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TheNFTbay.org – The Billion Dollar Torrent (All NFT's from Ethereum and Solana)
- rvz 5y agoThe images are not even stored on the blockchain. So you are basically purchasing a very expensive receipt for something that you do not even 'own' and the images are sitting on a server somewhere. This is definitive proof that these sort of NFTs based on images, videos, etc are a complete and gigantic scam ready to collapse. QED.
- fooyc 5y agoEver bought a game or a movie yet ?
- banana_giraffe 5y agoSo, is the infohash on that page being a discography for a Swedish rock group called November an Easter Egg, or just a random copy-n-paste?
- TheProbes 5y agoI own a cryptopunk NFT. https://openpuddle.io/?id=328wfloxyf https://openpuddle.io/?id=328wfloxyf I'm happy to answer any questions about it that you may have.
- kumarvvr 5y agoAm glad this is happening. A handful of people actually know what are NFTs. Those with half knowledge are curious about their insane transactions. Those who are dumb or greedy or both, think NFTs are the next best thing. Events like this will even out the playing field, as the dumb ones will fear that their investments might wnd up on the torrent interwebs.
- clippablematt 5y agoNobody in the nft space cares about this. It’s being shared around and everyone thinks it’s funny that there are people so angry about nfts and that they think this is a “gotcha”, people are happy the content is being distributed and recorded by all the seeders. It’s wild how divisive nfts have become. I’m pretty sure everyone has such an abusive relationship with money and value that they’re blinded by it all and fearful of anything that embraces it. That probably makes sense as an attitude to have, but it’s also silly. https://youtu.be/vMDBmP56s8o https://youtu.be/vMDBmP56s8o
- mavu 5y agoVery nice. I hope this makes some news and show people more clearly what they are actually spending money on.
- fooyc 5y agoDo you think that people don't know that a picture on the internet can be freely downloaded or screenshoted ?
- yabones 5y agoIsn't funny how the same generation that almost bankrupted the entertainment industry with piracy (their words, not mine) is now crying and stomping their feet because of exactly the same copy-paste 'piracy'. It doesn't go both ways, scarcity simply doesn't exist with digital goods, nor does ownership. We proved two decades ago that average people don't care about copyright, why would anybody be so naive to think adding a blockchain would change anything?
- programmarchy 5y agoBecause now the apparatus of digital rights enforcement can be exercised by independent creators, without the need for leviathan media companies with hordes of lawyers. It enables simple and easy self-publishing for artists.
- singularity2001 5y agoIgnorant question: Can downloading the torrent result in charges of 'digital theft' and given the 'value' of the file result in a felony?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mythz 5y agoCan Web Browser users be charged with 'digital theft' for downloading images from public HTTP servers? No, it's the same thing.
- TrackerFF 5y agoLet's say you create some image, and claim ownership over it. Would it be theft if someone views that image, and thus saves it? Like via the browser/cache, to the computer, or whatever. I can see that it would be a copyright violation if someone actively hosts that exact picture. Shouldn't be much different from hosting copyrighted audio or video clips. But then again, if you host that picture on some public website - just the mere fact that someone views it, would also mean that their computer probably has already stored it? With that said, I do think that sharing copyrighted material, goes under digital theft. And in this case, someone has explicitly shared the media/data. (I'd imagine that this varies from country to country. What is theft in one country, may not be the same in another.)
- superbaconman 5y agoNo, because you wouldn't have actually stolen anything. The content of nfts are public; they kinda have to be to live on the Blockchain. You actually need the wallet that owns the nft in order to prove ownership. In other words, you have to steal someone's wallet to take their nfts.
- SuoDuanDao 5y agoI doubt it. Nobody in the NFT space is ignorant of the fact that copies can be made, an NFT is simply ownership of the original. The more people want copies of something, the more valuable the original would probably be.
- zachaden 5y agoI have been tinkering in the NFT space, yet I don't see any particular use cases affecting the world.
