40 ms·

NFT misconception: JPEG aren't stored on the Blockchain

101 points by greenSunglass 5y ago

aorth 5y ago
What happens when the domain in the tokenURI expires? Or when the HTTPS certificate expires? Or when the server gets hacked? Or the server changes owners? Or the server operator just decides to abscond? Etc... this is complete nonsense.
- thephyber 5y ago
  Caveat emptor. This is no different from due diligence when making any other form of investment. Observation: there is an incentive for the buyer to maintain the content (or perhaps even to replace with higher value content) at the URL. Perhaps NFT owners can band together to form a co-op / condo association if an NFT-content host site/domain goes down to maintain it. The next set of features I keep reading about in cryptocurrency/NFT space is "governance", which could cover this type of responsibility.
  - aorth 5y ago
    > Caveat emptor. This is no different from due diligence when making any other form of investment. Thanks for taking the time to respond, but it's _literally_ the value proposition of "crypto" evangelists that this stuff will be around "forever" on the blockchain. When you invest in stocks or put money in a savings account there are shit tons of regulations against insider trading, fraud, etc, not to mention federal deposit insurance. With "crypto" you have nothing except a pinky promise from some developers, essentially, who say that their "blockchain" aka directed graph will be around forever! > Observation: there is an incentive for the buyer to maintain the content (or perhaps even to replace with higher value content) at the URL. Why would the buyer of the NFT have to maintain the content at the URL? It's pointing to an external, off-chain URL that the _seller_ chooses.
    - thephyber 5y ago
      “Crypto evangelists” are right. The problem isn’t with the blockchain layer (eg the Operating System). It retains the promises you espouse. The problem is with an NFT (an application) minted with bad assumptions. If a buyer fails to understand what the NFT is, that’s not a shortcoming of blockchain enthusiasts. I’m not an NFT investor (I don’t think an NFT of a JPG/MP3/MP4 has any intrinsic value), but your complaint applies to any investor in any asset. Caveat emptor. A buyer needs to learn what they are buying before they can put an accurate value on their offer, so they are responsible for their purchase.
tiku 5y ago
The only real future for NFT's is a coupling with the physical world. Like buying physical art. Or proofing ownership of an asset like houses.
- blackoil 5y ago
  Which will require the authority to recognize it. Your NFT of house is worth nothing unless court/police recognize it to be so.
  - can16358p 5y ago
    Which kills the whole idea blockchain is based on: decentralization. It's a feedback loop with no known exact solution yet.
- rvz 5y ago
  Or an uncensorable domain name service which has both utility and rarity and cannot be downloaded and is stored on the blockchain.
  - sweetbitter 5y ago
    You might be thinking of Namecoin, the first fork of Bitcoin.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    cannot be downloaded I can't help thinking this criteria makes the DNS service a bit less useful.
- onion2k 5y ago
  Would anyone buy a house if the proof of ownership was a URL to JSON file on a server you didn't control, with no regulation of the blockchain that the "proof" resides on? I will genuinely put effort in to starting a company that provides a blockchain proof of real estate ownership if this ever happens, just so I can fraudulently sell everyone's houses while they live in them after a few years. It'd be hilarious.
- 5y ago
IceWreck 5y ago
NFTs are such a sham to claim fake "ownership" of an asset. All the images/files are public anyways. Nothing stops me from creating another blockchain and call it NFTv2. And then I can create an NFT which points to the original asset. Its just as legit as the Etherium one. Or just change the link to the same file and create an NFT on the Etherium blockchain.
- Kiro 5y ago
  NFTs has nothing to do with ownership or uniqueness of the image itself. It's all about bragging rights that you bought something that was minted by X.
- MrPatan 5y ago
  You can also copy and set up your own land registry and say it's all yours. Yes, it's all a social convention, like all property. If enough people decide it's "real" then it is.
  - robjan 5y ago
    You can't copy and enjoy my property for free, you can copy and enjoy an NFT for free. If you were to get the new Land Registry enforced you would have to change the law, in which case the blockchain is no longer needed since the idea and enforcement of ownership is centralised with the government.
    - thephyber 5y ago
      > You can't copy and enjoy my property for free, you can copy and enjoy an NFT for free. Your wording here makes it seem like you confuse the NFT (the pointer to the content) with the content itself. If your property is an authentic piece of fine art, it can be copied/forged. An NFT doesn't prevent unauthorized copying; it only asserts ownership of the official copy, similar to a receipt of the transaction (which must be publicly and immutably stored and displayed in public). The "NFT" is not the property itself, hence copying is not of the NFT itself; it is a notary's public assertion that a transaction of the asserted property (URL) happened. I agree that NFTs don't solve the issues you raise in your second sentence.
amomo 5y ago
Funny to see this "epiphany" just now. Maybe one solution would be to store files on bittorrent and Blockchain pointing to a bittorrent link ? There are already multiple webclients for bt, this would not be an issue. Reliability would "just" depend on the number of peers
- thephyber 5y ago
  Website, BitTorrent, IPFS, etc all have the possibility for bit rot. There is, however, incentive for the person who currently owns the NFT to maintain the content at the current URL or their investment would suffer a loss of value.
  - nieve 5y ago
    Is it necessarily true that the owner of the NFT has any control at all over the server being pointed to? It seems highly unlikely to me that it's universal or even common.
    - saltminer 5y ago
      With IPFS you can pay someone to pin a file (or do it yourself), and bittorrent you can just seed it yourself. But if your NFT is a URL to some random webserver (which might not be the majority of NFTs, but is not an insignificant number according to [0]), you have no control over it unless the previous owner passes along the credentials somehow. Or, they might not pass them along, and modify or delete the file because...what are you going to do about it? Good luck getting a refund. Either way, you have to do something to ensure your investment doesn't become unreachable. [0]: https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1448066579611234305 https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1448066579611234305
