networks too like IPFS. Also, not all NFT projects are built the same. I suggest you check out Pak’s Poets project - it’s a very exciting piece of performance art built around game theory. Disclaimer: I don’t own any NFTs but that doesn’t mean I’m not excited by what they’re doing.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago
I agree, you can store it on IPFS. But most people don't, they don't even know it's possible. I mean, most people could host their own video, but they upload on youtube, and just youtube. Well, this is the same, only even more niche, so the easy "upload" on open sea is very, very attractive. I'd wager if one the most popular NFT trading plateform disapear, 99% of all NFT would go poof.
- miracle2k 5y ago
  The majority of all NFTs are stored in IPFS; source: I run a platform indexing NFT media files. Also, the art is the token. Data storage is a orthogonal problem entirely.
  - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
    > The majority of all NFTs are stored in IPFS Oh, I would never have believed it. Thanks for the info. Most people that I know don't even know what IPFS is. Are those human uploaded, or bot uploaded? > the art is the token Yes, but why isn't the token displayed in the centered of the page on most popular platforms? Because human needs a symbol that represent that token. For most people, the animation and the number are the same. NFT work because people share a believe about them, after all. And all the strong believe in humanity are sustained using symbols. BTW, what's the name of your platform?
  - BrianOnHN 5y ago

dls2016 5y ago

I think the best explanation is that NFTs are a very fancy system of provenance (which the art world already takes very seriously).

Jensson 5y ago
NFT's doesn't prove anything though. The art world care a lot about originals, but an NFT cannot prove that something is an original. Nothing would prevent the author from just issuing a lot of NFT's pointing to a lot of copies of the same art piece. They are even worse than that, NFT doesn't even represent the piece of art, if the service it is connected to goes down then the NFT points to nothing, you can't even prove that it at one time pointed to a specific image. Lastly, there is no reason for a service provider to issue NFT's. Service providers earns a ton from taxing the market when people trade items, there is no reason for them to give this away by issuing NFT's. Rather every service I've seen issue NFT's did it to sell items that will never be valuable, but that NFT enthusiasts now think will be valuable thanks to the NFT. Anyway, best case NFT's are just an untaxed market associated with a game or service content. That is the absolutely best case, in what way does that sound novel? Edit: The untaxed part probably means that governments will shut it down if it becomes too popular. So even less reasons to invest.
- Sargos 5y ago
  >Nothing would prevent the author from just issuing a lot of NFT's pointing to a lot of copies of the same art piece Nothing prevents an author from just issuing a lot of duplicate art and claiming they are the original copy. Except it's fraud and people would likely figure it out over time. That's the exact same scenario as the blockchain except it's even harder for the artist to cheat as everyone can see the blockchain so when the artist makes copies and tries to sell them then everyone can easily see that they are frauds. >you can't even prove that it at one time pointed to a specific image Most NFTs use IPFS which uses hashes to uniquely identify files and even if the file disappears from the internet it can be recovered by anyone who still has the original file and be back online.

seanhunter 5y ago

Non-fungible doesn't mean something can't be divided, it means a specific one just can't be substituted for another one. An example: If I trade oil, one barrel of oil with a certain spec[1] is fungible with another barrel of oil with the same spec. If I sell you some oil you don't care which specific barrel you get as long as it's the same kind of thing. Likewise if you borrow 10 dollars from me you can pay me back with any combination of notes up to the value of 10 dollars, you don't have to give me back the specific bills I gave you. On the other hand, things like art are not fungible. If I loan a Van Gogh to a gallery I very much want the same piece to be sent back to me after the exhibition is done. It's not ok for them to send me something else. Even if it's "sunflowers" (since Van Gogh painted a few of those and they are quite similar), I want the actual one I loaned to be sent back to me. Normal bitcoins or ETH are fungible whereas NFTs are non-fungible. The specific one you have matters usually because it represents a digital proof of ownership of some specific resource (a bored ape or whatever). [1] The spec for oil types standardises particular grades and then people trade a standard barrel size (called a bbl which is short for "blue barrel" because they used to be painted blue). "Brent" and "WTI" are different grades. A barrel of brent is fungible with another barrel of brent but not with a barrel of WTI because that's a different grade.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago
Thank you for the correction. I particularly appreciate the kind tone, it's rare on the internet.
3np 5y ago
To make a parallel to the social media economy: upvotes are fungible, reshares are not
int_19h 5y ago
So you can split NFT tokens and e.g. resell them separately?
- Traster 5y ago
  Oh do I have a scam for you! So, no, obviously you can't divide an NFT, but what you can do is create a new fungible token (or smart contract not sure about the exact details) that represents partial ownership of the NFT. So you can issue 1000 of these fungible tokens that represent partial ownership of the NFT.

