20 ms·

An NFT without a blockchain

185 points by Amorymeltzer 5y ago

DevKoala 5y ago
> But there are a few drawbacks with this. > Without a published chain of transactions, there is no guarantee that the artist hasn't sold the same item multiple times. Then it doesn’t handle the most basic case.
- DitheringIdiot 5y ago
  The piece goes on to say that the same can be true for NFTs. An artist could just sell an identical work multiple times. I like this idea, it has the exact amount of usefulness of NFTs without the ecological issues.
  - mattdesl 5y ago
    I don’t think the piece is accurate. An NFT is uniquely addressable by its contract address. Copying it would produce a new address, and it would be obvious the artist is trying to sell the same work again. This is why it is “non-fungible” and what makes it uniquely different from mere files, receipts and signatures.
    - Aeolun 5y ago
      So you make another layer of PGP file where you first make a token/id that indicates you created the file (which ID doesn’t change between transactions). The problem is it still wouldn’t be obvious because nobody can verify anything.
    - DitheringIdiot 5y ago
      I’m sure you can generate a unique token for a non-unique artwork. I mean, I can just make an NFT now with a screenshot of someone else’s NFT.
      - mattdesl 5y ago
        Yep - I can make an NFT of a CryptoPunk, but since the addressable hash of my contract will be different, probably nobody would see value in acquiring my tokens. Social consensus (and, by extension, tooling and network effects) have built around the original crypto punk contract address, which seems to give it value over any other copy contracts that might be deployed after the fact.
        DitheringIdiot 5y ago
        So the real value of an NFT isn’t in the mechanism at all.
        mattdesl 5y ago
        The mechanism is extremely simple, see [1]. The value lies in the token which - much like art - is worth whatever somebody is willing to pay for it. [1] https://gist.github.com/mattdesl/c1eff283039b73a093c7777d11248a72 https://gist.github.com/mattdesl/c1eff283039b73a093c7777d112...
        lottin 5y ago
        Everything is worth whatever somebody is willing to pay for it.
        DitheringIdiot 5y ago
        So it’s replicating the worst thing about the art market — the speculation and nonsensical pricing. But without the best thing about the art market — actually owning a piece of art. With a thin veil of technobabble.
        mattdesl 5y ago
        That may be one view. Another view is that it allows artists across the globe a digital-first mechanism to distribute and earn revenue on their digital artwork. See Hicetnunc for example.
    - dkersten 5y ago
      So you have two unique NFT's claiming ownership of the same piece of art or tweet or whatever. Maybe on different blockchains, maybe not. Now what? Which one is the "real" one that conveys said ownership? How do you prove which one is the "real" one?
      - mattdesl 5y ago
        Usually whichever came first, or is still in circulation (hasn’t been burned), or whichever the distributor/artist says is the real one. Similar to a signed and authenticated physical artwork - if a newer copy turns up, which one is the authentic?
        root_axis 5y ago
        When it comes to fake artwork you at least need to be skilled enough to produce a convincing fake, which isn't trivial. In the NFT world anyone can trivially mint an NFT for anything, at any time, so there's no way to prove that "the first one" is the "real" one without relying on a trusted authority outside the blockchain. Thus any need for a blockchain is completely obviated.
        mattdesl 5y ago
        Hence “or whichever the distributor/artist says is the real one.” This does not prove copyright; it merely proves ownership of a token. It still requires a strong social consensus that the token and its addressable hash was indeed distributed by the artist (as in the case of most NFTs that are trading for any significant sum). This is very much like a certificate of authenticity of an artwork as it also requires social consensus (fwiw, a cert is far easier to forge than, say, a CryptoPunk).
        root_axis 5y ago
        Sure. My point being that the blockchain adds nothing useful. Social consensus does all the heavy lifting, the cryptographic signature is an implementation detail, and the blockchain is wholly unnecessary.
- timkam 5y ago
  Generally (with NFTs), the supposed 1-1 mapping of art piece (or other artifact) and token happens on meta-level, right? So for sure, an artist can issue many tokens that represent the same art piece (and don't tell me the token is a hash of the image or whatever; it still can be sold on a different technology, or noise can be added to the image, et cetera). Because of this object-/meta-level mix up, it seems that NFTs guarantee pretty much nothing, they are just great at facilitating speculation, because the whole thing takes so little effort...