    - thephyber 5y ago
      I’m saying the original minter of the NFT gets the choice to choose where the URL points. Any future owner needs to do due diligence to understand what they are buying. If the minter or original auction house can not vouch or has no contract with the content host, the investment can suffer from an unexpected content switch at any time. If a buyer realizes this could adversely affect the content, the value could suffer.
casi18 5y ago
in this thread: people claiming crypto people dont understand society, whilst also ignoring the existence of reputation, legitimacy, and community.
Animats 5y ago
Right. And not even encrypted. It's not like you need the NFT to view the image. You only need it to sell it to the next sucker.
sbierwagen 5y ago
>ERC-721 is the standard that dictates how one should create an NFT. Each ERC721 NFT must have a tokenURI field, that is an external link to a JSON file stored on an external server ... You can notice the image field, which is a link to an image. Not just a link, a link to a link! And when that server goes down next year, all those JSON files will vanish.
- folli 5y ago
  I mean, as the article mentions, you could store the image on the chain. Or at least a Hash of the image to prevent a bait-and-switch. But it would cost too much of added gas fees and the average user wouldn't understand the difference.
  - nuerow 5y ago
    > But it would cost too much of added gas fees(...) If your goal was honestly to just buy art, why would "gas fees" matter? They only matter in a scenario involving wash trades and high rates of transactions involving small deltas in price.
    - folli 5y ago
      Look, I'm not trying to defend NFTs here, but let's view this from an artist's perspective that wants to hop on the bandwagon: you either pay around $70 to mint your NFT without caring about how and where your image is actually stored, or you pay $20,000 to upload your 500kb onto the blockchain (as the article mentions).
  - meowkit 5y ago
    > But it would cost too much of added gas fees and the average user wouldn't understand the difference. Reminder that this a poor line of thinking. The average user of a smartphone has no idea how it works. The average user of software has no idea how their apps work. The average user of a blockchain doesn't know how it works, and they won't need to. This stuff gets abstracted out and developed enough to hide these details over time.
m0sa 5y ago
I'd expect at least a hash of the image to be stored on the blockhain..
- hoten 5y ago
  Wait, is this not how it works? Seemed like a safe assumption...
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    Even if it is, you can't really reconstitute the image from the SHA. I mean, unless we just created a new proof of waste algorithm.
    - quotemstr 5y ago
      You can't rebuild the image from the hash, but you can query various content-addressed stores for the image, potentially letting proof-of-space cryptocurrency systems do double duty as both verifiable resource commitments and repositories of blockchain external data.
      - arcticbull 5y ago
        Proof of wasted space. Proof of space algorithms just fill hard drives with garbage.
        quotemstr 5y ago
        Better than continuously burning electricity, yes? And if the stored data is actually useful, is the net result all that bad?
        arcticbull 5y ago
        I mean, it's still worse than not doing any of this lol, and that's the null hypothesis we should be using. Yes, getting stabbed is better than getting shot, but maybe stay inside and fire up a nice S3 bucket. The real problem is any proof of resource scheme immediately becomes a grey goo where folks are incentivized to consume literally all that resource wether it makes sense or not. It has no negative feedback loop. It cannot make sense. Also, because of market pricing of the tokens businesses cannot actually leverage it (as they don't want wacky prices that vary by the minute) so you're left with, as usual, illegal content, gambling, speculation and other misc crime. Basically why Filecoin has a small rack of hard drives' worth of stored data and Chia has exabytes and exabytes of garbage - or did, does anyone care about that one anymore? It makes more sense to just store garbage if your goal is to run a neat little pyramid scheme.
mastazi 5y ago
I'm very surprised that those (the JSON and the picture) are not stored in a decentralised way e.g. IPFS or Swarm. So if I buy an expensive NFT, and the domain goes down, the NFT is now worthless? We should be on the lookout for any of these domains expiring, then we will buy them and upload Rick Astley GIFs
- himlion 5y ago
  Most NFT projects are in fact stored on IPFS. You can put an IPFS URL in the tokenURI field.
  - mastazi 5y ago
    Oh yeah, I saw NFTs with IPFS URLs before, the reason why I'm surprised is that I thought all of them were using some form of decentralised storage.
  - swiftcoder 5y ago
    However, if someone ever stops paying a 3rd party to actually pin the file in IPFS… poof Just because you put a file in IPFS doesn’t mean IPFS actually retains it
    - thinkingemote 5y ago
      And there's about 0% chance that ipfs or the internet as we know it will still be operating as it is in 40 years.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
  There’s a popular genre of NFTs which consist of a recording of some physical object (often a painting) being destroyed. So perhaps we should create an NFT which represents the stranding of other NFTs through hacking. We could upload the logs from the shell showing us deleting everything.
- zenlikethat 5y ago
  They often are. For instance on Arweave
todd3834 5y ago
I hate to admit it but I’m still struggling to understand why people would pay so much for NFTs. I feel like I fully understand what they are and why most people want me to believe it has value but I still don’t agree. I’m waiting for my mind to change but it hasn’t happened yet. It’s frustrating because so many people I respect are leaving their high paying jobs to work in web3 startups around NFTs and I feel dumb for not getting it.
- LogonType10 5y ago
  Money laundering.
  - thenewewb 5y ago
    It’s not that simple.
- sbierwagen 5y ago
