5 ms·

If 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

If 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 ago
What is stopping you from selling a movie you've just downloaded ? The movie industry is a scam !
- ekabod 5y ago
  it would be selling a link to the location of a movie file.
  - fooyc 5y ago
    Which would be better than all streaming platforms today who don't even let you download what you have bought
    - neilalexander 5y ago
      s/bought/licensed/
- jordemort 5y ago
  Nobody is trying to tell me that buying a movie is an investment vehicle, though.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  A 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.
  - 5040 5y ago
    Prices aren't obvious. Movies are a good example of this. >Surprisingly, during the court battles over the legality of the VCR, the studios began selling their movies on Betamax and VHS—to play on the very devices they were trying to outlaw. Trying to have it both ways, they began selling movies on video cassettes for retail prices up to $100). In 1977, Twentieth Century Fox was the first when they released Patton and MAS*H, which had been in theaters seven years prior, and The Sound of Music, which had its theatrical release in 1965. The first movies on videocassette weren't exactly new releases. Given a family of four could watch a movie at the theater for about $15 in 1977, $100 for a videocassette of the same movie seemed outlandishly expensive. But from the studios' perspective, that was a fair price to own a movie versus the lower price to rent a seat in a theater to watch it. The price Fox set for these first releases became the standard for the industry.
- sgent 5y ago
  Copyright law.
mythz 5y ago
There's no such constraint, it would be futile even if there was, you can just copy the image to a different web server and get a different URL. What's going to be interesting to watch is when one of the heavily CDN's used goes down so NFT owners are left with receipts of broken links, even better if a CDN gets hijacked and gets configured to return the same Rick Roll clip for every NFT link.
- bni 5y ago
  What are the most popular CDNs used for this crap?
  - T0Bi 5y ago
    > What are the most popular CDNs used for this crap? They're using IPFS and/or Arweave so nothing that can simply go down. Decentralization yay.
- T0Bi 5y ago
  They're using IPFS and/or Arweave so nothing that can simply go down. Decentralization yay.
skizm 5y ago
You can tell who minted it. So the "uniqueness" comes from the fact that the original artist minted the NFT and the timestamp tells you if this was the first and/or only one minted by this artist for this URL.
- jordemort 5y ago
  Is there any sort of in-band mechanism for verifying that the key that minted a particular NFT belongs to a specific person, or does that have to be done manually/off-chain? Is it the usual case that people purchasing NFTs or marketplaces selling them undertake that kind of due diligence before completing a transaction?
  - nkeebs 5y ago
    The marketplace for the most part does this for you. The artist directs buyers to the marketplace page for their project and the marketplace pulls information directly from the blockchain. If you want additional security you can manually lookup the history of a project on etherscan. There are scammers that make copy-cat projects but it is usually easy to steer clear of them by getting contract address/marketplace info from the artist on twitter or discord.
- falcolas 5y ago
  Until the artist needs money, and “mints” more NFTs for the same URL.
  - skizm 5y ago
    Timestamp shows which one came first.
    - falcolas 5y ago
      So? That doesn't make the following ones invalid. At best, it's like a numbered print. The point is, there's no scarcity built in to an NFT. Scarcity builds far more value than a position in line.
programmarchy 5y ago
The timestamp and signature would disprove your claim, and evidence of your fraud would perpetually exist on the blockchain if someone wanted to hold you accountable.
- willio58 5y ago
  Yeah this is the thing. You can’t prove ownership if you copy paste a jpeg or a url. You prove ownership with the blockchain.
  - neilalexander 5y ago
    The blockchain tells you that you "own" whatever was at the URL at the point of time that it was written onto the chain. There is no continuing or on-going guarantee that the content at the URL won't change after that. If there is no content hash in the receipt and the original URL is now defunct, how do you prove authenticity?
    - programmarchy 5y ago
      One way would be to store a hash of the content at that URL with the NFT, but there's actually a better way. IPFS supports the concept of immutability [1], so you could just use an IPFS URL with a content identifier. It also allows for revisions linked to the original content identifier. [1] https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/immutability/ https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/immutability/
      - neilalexander 5y ago
        While this coincidentally works for IPFS CIDs, it's not clear why hashes wouldn't be first-class fields in the NFT itself.
      - jordemort 5y ago
        Is it correct that things can disappear from IPFS, if nobody is continuing to bother to pin the content? It seems like you could get an immutable URL this way, but that there's still no guarantee that the URL will remain accessible.