  - drdeca 5y ago
    If the person/entity minting them commits to only using a particular address/public-key when minting (such that only ones from that address would be regarded as legitimate), then one can still check all the transactions they’ve made, and, well, if they mint tokens for other files which you don’t know what those files are, and have no way to retrieve them, then yes, you could be uncertain as to whether or not those are essentially the same image but with some noise added. If there is a list of what all those files are though (maybe the files are all available for download on the author’s website? Doesn’t have to be the author’s, just any source providing each file. Doesn’t need to be a trusted source either.), you could check that none of them are essentially the same. Though, the reliance on all the images being publicly available, does go against what it seems like the way many seem to want to use NFTs, and so for the use cases which are completely incompatible with all the images being publicly available (e.g. people who want to be the only person who has access to an image), your point is entirely valid, and there is presumably no way to achieve the use-case that those people seem to want. As for “what about on other technologies” I think this fits under the “the author should just make well-known all the [address+chain combos] they issue from, and instruct people to treat as illegitimate any which is issued from a [chain+address combo] that is outside of this well-known list as illegitimate” thing. It doesn’t seem like that serious of an issue? That being said, I don’t see much point to tokens like these. I’m just talking about "what can be done under different goals + assumptions" .
- btoiled 5y ago
  He argues just a few sentences further down that the same is true for on-chain NFTs.
  - miracle2k 5y ago
    No, he is mixing up two distinct things. One is trusting the artist (to be honest and manage their career, in the widest sense). The other is trusting that out of hundreds of people who owned this artwork before, everyone deleted their signature file. This model does not track ownership and therefore does not solve the usecase that an NFT is solving.
johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago
>Without a published chain of transactions, there is no guarantee that the artist hasn't sold the same item multiple times. That's a pretty glaring problem... and arguably the entire point of blockchain technology is to make tokens only spendable once.
- krainboltgreene 5y ago
  The only thing the distributed encrypted ledger does is tell you what wallet owns what token. It does not tell you if the artist has sold the piece multiple times.
  - breakfastduck 5y ago
    Yes exactly. It can certify the owner...
    - XorNot 5y ago
      No it can't because it has no legal standing whatsoever to do so. No court and no law creates any legally binding standing for an NFT, because an NFT sale does not establish any sort of recognized contract between the parties - it does not even establish the the terms of use or ownership under which the NFT can be recognized. The nature of NFTs at most would lead to a recognition of the the token being legal property, if your wallet was stolen, but not whatever you think the property actually is.
  - johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago
    >It does not tell you if the artist has sold the piece multiple times. If you purchased a NON-FUNGIBLE-token, you can be sure that nobody else owns the same array of bytes which may or may not prove that you own a piece of art. There may be many prints of the same original work created in multiple NFTs as there are in the art world... but it's not possible to sell the same NFT twice... on the blockchain at least... without re-acquiring it first. Plenty of NFT sellers sell multiple issues/prints/copies of the same original artwork. I think digital prints in NFT format are ridiculous but I digress.
authed 5y ago
copyright?
sascha_sl 5y ago
Git. You want git. Git does this. Please use git. You can even validate your transactions with a hook. I've joked about making a satire product website for a revolutionary new crypto. And because most people deep into NFTs have no idea how it works, I'd bet they'd love it. GitCoin? I'm out of energy, feel free to steal this idea.
- Zamicol 5y ago
  Gitcoin is very much so already a thing: https://gitcoin.co/ https://gitcoin.co/ It's used to fund public goods/open source projects.
- throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
  That's basically how this works. NFT's are store in IPFS which is essentially git + bittorrent https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ipfs/papers/master/ipfs-cap2pfs/ipfs-p2p-file-system.pdf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ipfs/papers/master/ipfs-ca...
- teraflop 5y ago
  Stripe did something very similar as part of a programming challenge several years back. https://abiusx.com/stripe-ctf-v3-writeup/ https://abiusx.com/stripe-ctf-v3-writeup/
- cortesoft 5y ago
  How would you gain consensus on which git repo is the original? How do you distinguish between the original repo and a fork? Crypto is git + a way to determine who is a fork
  - nkrisc 5y ago
    Would it even matter? What percentage of people who’ve bought into the cryptocurrency/NFT craze without even know how to verify something that?
    - cortesoft 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
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everfree 5y ago
If ownership is not transferable, then how can you call it a token, and what is it non-fungible in relation to? This categorically seems like it is not a non-fungible token, or even a token at all. It's just an artist signing a file using PGP. So many articles throw around the term "NFT" nowadays without stopping to even break down the acronym, let alone consider what it actually entails.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  The NFT part is only the “I paid for this item” part. You can make a chain by making a further transaction with the ID of the last one (which arguably indicates you own the file hash indicated). I don’t think the NFT actually does anything but identify a certain bunch of content? The important part is the transaction history.