  The most plausible conspiracy theories I've heard is that the big sales ($1 million plus) are wash trades, ("sell" an object to a confederate for 500 ETH, then they transfer the money right back via another route) and some classic money laundering Now of course there's a mountain of clueless suckers kicking off a regular tulip mania-style bubble. I wonder how many more weeks it will last.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    Like this $500,000,000 flash loan backed wash trade of punk 9998. [1] [1] https://news.artnet.com/art-world/crypto-punk-500-million-sale-2028470 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/crypto-punk-500-million-sa...
    - throaway6942 5y ago
      that's not a wash trade.. it was just a publicity stunt. I know the guy who did it!
forgotmyoldname 5y ago
So how exactly is the "gas money" calculated? I was led to believe it was expensive because putting all that data into the blockchain costed a significant amount. Asking because, wanting to verify whether NFTs were really a scam or scheme instead of just following heated Twitter arguments, I looked into uploading my own NFT. Gas money for a single image was $250--estimated earnings for an NFT are in the low dollars for most people, so it certainly wasn't worth it for me. I told a friend how insane the price was and went back to attempt the process once more a few minutes later to get a screenshot showing him I wasn't lying--gas money for the same image was suddenly over $800. I can't think of any reasonable way to justify such costs if it's just encoding a few bytes of text and not an actual image, so now I'm doubly suspicious of how these costs are actually calculated. It reminds me of countless other schemes where you put in a bunch of initial cash to "start your own business", then spend the rest of your days desperately trying to find buyers.
- Fckd 5y ago
  Of course its a scam. all are fuelled by cheap printing press
- folli 5y ago
  (just speaking for Ethereum) The gas fees are a constant, so you pay a certain amount of ETH to mint your NFT. You don't upload any image data but solely the address (so a couple of bytes) of the owner. The reason that this costs so much is the exponential increase in ETH prices in the recent years and the network congestions (gas price depends on the workload of the ETH network). What used to be a couple of cents or so is now easily $70, depending on the ETH price and network congestion. I whipped up a calculator some time ago: https://nuftu.com/pricing https://nuftu.com/pricing
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  The cost is about how expensive it is to execute the smart contract. Plus a tip to get your transaction executed earlier. https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/gas/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/gas/ If you’re like “well those costs are ludicrous compared to the computational complexity” then you’re right. But then the entire thing is secured by the ludicrous overspend of power through computation.
notindexed 5y ago
Why misconception? NFT = proof of ownership
- iamacyborg 5y ago
  The only thing it proves ownership of is of the NFT itself and not the asset the NFT claims to be.
- thephyber 5y ago
  The point is "proof of ownership" of what. The misconception seems to be that people think the owned content is inlined in the blockchain, when it more often is a URL in the NFT / on the blockchain. Hence, the proof of ownership is contextual around what content existed at the URL at the time of minting, which might change if the controller of the URL changes the content after minting.
deleted 5y ago
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parafactual 5y ago
This means that NFTs still don't denote much without a centralized authority. Doesn't that defeat the point? (That might not make them worthless, since value is socially constructed, but it makes the claims of decentralization seem less impressive.)
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  All the trading hubs like OpenSea are centralised to the point that some NFTs will get blacklisted if a famous enough person in the community gets scammed out of theirs.
jamespitts 5y ago
Here is more information about current NFT-related standardization efforts in the Ethereum community: https://www.nftstandards.wtf/ https://www.nftstandards.wtf/ Discussions about proposals & implementations are happening here: https://ethereum-magicians.org/tag/nft https://ethereum-magicians.org/tag/nft
iamwil 5y ago
This isn't the whole story. Some NFTs are written to the blockchain. Avastars https://avastars.io/ https://avastars.io/ is an NFT collection that's represented by an SVG. The SVGs are all written on-chain, back when it was cheaper to do so. https://nft.substack.com/p/the-art-of-avastars https://nft.substack.com/p/the-art-of-avastars The original NFT, Cryptopunks is also written on-chain now. (It wasn't originally). https://www.larvalabs.com/blog/2021-8-18-18-0/on-chain-cryptopunks https://www.larvalabs.com/blog/2021-8-18-18-0/on-chain-crypt... One of the oldest NFTs, MoonCatRescue https://mooncatrescue.com/ https://mooncatrescue.com/ writes an encoded version of the image onchain, and uses a published function to regenerate the image. The MD5 hash of the algorithm is written onchain so you know you're using the right one. https://github.com/ponderware/mooncatparser/blob/master/mooncatparser.js https://github.com/ponderware/mooncatparser/blob/master/moon... For other NFT projects that can't use these techniques, they use decentralized storage like IPFS and ARWeave. You can check what technique is used with this tool for any NFT project on ETH chain: https://checkmynft.com/ https://checkmynft.com/
- exclipy 5y ago
  Did you read any of that code? I looked at mooncatparser and it just hardcodes all possible 2-bit art as a big string array constant at the top of the JS file. Definitely not "on the blockchain". The part that's stored on the blockchain is the index into the big string array.
  - iamwil 5y ago
    Good job reading the code! It's as you should do when looking at a project. Is there a way where the image can be replaced with another based on the scheme? I didn't see any, which achieves the same result as putting the image on-chain.
Kosirich 5y ago
I haven't studied NFTs but I will admit I had an misconceptions that the low pixel art NFTs purpose was that it was able to be stored on the chain itself as "it's own thing" or as a representation of a "bigger piece". My question would then be.... why the lowres pixelated NFTs if they are being hosted somewhere else?
skinnyasianboi 5y ago
"..There are other techniques such as using a solution like IPFS,.." IPFS is pretty much the standard
ebanana 5y ago
sometimes i feel like nfts are the new mlm
bananamerica 5y ago