- grenoire 5y agoHoly moly, twenty whole terabytes of this mess!
- micromacrofoot 5y agoyeah but only I have the certificate of authenticity
- Deestan 5y agoWell, here is mine: ca813206fc37742ed2bf192c97f6c7db56686321 It says I own Banksy's hat. Now, the site I bought it from has since gone offline and the person I bought it from deleted his email account and I lost the paper receipt, but there's my certificate of authenticity. I OWN BANKSY'S HAT Do you want to buy it from me?
- notkaiho 5y agoOr rather, the receipt of your purchase of a link. :P
- mosdl 5y agoHave you gotten it graded yet?
- KZerda 5y agoYou have a url that purports to be a certificate of authenticity. What happens to that certificate of authenticity when the site goes down, or gets sold to someone who decides to replace all the images there with poop emojis?
- fooyc 5y agoSame for your movie collection. The movie streaming industry is a scam !
- npteljes 5y agoIf they promise you to own that piece of media, and then later make it unavailable for you, then yeah, that's a scam. DRM, or things like DVD region locking are also quite scammy if you ask me.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
- neximo64 5y agoNFTs are bigger than the size of the Ethereum blockchain
- sanqui 5y agoI love how the .NFO file is presented as an image, yet deliberately uses the wrong charset for its box drawing characters. Nice touch.
- ghuntley 5y agoThanks :)
- fooyc 5y agoWith the TPB parody and everything, this a satire against intellectual property in general, not just NFTs, right ?
- ghuntley 5y agoIt's the spiritual successor of https://www.noyaml.com https://www.noyaml.com.
- handrous 5y agoSomehow I'd missed that one. I agree with its general point, but the "this is what SQL would look like as YAML" joke actually looks almost exactly like how I write SQL. Maybe I've been doing it wrong all these years....
- theshadowknows 5y agoI used to come onto HN and see crypto-coin news and I'd jump into the comments and ask something along the lines of "But isn't bitcoin and all the other things like it just a giant scam?" and someone who believed in Bitcoin to be a transformative technology would jump in and explain the real potential. I personally still think it's sort of a scam, but I'm happy for all of the people who used it to get rich....so, along those lines... How is "NFT" not a gigantic scam? I'm looking at this image right now: https://rarible.com/token/0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061c2e118a18a936f13d:9187?tab=details https://rarible.com/token/0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061c2e118a18... There is nothing at all to keep me from screenshotting or otherwise downloading that image. I won't have to pay the author $213 for it, I just take the image because I can. Now I won't necessarily "be the original owner" of it or whatever but....I mean....I have the same image as the owner and I have $213 where the new "owner" simply has the image..... Can someone, if such a person exists, that believes in NFT's as having actual value please explain it? It just seems to me like a few thousand people have realized "Hey people will literally give me $200 just because I told them to" and are doing it at scale.... And according to that website, so far the author of those "NFT"s has made 13 million dollars......Is that true? If this person has made 13 million dollars because they drew a few monkeys....I'm pretty sure they will be President of the US one day.
- fooyc 5y agoNFTs are a scam, but saying that it's because you can download them without paying is missing the point. You could say the same thing about movies, music, games, art. People in the cryptocurrency community believe that NFTs are used for money laundering. It's also believed that prices are inflated artificially to trick gullible or greedy people into buying them. But the download thing ? It's missing the point.
- serverholic 5y agoA scam implies someone is getting hurt. Yet I haven't seen anyone getting hurt. You might say that people will get hurt when the bubble pops but people have been saying the same thing about crypto for awhile.