  - everfree 5y ago
    > You can make a chain by making a further transaction with the ID of the last one (which arguably indicates you own the file hash indicated). You can, but then you either have to host a central transaction history somewhere or you run into the double-spending problem.
    - stagas 5y ago
      The difference with NFT is that it's used for art, and art comes from a specific artist, and usually in the world of art what gives value to the art is the artist. So, if I have a thing signed from the artist, it's as good as it can get. If they want to double spend or do other things, then they will lose credibility as artists and will no longer be able to sell what they sold so there's no incentive in cheating, hence no need for a central authority or blockchain. All you need is them publishing their public ledger of what was sold to whom, no blockchain necessary.
      - everfree 5y ago
        > If they want to double spend or do other things, then they will lose credibility as artists Double spending is a property of ownership, not creation.
eightysixfour 5y ago
> Without a published chain of transactions, there is no guarantee that the artist hasn't sold the same item multiple times. > Without a verified on-chain transaction, there is a risk that either the buyer or the seller may be lying about the transaction price. I mean, this is kind of the whole point - the published record on the chain is what actually matters. I don't like NFTs, but the anti-NFT crowd doesn't seem to get it and that is just as frustrating. People value status signaling tools. A lot. Image 99 of 1000 isn't a status signaling tool, showing you paid for the image is, the verifiable receipt is what matters. This article is like suggesting the signature on art is what matters, but what matters is the actual provenance.
- stale2002 5y ago
  > I mean, this is kind of the whole point - the published record on the chain is what actually matters. Sure, but you don't need a blockchain for that. It could be published anywhere. When it comes to publishing information, a blockchain is one of the least efficient ways of doing that. The blockchain doesn't change much in the equation here.
  - eightysixfour 5y ago
    It is inefficient but it absolutely provides things "anywhere" doesn't, with a much longer likelihood of surviving than "anywhere."
- coolestguy 5y ago
  It's like the author has absolutely 0 idea what the reason for blockchain is
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  Right but which chain and which NFT? NFTs on the blockchain suffer the same problems which is the point made in the article. There are multiple blockchains and no guarantee that a particular NFT is unique or even published by the actual author.
  - 5y ago
laluser 5y ago
How would people validate ownership of an NFT when there could be hundreds of blockchains in the future? Would I have to go and verify each one of them to make sure my NFT hasn't been sold multiple times already?
- doopy1 5y ago
  I think each chain is its own economy when it comes to NFTs.
- edent 5y ago
  We'll have to create a centralised registry of all tokens on all chains‽
  - CharlesW 5y ago
    And even though there may be tens of thousands of these search engines/registries built in the next two years, Google (for example, pick your poison) can step in any time and own this if NFTs turn into something more than pet rocks.
  - Zamicol 5y ago
    Just as there's a central ledger of all the various citizens of the word's countries? A few trusted ledgers is all that's needed.
  - kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
    It’s the circle of liiiiiiiiiife!
- thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
  Artificial scarcity is artificial. Nothing prevents someone from making copies and selling each "unique" one. Since it is decentralized, there is no centralized authority to take down the copies (that is, a DMCA-style take down). The "no one can censor you" upsides of decentralization are not without downsides: you cannot censor or take down others, even in cases of copyright breach.
- 5y ago
cortesoft 5y ago
It is silly to try to save money on the mechanism for NFTs. That defeats the entire purpose. The entire purpose of of an NFT is to publicly demonstrate that you wasted money on it. This is the case for all status symbols; if you are saving money on it, it loses its value as a status symbol.
- edent 5y ago
  My proposal saves money for the artist creating the token. Investors can pay as much as they like - with no middle-man.
beebeepka 5y ago
Remember what Victor Chaos said about NFT - you don't make money with them, you earn money by making people to invest in them. I think it's stupid by really not much different to people spending money on hats in TF2 or whatever. People used to lose their shit over virtual items in Diablo and MMOs. It's the same thing. Plenty of suckers out there
- moffkalast 5y ago
  Yeah it was never about the so called art, it's just the latest way to hype up and get people to fork over cash for something that's functionally the same as buying crypto anyway. Though you do get the bonus tax evasion, so that's neat.
  - doopy1 5y ago
    Has the tax evasion claim been at all substantiated beyond hypothetical pontification?
colpabar 5y ago
I highly recommend the new south park post covid special for anyone who still doesn’t understand what an NFT is or who just thinks the whole thing is kind of silly.