Three types of people "get" NFTs: - those that have something to gain from it, and are likely insincere; - those that are ashamed of not getting it and merely pretend to understand it; - those that duel in such profound abstractions that the actual world for them becomes a nuisance, a minor detail, an after thought. NFTs are a joke, a thought experiment taken too far. They're the modern version of The Emperor's New clothes.
- koonsolo 5y ago
  Or they are the new baseball cards.
  - koffiezet 5y ago
    But you get a baseball card that's pretty hard to perfectly duplicate, not a link to a digital picture of a baseball card, which can be copied at virtually zero-cost, and where you have zero control over the hosting of that picture, and can be replaced at any time. What's the point of 'owning' a digital baseball card if anyone can download it and store it on their PC? There's only one Mona Lisa, it only hangs in the Louvre, you can't just have an exact copy of it at zero cost. It's make-belief ownership. The only viable application I've seen is digital licensing, for non-free software or digital assets. This can work in a closed-garden system, like in-game assets, software licensing, ... where you don't have control over the environment you're in, but cannot work on an open internet. But anyway, the gas-cost on eth is WAY too high ($70-ish to mint?) for this to be actually used for these applications, and if you're in a walled-garden anyway, who needs decentralisation?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - thinkingemote 5y ago
    Baseball cards used to come with a purchase of a real product. They were an incentive to buy actual things. People collect them now, but they didn't exist on their own back then initially.
vmception 5y ago
In response to the title, some are. Since blockspace has increased some people are deploying NFTs that put the binary data directly into them A particularly novel one, to me, was that people did it with SVGs and html injection directly into the image location methods of the NFTs It works! The marketplaces and wallets just read that. No ipfs required.
kerng 5y ago
There was a post on Embrace the Red a while ago. It also talks about how there is not even a hash required on-chain. https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2021/broken-nft-standards/ https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2021/broken-nft-standar... It all is really up to whoever implements it to make decisions on how secure/verifiable/reliable an NFT is. Storing the image itself on-chain actually makes most often not a lot of sense if you think about it, but at least a hash should be required in such cases.
deleted 5y ago
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Kiro 5y ago
People seem to gloss over the first example (Project Memento) which I think is a great example where NFTs make sense. It's just a configuration with a fixed value (the coordinates) and a dynamic value you can actually change yourself (the letter). Other apps and games can use the same NFTs to build something different based on the same coordinates. Let's say I build a war game where Project Memento NFTs decide ownership of land on map. The blockchain is an open API and players just need to connect their wallets to my game in order to play. HyperDragons eating CryptoKitties to grow stronger is a good example of one app using NFTs from another. Art NFTs on the other hand are more like digital signatures. It doesn't really matter what is stored in the NFT. What gives it value is the fact that it was minted by X (where X can be an artist or a service). Yeah, you can use IPFS or store a hash but what's the point? You're buying the bragging rights, nothing else.
can16358p 5y ago
I believe it really boils down to consensus. If enough entities in a community "accepts" some platform/publisher as valid, those collectibles created by those entities (which can easily be validated on the chain) will have subjective value. Just like money: it's a piece of paper but enough people/companies/governments legally accept it so that paper now has a value more than it's physical components. I can print money too but it will be fake and worthless, even if I print it on a more expensive paper. An NFT is just some bits on a blockchain after all, but when enough people accept those "bits" by a particular entity, they are worth something. Sure anyone can clone/copy paste those JPEGs and mint them just as I can print dollars on my home printer, but as long as they aren't issued by an entity that many trust (e.g. A legally accepted central bank) they are worthless. Which in this case community is free to choose their central bank and currency, and change if they have the interest, creating a whole new economic system.
- ostenning 5y ago
  Consensus needs realistic price evaluations otherwise NFTs and most of crypto will remain what it actually is: a pump and dump asset class.
  - can16358p 5y ago
    Currently the "value" is determined by hype and speculation. The more NFT (or whatever replaces that idealogically) is accepted into the society, the more "real" uses it will have and whatever real (non-pump-and-dump-JPEGs) use it has will stabilize its value when the hype ends.
- thinkingemote 5y ago
  Exactly if people don't value it , it has no value. So it's fundamental to shill, promote and evangelise and maybe stretch the truth for NFTs for it to succeed. To not do so endangers the hype and your own investment. If people don't believe it, it has no value. Money was a token that has direct exchange value. You don't really need to promote it to give it value.
andronov04 5y ago
The longevity of many NFT projects is a real problem. This is why we set out to create the Smarts platform. The platform combines smart contracts with generative arts (smart arts, abbreviated into Smarts). Smarts is a new platform where the entirety of the artwork is stored in, and computed from smart contracts with no external dependencies at all. No IPFS, no Arweave, no APIs, no baseURI, no p5js, etc. So all Smarts artworks will live as long as Ethereum itself. However, the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) has some severe limitations for smart contracts - less than 25kb, no floating point math, limited gas amount for each invocation. So this makes it an interesting coding challenge to create smart contract based arts, it’s bearing some similarities to the demoscene. We haven't launched yet, but you can check it out the work in progress here: https://smarts.is/ https://smarts.is/
hermitsings 5y ago
Enlightening
MrPatan 5y ago
Many are fully on chain, SVGs generated on the fly or JS code that generates the artwork.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