cableshaft 5y ago

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the NFT thing (I get the base concept, and I know originally it was thought of for digital ownership of home deeds, etc, which makes perfect sense to me, but everything that I'm seeing from it lately just seems like beanie baby collecting, like art and avatars and buying with the sole expectation of selling to a bigger sucker later). Where are you going to immerse yourself into this universe and seeing the community and experimentation? I don't know where I'd even start with that.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago
I have a lot of crypto nerds as friends, they have a trading platform, and so they are on all the reddit/discord/telegram important channels. I wouldn't know where to begin, because I just got dunked into it a few days ago when one my friends asked my help to code a platform to create vanity user pages. I had nothing to do, it came to me :)
- cableshaft 5y ago
  Gotcha. I've been into cryptocurrencies for a long time, but I've been feeling like a bit of a luddite when it comes to NFTs, or like most people who call crypto a ponzi scheme (some coins pretty much are, but not all), and that probably means I'm missing something. I know where to go to find good information about crypto, but not NFTs.

jameshart 5y ago

So I do wonder whether the NFT divide (between people who get it and people who don’t) might be a generational split, related to a larger societal shift away from ‘owning things’. We’ve definitely passed ‘peak thing ownership’. For those of us old enough to have grown up with the idea of ‘buying a book’, ‘buying a toy’, ‘buying a CD’ or ‘buying a magazine’ we have a particular mental framework for ‘owning’ stuff. But people stopped buying those things a while ago (people stopped buying toys? Not completely, but certainly some of that spend now goes on apps right?). So for people who have grown up in a digital-subscription world, they might just have a fundamentally different mental model of ownership - one which is more compatible with NFTs as a reasonable idea than the paradigm us old ‘thing owners’ have. Like, consider some of the things you likely have bought recently: a ‘twelve month Netflix subscription’, a ‘Steam library game’, an ‘app’… you bought those things with no expectation you could resell them later because you don’t think of those as ‘things’. And because you haven’t yet adjusted your mental model to the reality that this is what you spend your wealth on now - ephemeral digital rights you won’t be able to pass on to your kids when you’re gone. But if you grew up digital native and the only things you’ve ever been able to buy are non transferable digital pointers to rights to use something, maybe the idea of a transferable digital rights pointer seems like a crazy innovative new idea that changes everything?

jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
The difference between most[1] NFTs and Netflix/Steam/Apps is with the latter, you are buying access to something. With most of these NFTs that are just a picture, owning the NFT doesn't confer any special right to you. We can all enjoy the Disaster Girl meme, you don't have to have bought the NFT. The owner of the first ever tweet cannot actually do anything with it, edit it, destroy it, put it in a private collection so only they can look at it. The only thing buying one of these NFTs gives you is I guess "bragging rights" but I think it remains to be seen why anyone should care that you paid money for 0x3B3ee1931Dc30C1957379FAc9aba94D1C48a5405,25046. [1] The only exception is maybe these NFTs that interact with something on the blockchain like an item or place in a videogame, in that case owning the NFT provides some sort of utility.
- 5y ago

MR4D 5y ago

My favorite description, heard just this week: “Here’s a receipt for the Mona Lisa that says that you own this receipt of the Mona Lisa”.

kabdib 5y ago
"This is a picture of four dogs playing poker, with the words 'Mona Lisa' written on the back in crayon." "You have a receipt for it, what's the problem?"
TeMPOraL 5y ago
"...which says you believe you own this receipt, and at the time of purchase, you believed that the issuer of this receipt believes in your ownership of it too".

Alex3917 5y ago

> The platform disappears, or bans you, or changes policy, or is blocked, or whatever, and your NFT is back to being a bare-bone blockchain contract number and a token id. So what? You can obviously right click to save the JPEG, so if the platform goes down it doesn't really matter. What you're buying is ownership of the NFT of the JPEG, not the JPEG. Even if the platform goes down, you'll still be able to see the name of the piece in the metadata.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago
No because the nothing link the contract to that jpeg anymore.
- Alex3917 5y ago
  You can store a hash in the contract if you really want them to be linked.

dnautics 5y ago

I kinda hate NFTs: But, the analogy to a "certificate of authenticity" for "real pieces of art" or "memorabilia" is reasonable. It's not "actually the art". the "centralized platform" blocking you is kind of immaterial. The point is that other people can see that the token matches. Though one difference from CoAs is that the "centralized platform" could remove the art. I don't know how opensea works, but one could in theory hash the digital content, drop it onto bittorrent (or whatever, use the bittorrent hash id) and lock that up with the token. Is that how opensea works?

jrochkind1 5y ago

Did the early days of the internet have as much scams and money-laundering in the mix? Not in my neck of the early days of the internet woods.