- CharlesW 5y ago
  https://decider.com/2021/12/16/south-park-covid-part-2-nfts/ https://decider.com/2021/12/16/south-park-covid-part-2-nfts/
- k__ 5y ago
  It really is a good episode, even the crypto crowd liked it. The scammers and the clueless critics all get their moment, lol.
er4hn 5y ago
This raises a very interesting point. Much of the problems with blockchain's, i.e. proof-of-work, on-chain transactions needing everyone to know about them, are because there are no central authorities baked into the design that can behave in opaque ways. Yet, centralized services still spring up to handle transactions: OpenSea for NFTs, Coinbase for cryptocoin transactions. These services in turn still rely on a sea of middlemen which take a cut, or "gas" fees for their work. If you are transfering coins among several services then there are fees for each transfer, etc. So tying this back to present day, mainstream, finance: When you run a credit card there are several middlemen between the cardholder and the merchant. This diagram (https://merchantcostconsulting.com/lower-credit-card-processing-fees/understanding-credit-card-networks/ https://merchantcostconsulting.com/lower-credit-card-process...) suggests 4 intermediaries, each taking a cut. In theory each of these provides a service - but how many are required in modern times? Let's say that the cardholder just wants to pay the merchant, and the merchant wants to maximize their take. In cryptocoin-land you would have a direct transaction with the merchant. This works because you cannot double pay. In trad-finance land you need to have your issuing bank state that you have the funds. Credit cards provide a level of abstraction where the merchant gets paid now and the credit card provider collects later. This all happens live. What if instead you had a system where: - Card holder uses a computing device (say a smartphone with TPM) and that cryptographically signs transactions to say that the card holder requested this. - Issuing bank gives the card holder a signed certificate each week saying: This is account holder #XXXXX. They can purchase up to $YYY at one time. - Card holder provides the cert to merchant upon wanting to make a purchase along with a signed receipt indicating a transfer of money. You could add a pin to be entered on each transaction as 2FA. - Merchant gets this crypto-receipt and has some reasonable amount of time to turn it in to the issuing bank (say 1 month) and collect payment. - Issuing bank gives merchant money for receipt and charges account holder. Account holder does normal procedures of paying for things, complaining about charges, etc. This scheme has a few advantages and feels very similar to how I sort of understand credit cards work in Europe. - Issuing bank can get a larger take since there are less intermediaries. - Merchant can get a larger take since there can be less fees. - There is a reasonable assurance of lack of fraud due to 2FA, and TPM storing signing key. - This does not require live internet access nor live responses. Why is there nothing like this? What are the drawbacks? Tying back to the parent discussion, is this a reasonable optimization on top of crypocurrency as it exists today?
csmarshall 5y ago
So…art, you're talking about art…
drdeca 5y ago
This works if you just want to prove that you and the artist agree that you paid the artist “for” the work. But, if you can’t transfer it to someone else, is it really a “token” in the relevant sense? Not that I think there’s much value in the NFTs corresponding to digital images, outside of from people being somewhat silly in what they value, but this nevertheless doesn’t satisfy all of use-cases of those blockchain tokens. With those blockchain tokens, as this article mentions, you do have to trust that the author is the actual author, and that they aren’t like, issuing more than they say they are (perhaps using different addresses), but these are adequately handled by reputation and the author simply having a single well-known-to-be-their-only-official address/public-key . But, this trust is only needed for the origin of the token, not for resale of the token. Whereas, with this system, attempting to use these “tokens” as something that can be resold, would be vulnerable to the double spend problem. Now, if all you want is to be able to prove to others that you and the author agreed that [you paid the author money in relation to the image or other document, and that they received the payment], then 100% yes this is a better solution. Why get an expensive public ledger involved if all you want it is to be able to prove to others is that you and someone else both attested to a particular claim? That sort of thing is exactly solved by public key cryptography. (If people don’t know your public key is yours, but they do recognize the artist’s public key, there are standard ways to prove you control a key (though not that no one else does)) Whether this serves the purpose that people want NFTs “of”/about digital images to serve, well, that depends on what that purpose is. And, I’m not sure what that purpose is exactly, seeing as, again, while I recognize the subjectivity of economic value, I still think buying such tokens is kind of silly.
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
The interesting thing to me is that many discussions around NFTs (my previous comments included) focus on whether people will treat these digital markers of provenance the same as physical markers of provenance (like a signed portrait). The thinking goes that since the physical markers of provenance obviously and provably have value (sometimes multi-hundred millions in value), the digital ones should as well. I wish instead that there would be more discussion around how fucked up it is that provenance is a thing that has value to begin with, digital or physical. There are literally huge swaths of humanity that are nearly starving on a daily basis, yet others spend obscene amounts of money on things with 0 tangible value. Say what you want around billionaires blowing their wad on flights-of-fancy space projects, at least they are building something real that could have value to humanity. Paying for provenance is just a place to stash wealth, when extreme wealth inequality has made it difficult to find places for the wealthy to store their dough. I don't really have any purpose with this post - human nature is what it is, and having value in displays of status is as old as the species. I still think it's horribly fucked up.