101 points by greenSunglass 5y ago

What happens when the domain in the tokenURI expires? Or when the HTTPS certificate expires? Or when the server gets hacked? Or the server changes owners? Or the server operator just decides to abscond? Etc... this is complete nonsense.

thephyber 5y ago
Caveat emptor. This is no different from due diligence when making any other form of investment. Observation: there is an incentive for the buyer to maintain the content (or perhaps even to replace with higher value content) at the URL. Perhaps NFT owners can band together to form a co-op / condo association if an NFT-content host site/domain goes down to maintain it. The next set of features I keep reading about in cryptocurrency/NFT space is "governance", which could cover this type of responsibility.
- aorth 5y ago
  > Caveat emptor. This is no different from due diligence when making any other form of investment. Thanks for taking the time to respond, but it's _literally_ the value proposition of "crypto" evangelists that this stuff will be around "forever" on the blockchain. When you invest in stocks or put money in a savings account there are shit tons of regulations against insider trading, fraud, etc, not to mention federal deposit insurance. With "crypto" you have nothing except a pinky promise from some developers, essentially, who say that their "blockchain" aka directed graph will be around forever! > Observation: there is an incentive for the buyer to maintain the content (or perhaps even to replace with higher value content) at the URL. Why would the buyer of the NFT have to maintain the content at the URL? It's pointing to an external, off-chain URL that the _seller_ chooses.
  - thephyber 5y ago
    “Crypto evangelists” are right. The problem isn’t with the blockchain layer (eg the Operating System). It retains the promises you espouse. The problem is with an NFT (an application) minted with bad assumptions. If a buyer fails to understand what the NFT is, that’s not a shortcoming of blockchain enthusiasts. I’m not an NFT investor (I don’t think an NFT of a JPG/MP3/MP4 has any intrinsic value), but your complaint applies to any investor in any asset. Caveat emptor. A buyer needs to learn what they are buying before they can put an accurate value on their offer, so they are responsible for their purchase.

tiku 5y ago

The only real future for NFT's is a coupling with the physical world. Like buying physical art. Or proofing ownership of an asset like houses.

blackoil 5y ago
Which will require the authority to recognize it. Your NFT of house is worth nothing unless court/police recognize it to be so.
- can16358p 5y ago
  Which kills the whole idea blockchain is based on: decentralization. It's a feedback loop with no known exact solution yet.
rvz 5y ago
Or an uncensorable domain name service which has both utility and rarity and cannot be downloaded and is stored on the blockchain.
- sweetbitter 5y ago
  You might be thinking of Namecoin, the first fork of Bitcoin.
- onion2k 5y ago
  cannot be downloaded I can't help thinking this criteria makes the DNS service a bit less useful.
onion2k 5y ago
Would anyone buy a house if the proof of ownership was a URL to JSON file on a server you didn't control, with no regulation of the blockchain that the "proof" resides on? I will genuinely put effort in to starting a company that provides a blockchain proof of real estate ownership if this ever happens, just so I can fraudulently sell everyone's houses while they live in them after a few years. It'd be hilarious.
5y ago

IceWreck 5y ago

NFTs are such a sham to claim fake "ownership" of an asset. All the images/files are public anyways. Nothing stops me from creating another blockchain and call it NFTv2. And then I can create an NFT which points to the original asset. Its just as legit as the Etherium one. Or just change the link to the same file and create an NFT on the Etherium blockchain.

Kiro 5y ago
NFTs has nothing to do with ownership or uniqueness of the image itself. It's all about bragging rights that you bought something that was minted by X.
MrPatan 5y ago
You can also copy and set up your own land registry and say it's all yours. Yes, it's all a social convention, like all property. If enough people decide it's "real" then it is.
- robjan 5y ago
  You can't copy and enjoy my property for free, you can copy and enjoy an NFT for free. If you were to get the new Land Registry enforced you would have to change the law, in which case the blockchain is no longer needed since the idea and enforcement of ownership is centralised with the government.
  - thephyber 5y ago
    > You can't copy and enjoy my property for free, you can copy and enjoy an NFT for free. Your wording here makes it seem like you confuse the NFT (the pointer to the content) with the content itself. If your property is an authentic piece of fine art, it can be copied/forged. An NFT doesn't prevent unauthorized copying; it only asserts ownership of the official copy, similar to a receipt of the transaction (which must be publicly and immutably stored and displayed in public). The "NFT" is not the property itself, hence copying is not of the NFT itself; it is a notary's public assertion that a transaction of the asserted property (URL) happened. I agree that NFTs don't solve the issues you raise in your second sentence.

amomo 5y ago

Funny to see this "epiphany" just now. Maybe one solution would be to store files on bittorrent and Blockchain pointing to a bittorrent link ? There are already multiple webclients for bt, this would not be an issue. Reliability would "just" depend on the number of peers

thephyber 5y ago
Website, BitTorrent, IPFS, etc all have the possibility for bit rot. There is, however, incentive for the person who currently owns the NFT to maintain the content at the current URL or their investment would suffer a loss of value.
- nieve 5y ago
  Is it necessarily true that the owner of the NFT has any control at all over the server being pointed to? It seems highly unlikely to me that it's universal or even common.
  - saltminer 5y ago
    With IPFS you can pay someone to pin a file (or do it yourself), and bittorrent you can just seed it yourself. But if your NFT is a URL to some random webserver (which might not be the majority of NFTs, but is not an insignificant number according to [0]), you have no control over it unless the previous owner passes along the credentials somehow. Or, they might not pass them along, and modify or delete the file because...what are you going to do about it? Good luck getting a refund. Either way, you have to do something to ensure your investment doesn't become unreachable. [0]: https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1448066579611234305 https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1448066579611234305
  - thephyber 5y ago
    I’m saying the original minter of the NFT gets the choice to choose where the URL points. Any future owner needs to do due diligence to understand what they are buying. If the minter or original auction house can not vouch or has no contract with the content host, the investment can suffer from an unexpected content switch at any time. If a buyer realizes this could adversely affect the content, the value could suffer.

casi18 5y ago

in this thread: people claiming crypto people dont understand society, whilst also ignoring the existence of reputation, legitimacy, and community.