- chrisco255 5y agoRelease Notes: Did you know an NFT is just a hyperlink to an image usually stored on a Google drive? ... WTF? We destroyed our planet for this? ---- NFTs are simply JSON and JPEGs and people have deluded themselves into thinking they destroy the planet. This is quite a ridiculous situation. Blockchains produce blocks that get mined at regular intervals regardless of how much data or value is transferred with each block. The dubious argument is that since blockchains spend electricity to mine blocks that means they are destroying the planet. and therefore JSON and JPEG transfers are also destroying the planet. Even if you believe this, your fight should be against dirty power plants and end there. But meanwhile, Ethereum is migrating to proof of stake before next summer and will become 99.9% more energy efficient. I'm sure that we'll still hear the trope though.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mattdesl 5y agoIronically, this is great for NFT artists: most artists distributing their work as signed tokens want the high resolution media to be more widely distributed across many points of failure (that's exactly why IPFS is typically chosen). So far most comments here fail to understand that the economic value of an NFT, unlike traditional art through most of recent history, is not tied to scarcity of access to its media. If you want to learn more about this (very polarizing) paradigm and how it can benefit artists, I suggest the following links: [1] - https://mattdesl.substack.com/p/hicetnunc-and-the-merits-of-web3 https://mattdesl.substack.com/p/hicetnunc-and-the-merits-of-... [2] - https://jackrusher.com/journal/what-does-it-mean-to-buy-a-gif.html https://jackrusher.com/journal/what-does-it-mean-to-buy-a-gi...
- fooyc 5y agoYou could do that with movies, music, art, games, anything digital. NFTs are a scam, but this is completely missing the point. Unless the point is that every digital property is a scam.
- neilalexander 5y agoYou're conflating two wildly different things: buying "ownership" and buying "license". NFTs are represented to people as buying ownership of something, as if you are the one true owner of whatever-it-is and it is yours to do with what you will, including selling or re-selling it. Most digital content (think films, music, games) is not bought, it is licensed. You buy the license which grants you some rights to consume it, but there are also restrictions (thou shalt not redistribute, re-sell etc) and those rights are often not irrevocable.
- jordemort 5y agoIf an NFT just contains a URL, is there anything stopping me from minting a bunch of new NFTs that contain the same URLs as existing NFTs? Is there some sort of uniqueness constraint on the URLs or is it just taken on faith that nobody would ever do that? What if I added some nonsense (like, I dunno, an fbclid) to the URL query string? What if I minted duplicates of all the NFTs on the Ethereum chain on the Solana chain, or vice-versa?
- fooyc 5y agoWhat is stopping you from selling a movie you've just downloaded ? The movie industry is a scam !
- ekabod 5y agoit would be selling a link to the location of a movie file.
- fooyc 5y agoWhich would be better than all streaming platforms today who don't even let you download what you have bought
- neilalexander 5y agos/bought/licensed/
- jordemort 5y agoNobody is trying to tell me that buying a movie is an investment vehicle, though.
- michaelmrose 5y agoA movie requires as input substantial fulfilling meaningful work and produces as output something that people find meaningful. Rendering the output file artificially scarce may itself be bullshit but doing otherwise does leave us with the challenge of how to pay for that work. The price set for enjoyment of that file is set to a value that the majority of people can afford even if they have to wait for it to say hit red box. For some value of sense the movie industry makes some sense. An NFT like a physical baseball card has zero actual utility save for the covetous feeling of ownership itself a mental disease now unmoored from physicality and actuality. It is an opportunity for us to view side by side people who cannot live indoors and in some places get enough to eat with people pouring more money than many people will ever see into abstract unrealized never to be satiated covetous greed that will only pay a return if they can thereafter pawn it off on someone even more foolish in the future.
- serverholic 5y agoI honestly don't think this is the big "gotcha" that people seem to think it is. An NFT can be traced back to the creator. So you don't have the same history or satisfaction of giving back to the creator of the NFT. I think people on here are getting too caught up in the technical. I can print out a shiny charizard pokemon card but it isn't the same thing is it? A better way to think about NFTs is exchanging a monetary gift to the creator of something you enjoy for a collectable.