- samvega_ 5y ago
  The money they pay also has 0 tangible value. You can't pay humanity out of poverty, that's a ficticious dream. Poverty is a structural problem, and a political one. It has more to do with what other countries are allowed and not allowed to do within the larger financial superstructure dominated by western capital.
  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    > The money they pay also has 0 tangible value Inflation may be a bitch, but last I checked I could walk into McDonald's with a green piece of paper with a "$5" printed on it and walk out with a Big Mac, no questions asked.
    - samvega_ 5y ago
      It doesn't scale, is the thing. You can't walk into a macdonalds and walk out with a billion burgers just because you're a billionaire. What seems to make sense on a micro level is completely nonsensical on a macro level. Money is mostly tied up in property, stock, loans and financial derivatives anyway. It's largely a ficticious element, which is printed by the billions every day.
emersonrsantos 5y ago
It hurts a lot when the shit hits the fan and you notice things that were clear all the time and you just didn't notice it before because you didn't want it to be true.
deleted 5y ago
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vmception 5y ago
> Whether that claim can be meaningfully sold on to someone else is outside the scope of this discussion. Taking the non fungible part too literally then
trutannus 5y ago
>But how can you prove that you've paid an artist for a specific piece of work? Again, another author talking about NFTs who doesn't understand what an NFT signifies. An NFT does not confer ownership of the underlying work it just confers ownership of the NFT itself, unless you ALSO agree to a secondary contract in the process of buying the NFT. Which, at that point, you've just negated the supposed value of owning the NFT in the first place.
- acdha 5y ago
  That seemed reasonable because almost everyone selling NFTs conflates the two unless pressed. The way the community talks to journalists and potential customers seems very bait and switch — go through this thread alone and see how many people are talking about ownership without even a tiny footnote saying “… of the receipt, not the referenced URL”.
  - trutannus 5y ago
    > go through this thread alone and see how many people are talking about ownership without even a tiny footnote I think it's because of how it's talked about, like you said. There's no real understanding among most people what an NFT actually is.
    - acdha 5y ago
      > There's no real understanding among most people what an NFT actually is. Which immediately raises the question about why so few people learned what that was before they bought some to resell.
      - trutannus 5y ago
        Likely FOMO, and being hyped into it by shills.
dom96 5y ago
I can't help but feel like it doesn't even matter if NFTs (and cryptocurrencies) are a scam. At this point just the mere fact that you can provably show some NFT was sold for millions is enough, some people entering these scams will still get rich, it's just the people at the end that won't. But looking at it this way, there are plenty of people willing to take the risk to try and be those early people that get the money and don't get screwed, so it doesn't really matter if it's a scam or not in the end.
- thinkingemote 5y ago
  Would you say that gamblers that choose to gamble and destroy their lives doesnt matter or not in the end because it's their choice? Is morality just relative and unconnected to your neighbor?
dqpb 5y ago
An NFT is not a digital representation of a piece of art. An NFT is a token whose identity and value is independent of all other tokens.
deleted 5y ago
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gigatexal 5y ago
So a jpeg? ;)
bitwize 5y ago
Something I realized: NFTs are basically "adoptables" from DeviantArt, with crypto mumbo jumbo attesting that you have adopted the adoptable, instead of relying on the community. A lot of the artwork involved even looks like adoptables.