Animats 5y ago

Right. And not even encrypted. It's not like you need the NFT to view the image. You only need it to sell it to the next sucker.

sbierwagen 5y ago

>ERC-721 is the standard that dictates how one should create an NFT. Each ERC721 NFT must have a tokenURI field, that is an external link to a JSON file stored on an external server ... You can notice the image field, which is a link to an image. Not just a link, a link to a link! And when that server goes down next year, all those JSON files will vanish.

folli 5y ago
I mean, as the article mentions, you could store the image on the chain. Or at least a Hash of the image to prevent a bait-and-switch. But it would cost too much of added gas fees and the average user wouldn't understand the difference.
- nuerow 5y ago
  > But it would cost too much of added gas fees(...) If your goal was honestly to just buy art, why would "gas fees" matter? They only matter in a scenario involving wash trades and high rates of transactions involving small deltas in price.
  - folli 5y ago
    Look, I'm not trying to defend NFTs here, but let's view this from an artist's perspective that wants to hop on the bandwagon: you either pay around $70 to mint your NFT without caring about how and where your image is actually stored, or you pay $20,000 to upload your 500kb onto the blockchain (as the article mentions).
- meowkit 5y ago
  > But it would cost too much of added gas fees and the average user wouldn't understand the difference. Reminder that this a poor line of thinking. The average user of a smartphone has no idea how it works. The average user of software has no idea how their apps work. The average user of a blockchain doesn't know how it works, and they won't need to. This stuff gets abstracted out and developed enough to hide these details over time.

m0sa 5y ago

I'd expect at least a hash of the image to be stored on the blockhain..

hoten 5y ago
Wait, is this not how it works? Seemed like a safe assumption...
- arcticbull 5y ago
  Even if it is, you can't really reconstitute the image from the SHA. I mean, unless we just created a new proof of waste algorithm.
  - quotemstr 5y ago
    You can't rebuild the image from the hash, but you can query various content-addressed stores for the image, potentially letting proof-of-space cryptocurrency systems do double duty as both verifiable resource commitments and repositories of blockchain external data.
    - arcticbull 5y ago
      Proof of wasted space. Proof of space algorithms just fill hard drives with garbage.
      - quotemstr 5y ago
        Better than continuously burning electricity, yes? And if the stored data is actually useful, is the net result all that bad?
        arcticbull 5y ago
        I mean, it's still worse than not doing any of this lol, and that's the null hypothesis we should be using. Yes, getting stabbed is better than getting shot, but maybe stay inside and fire up a nice S3 bucket. The real problem is any proof of resource scheme immediately becomes a grey goo where folks are incentivized to consume literally all that resource wether it makes sense or not. It has no negative feedback loop. It cannot make sense. Also, because of market pricing of the tokens businesses cannot actually leverage it (as they don't want wacky prices that vary by the minute) so you're left with, as usual, illegal content, gambling, speculation and other misc crime. Basically why Filecoin has a small rack of hard drives' worth of stored data and Chia has exabytes and exabytes of garbage - or did, does anyone care about that one anymore? It makes more sense to just store garbage if your goal is to run a neat little pyramid scheme.

mastazi 5y ago

I'm very surprised that those (the JSON and the picture) are not stored in a decentralised way e.g. IPFS or Swarm. So if I buy an expensive NFT, and the domain goes down, the NFT is now worthless? We should be on the lookout for any of these domains expiring, then we will buy them and upload Rick Astley GIFs

himlion 5y ago
Most NFT projects are in fact stored on IPFS. You can put an IPFS URL in the tokenURI field.
- mastazi 5y ago
  Oh yeah, I saw NFTs with IPFS URLs before, the reason why I'm surprised is that I thought all of them were using some form of decentralised storage.
- swiftcoder 5y ago
  However, if someone ever stops paying a 3rd party to actually pin the file in IPFS… poof Just because you put a file in IPFS doesn’t mean IPFS actually retains it
  - thinkingemote 5y ago
    And there's about 0% chance that ipfs or the internet as we know it will still be operating as it is in 40 years.
fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
There’s a popular genre of NFTs which consist of a recording of some physical object (often a painting) being destroyed. So perhaps we should create an NFT which represents the stranding of other NFTs through hacking. We could upload the logs from the shell showing us deleting everything.
zenlikethat 5y ago
They often are. For instance on Arweave

todd3834 5y ago

I hate to admit it but I’m still struggling to understand why people would pay so much for NFTs. I feel like I fully understand what they are and why most people want me to believe it has value but I still don’t agree. I’m waiting for my mind to change but it hasn’t happened yet. It’s frustrating because so many people I respect are leaving their high paying jobs to work in web3 startups around NFTs and I feel dumb for not getting it.