- jagger27 5y ago> I think people on here are getting too caught up in the technical. I can print out a shiny charizard pokemon card but it isn't the same thing is it? In this case it is bit for bit identical. My inkjet printer Charizard would never pass as real. > A better way to think about NFTs is exchanging a monetary gift to the creator of something you enjoy for a collectable. This is called “buying art”.
- serverholic 5y agoPeople can make very convincing copies of a charizard. Yet people put effort and money into making sure they are getting an authentic card. Authenticity and supporting original creators is important to people.
- ghotli 5y agoI like that this exists. Seems to me that a non-fungible token that represents a receipt for a piece of art needs a different name entirely. It won't get one, but it's just one idea based on them that took off like wildfire. An NFT is just a token on a blockchain that you can't own a fractional part of. You might desire the state of that token in a card game, or a pokemon variant that's on-chain. If what it represents is something off-chain, it's still an NFT -- just only useful because scarcity is a hell of a drug to humans apparently. The Ethereum improvement proposals are a good place to start for other use cases other than a vehicle for artists / scam artists or whoever to get rich. "EIP-721: Non-Fungible Token Standard" https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721 https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721 is a good place to start if you want the hard detail.
- aaron695 5y agoI like the repetitive HN comments which would exactly apply to any digital artefact. A lot of delusion going on just to be part of the hate train. Ooooh why buy books or movies or courses when anyone can right click (/left click on TPB) And that's how many people now feel about physical books and CDs and Bluerays too. I think they are all stupid except picture books which I don't think can be done well digitally yet. But some people do like buying that stuff, so books and movies keep getting made. And they seem somewhat happy. And a lot of the people who don't care about the digital ownership are also happy.
- mdrzn 5y agohahaha the readme was a fun read, good to see some trolling in the NFT space too. The only thing that scares me is the size.. how is it 20TB total? That's a lot of jpegs..
- gigatexal 5y agoof all the things the crypto world has given us: a fixed number of digital coins, smart contracts, all teh blockchain based companies, NFTs are the stupidest most useless things except for those minting and selling them then they're still shit to sell to the gullible.
- reginold 5y agoIf these images were stored on the blockchain, would that make a difference?
- ASalazarMX 5y agoNone at all, since those "unique" assets can be copied freely because the blockchain is public. I'm really puzzled about why aren't they publishing a low-res copy of the image, and sending the buyer of the NFT the unpublished high-res version. That way only the buyer (and the artist) would have that file, and by keeping it secret they could make it rare, albeit not necessarily valuable.
- SrslyJosh 5y agoSame reason they're not assigning copyright or granting a commercial license as part of the sale -- it's just a scam, and those things aren't necessary for the scam to function. And because the marks think that they're gonna get rich off owning a blockchain pog with a link to a monkey jpeg, the art doesn't have to be good, either.
- T0Bi 5y ago> Same reason they're not assigning copyright or granting a commercial license as part of the sale -- it's just a scam, and those things aren't necessary for the scam to function. A lot of projects actually do assign a license to the sale.
- throwaway47292 5y agohaha damn I missed the boat, I was teaching my daughter about money and NFTs somehow make it easy to explain how crazy the world is, so we uploaded an NFT few days ago (day 148 of the log) https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/week-021.md#day-148-money https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/...
- diveanon 5y agoITT: People who don't know what NFT's are explaining what they think NFT's are to other people who don't know what NFT's are. HN is really good for tech & SF housing market news, but god awful for any other types of information because the users here think they are experts on every topic. If you are actually interested in how NFT's work, interesting projects using them, or just want to have a conversation around the topic that isn't just snarky morons jacking each other off, I highly encourage you to engage some of these communities on twitter, telegram, or discord. Its a really fun space right now and there are lots of projects looking for solid web devs if you are in the mood for a challenging side project.