timdaub 5y ago
As a person that has worked on a product that did NFTs before they reached mainstream [1]: This is not what we were trying to achieve. And before anyone comes with the classic HN argument that blockchain is a hammer looking for a nail. Sorry no. In 2015, we did what any other startup would do to create a product and talked to a whole lot of customers and did story elicitation. What customers were interested in was: - being able to prove the existence and hence authorship of their digital artwork upon creation: blockchain anchoring was a good fit - being able to make their art digitally ownable (precursors were e.g. Rafaël Rozendaal's ownable TLDs) - making money from their creations - transferring/consigning/loaning - generating a certificate of authenticity - licensing/copyright claims Many of these things aren't important in today's modern NFTs anymore. But what the author has created is not what artists were looking for in those days and it's not what they're looking for today. If they did, surely they'd do what the author suggests. - [1] https://ascribe.io https://ascribe.io
rglullis 5y ago
For anyone that still thinks that NFTs are only meant to be overpriced jpegs to be used for money laundering, consider two different projects: ENS [0] and Unlock Protocol [1]. ENS treats domain names like NFTs. So we can have applications that use your ENS domain as your identity, it can work as a decentralized / uncensorable alternative to OpenID, it can be used as an actual domain (you can use <your ens name>.eth.link to redirect to a IPNS name for instance, and the ENS devs are working to get a top-level domain that can integrate with actual DNS. Unlock uses NFTs as keys for access control. This means that you could have decentralized alternatives to substack or any kind of paywalled content, but one thought that really interests me is that we could imagine in the future that kind of service provider will not be able to lock you into a contract, and we will be able to avoid any type of billing overcharges of surprise bills. Coupled with the idea of "streaming payments" (i.e, periodic transfers of micro-payments), we could be able to run subscription services by the hour/minute/second, and to cancel it you can simply close the payment stream. [0]: https://ens.domains https://ens.domains [1]: https://unlock-protocol.com https://unlock-protocol.com
fernly 5y ago
Can someone ELI5 why at least some of the problems mentioned can't be solved by a third-party escrow[0]? There even already exist "Internet Escrow" companies, per that article. The escrow can provide a signed message to the effect, "I, Jess Crow, have received .01BTC from Joe Buyer, and on receipt of signed assurance from Joe Buyer that monkey.jpg has been received by them in satisfactory condition, I have disbursed that amount (less my fees) to Sue Seller who has acknowledged receipt." This at least removes the question, "was the transaction price as stated, and was it actually paid". It reduces the motivation for fake transactions (immediate kickback to buyer) because of the fee paid to the escrow. Escrow could be performed in the same, informal way as proposed in the topic article. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escrow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escrow
scotty79 5y ago
> Without a published chain of transactions, there is no guarantee that the artist hasn't sold the same item multiple times. That's not the problem. The problem is every "owner" of such item could just copy it and sell it to multiple people. And they would have no way of knowing they are not the unique owner. Preventing double-spend is the only thing block-chains do that other things don't. That's why they exist.
- miracle2k 5y ago
  Thank you. The first paragraph says - "resale is out of scope". No, that is the whole scope!
  - qqii 5y ago
    > Whether that claim can be meaningfully sold on to someone else is outside the scope of this discussion. The issue of sidestepping future interactions is that such a schema has no meaning. If I go a step further and stipulate that the transaction doesn't need to be proven to third parties then having any schema bar making the transaction itself is completely meaningless! It is only when you attempt to prove or sell the claim in future, to third parties does such a schema and blockchains have some utility.
Exendroinient 5y ago
Value of NFTs is purely fictional and based on some buzzwords with a spice of ponzi scheme on top of it. People who are into NFTs don't care about the functionality and usefulness at all. They are pulled to NFTs and shitcoins by a old get rich quick marketing tactics.
2pir 5y ago
An NFT is not the artwork. In an extreme simplification of the actual technology, an NFT is _conceptually_ an identifier of the form: (Blockchain, Publish Date, Comment, Unique ID, Signature) Ownership of this token is independently verifiable. It’s creation date is independently verifiable. It is transferable via a decentralized market. It is transferable only by the owner. The creator of this token cannot sell multiple, because the token is unique and can only belong to one individual. The token cannot be sold on a different blockchain, because it’s only valid on the blockchain it belongs to. Even if the Token’s creator later creates and sells similar tokens, this token is unique and only one person owns it. One use case for NFTs is to act as a _public_ digital certificate of authenticity. Extra emphasis on _public_. When an NFT is published, it is published with all of the above independently verifiable information. If today Quentin Tarantino publishes an NFT on Ethereum claiming ownership of frame ‘X’ of Pulp Fiction on Ethereum, it would _conceptually_ look something like this: (Ethereum, 12/18/2021, “Pulp Fiction Frame X”, “043f6ca3-f445-46f1-a048-5613d512a7d0”, “xoxo QT”) If tomorrow he decides to publish a new NFT on Ethereum claiming ownership of the very same frame ‘X’ of Pulp Fiction, it would look like this: (Ethereum, 12/19/2021, “Pulp Fiction Frame X”, “ 17aff37e-74f7-4e3e-b5bc-e023c2ded975”, “xoxo QT”) These two tokens cannot be mistaken for each other. This is why NFTs are conceptually and technologically useful. Compare this to physical collectibles, for example artwork. If you had an original painting and a forgery that was identified down to the atom level, but you could verify which one was the original, someone would still value the original more than the forgery. Don’t be mistaken, the NFT landscape today still warrants skepticism and criticism over the concept of ownership many are trying to sell. Many people are being tricked into investing into NFTs thinking what they are purchasing is some actual ownership or copyright of a digital artifact. In the scenario described above there is nothing inherently preventing Quentin Tarantino from selling millions of certificates of ownership for that frame of Pulp Fiction. But one thing he cannot do is sell more than one copy of the NFT he made today, because there can only be one.