LogonType10 5y ago
Money laundering.
- thenewewb 5y ago
  It’s not that simple.
sbierwagen 5y ago
The most plausible conspiracy theories I've heard is that the big sales ($1 million plus) are wash trades, ("sell" an object to a confederate for 500 ETH, then they transfer the money right back via another route) and some classic money laundering Now of course there's a mountain of clueless suckers kicking off a regular tulip mania-style bubble. I wonder how many more weeks it will last.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  Like this $500,000,000 flash loan backed wash trade of punk 9998. [1] [1] https://news.artnet.com/art-world/crypto-punk-500-million-sale-2028470 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/crypto-punk-500-million-sa...
  - throaway6942 5y ago
    that's not a wash trade.. it was just a publicity stunt. I know the guy who did it!

forgotmyoldname 5y ago

So how exactly is the "gas money" calculated? I was led to believe it was expensive because putting all that data into the blockchain costed a significant amount. Asking because, wanting to verify whether NFTs were really a scam or scheme instead of just following heated Twitter arguments, I looked into uploading my own NFT. Gas money for a single image was $250--estimated earnings for an NFT are in the low dollars for most people, so it certainly wasn't worth it for me. I told a friend how insane the price was and went back to attempt the process once more a few minutes later to get a screenshot showing him I wasn't lying--gas money for the same image was suddenly over $800. I can't think of any reasonable way to justify such costs if it's just encoding a few bytes of text and not an actual image, so now I'm doubly suspicious of how these costs are actually calculated. It reminds me of countless other schemes where you put in a bunch of initial cash to "start your own business", then spend the rest of your days desperately trying to find buyers.

Fckd 5y ago
Of course its a scam. all are fuelled by cheap printing press
folli 5y ago
(just speaking for Ethereum) The gas fees are a constant, so you pay a certain amount of ETH to mint your NFT. You don't upload any image data but solely the address (so a couple of bytes) of the owner. The reason that this costs so much is the exponential increase in ETH prices in the recent years and the network congestions (gas price depends on the workload of the ETH network). What used to be a couple of cents or so is now easily $70, depending on the ETH price and network congestion. I whipped up a calculator some time ago: https://nuftu.com/pricing https://nuftu.com/pricing
meheleventyone 5y ago
The cost is about how expensive it is to execute the smart contract. Plus a tip to get your transaction executed earlier. https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/gas/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/gas/ If you’re like “well those costs are ludicrous compared to the computational complexity” then you’re right. But then the entire thing is secured by the ludicrous overspend of power through computation.

notindexed 5y ago

Why misconception? NFT = proof of ownership

iamacyborg 5y ago
The only thing it proves ownership of is of the NFT itself and not the asset the NFT claims to be.
thephyber 5y ago
The point is "proof of ownership" of what. The misconception seems to be that people think the owned content is inlined in the blockchain, when it more often is a URL in the NFT / on the blockchain. Hence, the proof of ownership is contextual around what content existed at the URL at the time of minting, which might change if the controller of the URL changes the content after minting.

deleted 5y ago

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parafactual 5y ago

This means that NFTs still don't denote much without a centralized authority. Doesn't that defeat the point? (That might not make them worthless, since value is socially constructed, but it makes the claims of decentralization seem less impressive.)

meheleventyone 5y ago
All the trading hubs like OpenSea are centralised to the point that some NFTs will get blacklisted if a famous enough person in the community gets scammed out of theirs.

jamespitts 5y ago

Here is more information about current NFT-related standardization efforts in the Ethereum community: https://www.nftstandards.wtf/ https://www.nftstandards.wtf/ Discussions about proposals & implementations are happening here: https://ethereum-magicians.org/tag/nft https://ethereum-magicians.org/tag/nft

iamwil 5y ago

This isn't the whole story. Some NFTs are written to the blockchain. Avastars https://avastars.io/ https://avastars.io/ is an NFT collection that's represented by an SVG. The SVGs are all written on-chain, back when it was cheaper to do so. https://nft.substack.com/p/the-art-of-avastars https://nft.substack.com/p/the-art-of-avastars The original NFT, Cryptopunks is also written on-chain now. (It wasn't originally). https://www.larvalabs.com/blog/2021-8-18-18-0/on-chain-cryptopunks https://www.larvalabs.com/blog/2021-8-18-18-0/on-chain-crypt... One of the oldest NFTs, MoonCatRescue https://mooncatrescue.com/ https://mooncatrescue.com/ writes an encoded version of the image onchain, and uses a published function to regenerate the image. The MD5 hash of the algorithm is written onchain so you know you're using the right one. https://github.com/ponderware/mooncatparser/blob/master/mooncatparser.js https://github.com/ponderware/mooncatparser/blob/master/moon... For other NFT projects that can't use these techniques, they use decentralized storage like IPFS and ARWeave. You can check what technique is used with this tool for any NFT project on ETH chain: https://checkmynft.com/ https://checkmynft.com/

exclipy 5y ago
Did you read any of that code? I looked at mooncatparser and it just hardcodes all possible 2-bit art as a big string array constant at the top of the JS file. Definitely not "on the blockchain". The part that's stored on the blockchain is the index into the big string array.
- iamwil 5y ago
  Good job reading the code! It's as you should do when looking at a project. Is there a way where the image can be replaced with another based on the scheme? I didn't see any, which achieves the same result as putting the image on-chain.