- SrslyJosh 5y ago> ITT: People who don't know what NFT's are explaining what they think NFT's are to other people who don't know what NFT's are. Then you should explain what they are. If you can't (or won't), why should we care? > If you are actually interested in how NFT's work, interesting projects using them, or just want to have a conversation around the topic that isn't just snarky morons jacking each other off, I highly encourage you to engage some of these communities on twitter, telegram, or discord. If it's not a scam or cult, then just publish something on the web. "Can't explain it here, come chat with us on discord" has big "free personality test" vibes.
- diveanon 5y ago> Then you should explain what they are. I'm not a blogger or evangelist, plenty of people are and discuss this daily. Go find them on Twitter if you care, or not, makes no difference to me. > If it's not a scam or cult, then just publish something on the web. There are hundreds of whitepapers on the topic freely available all over the web. Every project worth following does this and there is no shortage of it. Honestly your comment is exactly what I meant, just pretentious HN users who can't be bothered to do a cursory search on the topic and just want to be spoon fed information.
- dropnerd 5y agoits strange how hn is so intellectually curious about technical subjects then as soon as people can make money from the tech, people who decide it's an immoral scam and have no curiosity take over the conversation the internet has convinced us that people who believe something strange must be wrong
- joeman1000 5y agoI think misunderstanding of NFTs is caused by one or all of: a persons generation, a persons hatred of crypto, a persons lack of openness to change. - Generational: I grew up playing Habbo hotel, club penguin, TF2. I am comfortable with the idea of digital goods. You pay for something that is not real and can sell ‘it’ later. ‘Ownership’ is a decidedly different concept for me and many other younger people. If I ‘own’ a hat in TF2, I can display it on my avatar, but I really have nothing. It’s a piece of code in Valve servers that renders some pixels on my characters head. Imagine if you buy some NFT art, and the metaverse becomes popular. You will have the ability to display the art (in your ‘house’ or something). If you think this is dorky and no one will bother, think about the resistance then explosion of social media in the mid 2010s. - Hatred of crypto: people hate crypto ideas for various reasons. Either environmental reasons, social pressure (from news and friends), fear of missing out, resentment at having missed out etc. I don’t comment on the validity of these beliefs, but they cloud peoples judgement either way. - Lack of openness to change: it is just a weird concept, like many crypto concepts. Even the thought that there could be underlying value to crypto currency was indeed a radical notion. Now it is mostly accepted (in my experience). The only people who don’t accept it are older and less willing to uproot the institutions which served them so well. Banks and traditional finance are still entrenched in our society. There are a huge set of people that have interests which oppose crypto. This is fine, I don’t blame them for disliking crypto. It is just something to keep in mind when making decisions. I hope my perspective helps some people.
- edanm 5y agoI mean, all of these are plausible reasons to misunderstand/hate NFTs. Then again, it's also possible that people who dislike NFTs don't misunderstand or hate them, they understand them perfectly and hate them anyway. And maybe you misunderstand them as well. NFT is just a technology. It's entirely possible to understand the technology and still hate it, e.g. I understand what nuclear weapons can do, yet I still hate them to some extent and would prefer they didn't exist. Not saying this is correct, just saying that you don't seem to leave open that possibility in your post. For the record, I don't really get NFTs. I mean, I kind of get how it's the same as autographs / collectibles, which I vaguely understand, but I don't particularly get how mapping that into a digital-only setting makes sense to people. But then I probably fall into some of your boxes above :) (I'm 36, I think blockchain is mostly overhyped though I do think cryptocurrencies specifically are interesting. I do think I'm open to change but who knows?)
- malermeister 5y agoNFTs are pure capitalist ideology. They introduce artificial scarcity for no good reason, without providing any actual value. You can have the exact same bytes without an NFT backing it up and have functionally the same goods - as demonstrated here. Cryptowarriors will come along and say something about how the NFT proves "ownership" or "provenance", but that's just ideological blindness. All NFTs do is wrap an pointless market layer around a digital good, for no reason and with no benefit to anyone, while using up electricity and killing the planet to power the insanity. Ideology at its worst.