okareaman 5y ago
There's going to be a bunch of new laws after enough people lose all their money, especially if they are the adult children of the ruling class in Washington D.C.
operator-name 5y ago
Perhaps the biggest problem that the author does not identify is lack of timestamping. Thus their schema provides strictly weaker guarentees than NFTs as they exist today. Timestamping would have to rely on a trusted third party (an example being publishing the transaction on twitter which already has an identity mechanism, provides timestamping and does not allow editing) or inventing a blockchain like mechanism to reduce the influence on the third party (twitter COULD disable your account and make those tweets unavailable after all). Without publicly verifiable timestamping verifying multiple sale is incredibly difficult, as is guarentee of future unique ownership. Apart from this the author is very on point with his criticisms and I believe most do not realise the limitations of what NFTs can achieve by themselves.
cirrus3 5y ago
> But how can you prove that you've paid an artist for a specific piece of work? What am I missing? This has been solved for literally centuries.
captn3m0 5y ago
I have a similar draft for this in progress (using signed PDFs instead of GPG), where I realised that you can do a lot with a Merkle Tree (Git) alongside a convention set on the public Cert Transparency log. Effectively using the CT log as a cheap side-chain of sorts (LetsEncrypt!).

185 points by Amorymeltzer 5y ago

> But there are a few drawbacks with this. > Without a published chain of transactions, there is no guarantee that the artist hasn't sold the same item multiple times. Then it doesn’t handle the most basic case.

DitheringIdiot 5y ago
The piece goes on to say that the same can be true for NFTs. An artist could just sell an identical work multiple times. I like this idea, it has the exact amount of usefulness of NFTs without the ecological issues.
- mattdesl 5y ago
  I don’t think the piece is accurate. An NFT is uniquely addressable by its contract address. Copying it would produce a new address, and it would be obvious the artist is trying to sell the same work again. This is why it is “non-fungible” and what makes it uniquely different from mere files, receipts and signatures.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    So you make another layer of PGP file where you first make a token/id that indicates you created the file (which ID doesn’t change between transactions). The problem is it still wouldn’t be obvious because nobody can verify anything.
  - DitheringIdiot 5y ago
    I’m sure you can generate a unique token for a non-unique artwork. I mean, I can just make an NFT now with a screenshot of someone else’s NFT.
    - mattdesl 5y ago
      Yep - I can make an NFT of a CryptoPunk, but since the addressable hash of my contract will be different, probably nobody would see value in acquiring my tokens. Social consensus (and, by extension, tooling and network effects) have built around the original crypto punk contract address, which seems to give it value over any other copy contracts that might be deployed after the fact.
      - DitheringIdiot 5y ago
        So the real value of an NFT isn’t in the mechanism at all.
        mattdesl 5y ago
        The mechanism is extremely simple, see [1]. The value lies in the token which - much like art - is worth whatever somebody is willing to pay for it. [1] https://gist.github.com/mattdesl/c1eff283039b73a093c7777d11248a72 https://gist.github.com/mattdesl/c1eff283039b73a093c7777d112...
        lottin 5y ago
        Everything is worth whatever somebody is willing to pay for it.
        DitheringIdiot 5y ago
        So it’s replicating the worst thing about the art market — the speculation and nonsensical pricing. But without the best thing about the art market — actually owning a piece of art. With a thin veil of technobabble.
        mattdesl 5y ago
        That may be one view. Another view is that it allows artists across the globe a digital-first mechanism to distribute and earn revenue on their digital artwork. See Hicetnunc for example.
  - dkersten 5y ago
    So you have two unique NFT's claiming ownership of the same piece of art or tweet or whatever. Maybe on different blockchains, maybe not. Now what? Which one is the "real" one that conveys said ownership? How do you prove which one is the "real" one?
    - mattdesl 5y ago
      Usually whichever came first, or is still in circulation (hasn’t been burned), or whichever the distributor/artist says is the real one. Similar to a signed and authenticated physical artwork - if a newer copy turns up, which one is the authentic?