Kosirich 5y ago

I haven't studied NFTs but I will admit I had an misconceptions that the low pixel art NFTs purpose was that it was able to be stored on the chain itself as "it's own thing" or as a representation of a "bigger piece". My question would then be.... why the lowres pixelated NFTs if they are being hosted somewhere else?

skinnyasianboi 5y ago

"..There are other techniques such as using a solution like IPFS,.." IPFS is pretty much the standard

ebanana 5y ago

sometimes i feel like nfts are the new mlm

bananamerica 5y ago

Three types of people "get" NFTs: - those that have something to gain from it, and are likely insincere; - those that are ashamed of not getting it and merely pretend to understand it; - those that duel in such profound abstractions that the actual world for them becomes a nuisance, a minor detail, an after thought. NFTs are a joke, a thought experiment taken too far. They're the modern version of The Emperor's New clothes.

koonsolo 5y ago
Or they are the new baseball cards.
- koffiezet 5y ago
  But you get a baseball card that's pretty hard to perfectly duplicate, not a link to a digital picture of a baseball card, which can be copied at virtually zero-cost, and where you have zero control over the hosting of that picture, and can be replaced at any time. What's the point of 'owning' a digital baseball card if anyone can download it and store it on their PC? There's only one Mona Lisa, it only hangs in the Louvre, you can't just have an exact copy of it at zero cost. It's make-belief ownership. The only viable application I've seen is digital licensing, for non-free software or digital assets. This can work in a closed-garden system, like in-game assets, software licensing, ... where you don't have control over the environment you're in, but cannot work on an open internet. But anyway, the gas-cost on eth is WAY too high ($70-ish to mint?) for this to be actually used for these applications, and if you're in a walled-garden anyway, who needs decentralisation?
- deleted 5y ago
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- thinkingemote 5y ago
  Baseball cards used to come with a purchase of a real product. They were an incentive to buy actual things. People collect them now, but they didn't exist on their own back then initially.

vmception 5y ago

In response to the title, some are. Since blockspace has increased some people are deploying NFTs that put the binary data directly into them A particularly novel one, to me, was that people did it with SVGs and html injection directly into the image location methods of the NFTs It works! The marketplaces and wallets just read that. No ipfs required.

kerng 5y ago

There was a post on Embrace the Red a while ago. It also talks about how there is not even a hash required on-chain. https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2021/broken-nft-standards/ https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2021/broken-nft-standar... It all is really up to whoever implements it to make decisions on how secure/verifiable/reliable an NFT is. Storing the image itself on-chain actually makes most often not a lot of sense if you think about it, but at least a hash should be required in such cases.

deleted 5y ago

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Kiro 5y ago

People seem to gloss over the first example (Project Memento) which I think is a great example where NFTs make sense. It's just a configuration with a fixed value (the coordinates) and a dynamic value you can actually change yourself (the letter). Other apps and games can use the same NFTs to build something different based on the same coordinates. Let's say I build a war game where Project Memento NFTs decide ownership of land on map. The blockchain is an open API and players just need to connect their wallets to my game in order to play. HyperDragons eating CryptoKitties to grow stronger is a good example of one app using NFTs from another. Art NFTs on the other hand are more like digital signatures. It doesn't really matter what is stored in the NFT. What gives it value is the fact that it was minted by X (where X can be an artist or a service). Yeah, you can use IPFS or store a hash but what's the point? You're buying the bragging rights, nothing else.

can16358p 5y ago

I believe it really boils down to consensus. If enough entities in a community "accepts" some platform/publisher as valid, those collectibles created by those entities (which can easily be validated on the chain) will have subjective value. Just like money: it's a piece of paper but enough people/companies/governments legally accept it so that paper now has a value more than it's physical components. I can print money too but it will be fake and worthless, even if I print it on a more expensive paper. An NFT is just some bits on a blockchain after all, but when enough people accept those "bits" by a particular entity, they are worth something. Sure anyone can clone/copy paste those JPEGs and mint them just as I can print dollars on my home printer, but as long as they aren't issued by an entity that many trust (e.g. A legally accepted central bank) they are worthless. Which in this case community is free to choose their central bank and currency, and change if they have the interest, creating a whole new economic system.

ostenning 5y ago
Consensus needs realistic price evaluations otherwise NFTs and most of crypto will remain what it actually is: a pump and dump asset class.
- can16358p 5y ago
  Currently the "value" is determined by hype and speculation. The more NFT (or whatever replaces that idealogically) is accepted into the society, the more "real" uses it will have and whatever real (non-pump-and-dump-JPEGs) use it has will stabilize its value when the hype ends.
thinkingemote 5y ago
Exactly if people don't value it , it has no value. So it's fundamental to shill, promote and evangelise and maybe stretch the truth for NFTs for it to succeed. To not do so endangers the hype and your own investment. If people don't believe it, it has no value. Money was a token that has direct exchange value. You don't really need to promote it to give it value.

andronov04 5y ago

The longevity of many NFT projects is a real problem. This is why we set out to create the Smarts platform. The platform combines smart contracts with generative arts (smart arts, abbreviated into Smarts). Smarts is a new platform where the entirety of the artwork is stored in, and computed from smart contracts with no external dependencies at all. No IPFS, no Arweave, no APIs, no baseURI, no p5js, etc. So all Smarts artworks will live as long as Ethereum itself. However, the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) has some severe limitations for smart contracts - less than 25kb, no floating point math, limited gas amount for each invocation. So this makes it an interesting coding challenge to create smart contract based arts, it’s bearing some similarities to the demoscene. We haven't launched yet, but you can check it out the work in progress here: https://smarts.is/ https://smarts.is/

hermitsings 5y ago

Enlightening

MrPatan 5y ago

Many are fully on chain, SVGs generated on the fly or JS code that generates the artwork.

deleted 5y ago

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