rednerrus 5y ago
There were a lot less idiots on the internet in the early days of the internet. It was a function of the difficulty of getting on the internet.
jboy55 5y ago
The early days of online payments (paypal) maybe. Unless they're talking about usenet selling, in which case I don't remember it being 'thrilling' to get a money order in the mail.
- sireat 5y ago
  I sold/bought music CDs as well as anime model kits on the usenet (on the .marketplace ones) around the time of "Eternal September". It was pretty thrilling to get money order in the mail. There was little to no scamming goin on. If someone wanted to be a bad actor, they'd be run out of town pretty quickly. I miss those days.
WorldMaker 5y ago
Many of the early ISPs played shell games with ad companies. NetZero is one of the most famously documented of the 90s dot-com age promising "free internet" with ads/MLM schemes, but they were one of the pack. The few I can recall today to google on the Bings, including NetZero, surprisingly still exist and survived the dot-com implosion as more traditional ISPs, but NetZero is the most useful example to give as it still bears the scars of its early scam-like history its own brand name. I don't think they've offered actual "zero dollar" service in more than a decade, but that's where their name originated. I recall so many fly-by-night ads and ads+MLM schemes in the early internet, a lot of which I watched in Slashdot takedowns and teardowns at the time.

bserge 5y ago

Isn't it more like if you see an image you own anywhere, you can claim ownership based on your NFT? Could be hilarious if you ask someone to remove it from their site. You own 1% of it? Which pixels do you want recolored? :D

tomtato 5y ago

There are certainly a chunk of NFTs that the media only exists on one centralized server somewhere. Someone forgets to pay the bill and poof there goes your art. You can download the image but the contract's `tokenUri` function still points to that old location. Then the next tier up would store their media on IPFS, if you purchase the NFT you're expected to be responsible for pinning that IPFS content somewhere. That's not communicated too well though. The benefit there is if the original minter stops paying for IPFS hosting but you still have yours pinned, it's still available. I think most of the "Mint as a service" platforms will use IPFS by default. Then there are projects that are storing the images entirely on chain. These are obviously more costly to create but don't require another service/protocol/platform.

silexia 5y ago

Anyone who buys these things is getting scammed and I feel sorry for them. I have friends who regularly fall for MLMs and other scams like this, and they never seem to learn. Is there any way to get through to them?

caeril 5y ago

> community bonding, money laundering and genuine experimentation To be fair, the real-life art auction world is basically all money laundering, too.

raindropm 5y ago

Your second last paragraph perfectly summed up my feeling about it. :p I don't want to touch it at first, since its scam/money laundering smell is very strong(and also environment impact) also I think overall thing is pretty stupid. But after some time that I,um, "participate" in it, I can feel the lots of weird creative energy flowing in there, collectively. Not a thing we see often in today's world. It's quite rejuvenating, and crazy.

kinddongzilla 5y ago

This is so wrong, I made an account to comment. While you are right that the NFT is just an entry to the blockchain with a URI to the actual media file, the file is NOT stored on a centralized platform. While it is possible to use a regular server to store the media file, it is certainly very bad practice and defeats the whole point of NFTs. The media files are stored on IPFS, which is a decentralized peer-to-peer storage network. This ensures that the media file that a NFT represents, will always be available, since it is hosted by many people on the network.

bofh23 5y ago
> This ensures that the media file that a NFT represents, will always be available, since it is hosted by many people on the network. I’m pretty sure this is incorrect. IPFS is not permanent storage unless you host the content yourself or pay a pining service to host it. It may be cached on many computers but those caches are finite and get cleared. Persistence | IPFS Docs https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/persistence/#long-term-storage https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/persistence/#long-term-storage « Long-term storage Storing data using a personal IPFS node is easy, but it can be inconvenient since you have to manage your own hardware. […] […] paying a pinning service to store data is a convenient workaround, it still requires someone to bear the cost of storing that data. […] While IPFS guarantees that any content on the network is discoverable, it doesn't guarantee that any content is persistently available. »

Grustaf 5y ago

As stupid as it is, what you describe IS exactly "baseball cards in the blockchain", because each individual card/nft can only be owned by one person at a time. The difference with baseball cards (apart from not being physical) is that most nft projects are combinatorial, so they make 10000 different cards, constructed from combinations of a much smaller number of "traits". That way the artist only has to draw say 25 faces, 20 hats, 20 eye glasses etc. With baseball cards you'd instead make 100 different cards, and then print 1000s of copies of each. You could do that with NFTs, but you don't. The reason for that is probably that you can't sell NFTs in sealed packages where 95% of the cards will be uninteresting. I guess you could, but again you don't.