fooyc 5y ago

What is stopping you from selling a movie you've just downloaded ? The movie industry is a scam !

ekabod 5y ago
it would be selling a link to the location of a movie file.
- fooyc 5y ago
  Which would be better than all streaming platforms today who don't even let you download what you have bought
  - neilalexander 5y ago
    s/bought/licensed/
jordemort 5y ago
Nobody is trying to tell me that buying a movie is an investment vehicle, though.
michaelmrose 5y ago
A 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.
- 5040 5y ago
  Prices aren't obvious. Movies are a good example of this. >Surprisingly, during the court battles over the legality of the VCR, the studios began selling their movies on Betamax and VHS—to play on the very devices they were trying to outlaw. Trying to have it both ways, they began selling movies on video cassettes for retail prices up to $100). In 1977, Twentieth Century Fox was the first when they released Patton and MAS*H, which had been in theaters seven years prior, and The Sound of Music, which had its theatrical release in 1965. The first movies on videocassette weren't exactly new releases. Given a family of four could watch a movie at the theater for about $15 in 1977, $100 for a videocassette of the same movie seemed outlandishly expensive. But from the studios' perspective, that was a fair price to own a movie versus the lower price to rent a seat in a theater to watch it. The price Fox set for these first releases became the standard for the industry.
sgent 5y ago
Copyright law.

mythz 5y ago

There's no such constraint, it would be futile even if there was, you can just copy the image to a different web server and get a different URL. What's going to be interesting to watch is when one of the heavily CDN's used goes down so NFT owners are left with receipts of broken links, even better if a CDN gets hijacked and gets configured to return the same Rick Roll clip for every NFT link.

bni 5y ago
What are the most popular CDNs used for this crap?
- T0Bi 5y ago
  > What are the most popular CDNs used for this crap? They're using IPFS and/or Arweave so nothing that can simply go down. Decentralization yay.
T0Bi 5y ago
They're using IPFS and/or Arweave so nothing that can simply go down. Decentralization yay.

skizm 5y ago

You can tell who minted it. So the "uniqueness" comes from the fact that the original artist minted the NFT and the timestamp tells you if this was the first and/or only one minted by this artist for this URL.

jordemort 5y ago
Is there any sort of in-band mechanism for verifying that the key that minted a particular NFT belongs to a specific person, or does that have to be done manually/off-chain? Is it the usual case that people purchasing NFTs or marketplaces selling them undertake that kind of due diligence before completing a transaction?
- nkeebs 5y ago
  The marketplace for the most part does this for you. The artist directs buyers to the marketplace page for their project and the marketplace pulls information directly from the blockchain. If you want additional security you can manually lookup the history of a project on etherscan. There are scammers that make copy-cat projects but it is usually easy to steer clear of them by getting contract address/marketplace info from the artist on twitter or discord.
falcolas 5y ago
Until the artist needs money, and “mints” more NFTs for the same URL.
- skizm 5y ago
  Timestamp shows which one came first.
  - falcolas 5y ago
    So? That doesn't make the following ones invalid. At best, it's like a numbered print. The point is, there's no scarcity built in to an NFT. Scarcity builds far more value than a position in line.

programmarchy 5y ago

The timestamp and signature would disprove your claim, and evidence of your fraud would perpetually exist on the blockchain if someone wanted to hold you accountable.

willio58 5y ago
Yeah this is the thing. You can’t prove ownership if you copy paste a jpeg or a url. You prove ownership with the blockchain.
- neilalexander 5y ago
  The blockchain tells you that you "own" whatever was at the URL at the point of time that it was written onto the chain. There is no continuing or on-going guarantee that the content at the URL won't change after that. If there is no content hash in the receipt and the original URL is now defunct, how do you prove authenticity?
  - programmarchy 5y ago
    One way would be to store a hash of the content at that URL with the NFT, but there's actually a better way. IPFS supports the concept of immutability [1], so you could just use an IPFS URL with a content identifier. It also allows for revisions linked to the original content identifier. [1] https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/immutability/ https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/immutability/
    - neilalexander 5y ago
      While this coincidentally works for IPFS CIDs, it's not clear why hashes wouldn't be first-class fields in the NFT itself.
    - jordemort 5y ago
      Is it correct that things can disappear from IPFS, if nobody is continuing to bother to pin the content? It seems like you could get an immutable URL this way, but that there's still no guarantee that the URL will remain accessible.