      - root_axis 5y ago
        When it comes to fake artwork you at least need to be skilled enough to produce a convincing fake, which isn't trivial. In the NFT world anyone can trivially mint an NFT for anything, at any time, so there's no way to prove that "the first one" is the "real" one without relying on a trusted authority outside the blockchain. Thus any need for a blockchain is completely obviated.
        mattdesl 5y ago
        Hence “or whichever the distributor/artist says is the real one.” This does not prove copyright; it merely proves ownership of a token. It still requires a strong social consensus that the token and its addressable hash was indeed distributed by the artist (as in the case of most NFTs that are trading for any significant sum). This is very much like a certificate of authenticity of an artwork as it also requires social consensus (fwiw, a cert is far easier to forge than, say, a CryptoPunk).
        root_axis 5y ago
        Sure. My point being that the blockchain adds nothing useful. Social consensus does all the heavy lifting, the cryptographic signature is an implementation detail, and the blockchain is wholly unnecessary.
timkam 5y ago
Generally (with NFTs), the supposed 1-1 mapping of art piece (or other artifact) and token happens on meta-level, right? So for sure, an artist can issue many tokens that represent the same art piece (and don't tell me the token is a hash of the image or whatever; it still can be sold on a different technology, or noise can be added to the image, et cetera). Because of this object-/meta-level mix up, it seems that NFTs guarantee pretty much nothing, they are just great at facilitating speculation, because the whole thing takes so little effort...
- drdeca 5y ago
  If the person/entity minting them commits to only using a particular address/public-key when minting (such that only ones from that address would be regarded as legitimate), then one can still check all the transactions they’ve made, and, well, if they mint tokens for other files which you don’t know what those files are, and have no way to retrieve them, then yes, you could be uncertain as to whether or not those are essentially the same image but with some noise added. If there is a list of what all those files are though (maybe the files are all available for download on the author’s website? Doesn’t have to be the author’s, just any source providing each file. Doesn’t need to be a trusted source either.), you could check that none of them are essentially the same. Though, the reliance on all the images being publicly available, does go against what it seems like the way many seem to want to use NFTs, and so for the use cases which are completely incompatible with all the images being publicly available (e.g. people who want to be the only person who has access to an image), your point is entirely valid, and there is presumably no way to achieve the use-case that those people seem to want. As for “what about on other technologies” I think this fits under the “the author should just make well-known all the [address+chain combos] they issue from, and instruct people to treat as illegitimate any which is issued from a [chain+address combo] that is outside of this well-known list as illegitimate” thing. It doesn’t seem like that serious of an issue? That being said, I don’t see much point to tokens like these. I’m just talking about "what can be done under different goals + assumptions" .
btoiled 5y ago
He argues just a few sentences further down that the same is true for on-chain NFTs.
- miracle2k 5y ago
  No, he is mixing up two distinct things. One is trusting the artist (to be honest and manage their career, in the widest sense). The other is trusting that out of hundreds of people who owned this artwork before, everyone deleted their signature file. This model does not track ownership and therefore does not solve the usecase that an NFT is solving.

johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago

>Without a published chain of transactions, there is no guarantee that the artist hasn't sold the same item multiple times. That's a pretty glaring problem... and arguably the entire point of blockchain technology is to make tokens only spendable once.

krainboltgreene 5y ago
The only thing the distributed encrypted ledger does is tell you what wallet owns what token. It does not tell you if the artist has sold the piece multiple times.
- breakfastduck 5y ago
  Yes exactly. It can certify the owner...
  - XorNot 5y ago
    No it can't because it has no legal standing whatsoever to do so. No court and no law creates any legally binding standing for an NFT, because an NFT sale does not establish any sort of recognized contract between the parties - it does not even establish the the terms of use or ownership under which the NFT can be recognized. The nature of NFTs at most would lead to a recognition of the the token being legal property, if your wallet was stolen, but not whatever you think the property actually is.
- johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago
  >It does not tell you if the artist has sold the piece multiple times. If you purchased a NON-FUNGIBLE-token, you can be sure that nobody else owns the same array of bytes which may or may not prove that you own a piece of art. There may be many prints of the same original work created in multiple NFTs as there are in the art world... but it's not possible to sell the same NFT twice... on the blockchain at least... without re-acquiring it first. Plenty of NFT sellers sell multiple issues/prints/copies of the same original artwork. I think digital prints in NFT format are ridiculous but I digress.

authed 5y ago

sascha_sl 5y ago

Git. You want git. Git does this. Please use git. You can even validate your transactions with a hook. I've joked about making a satire product website for a revolutionary new crypto. And because most people deep into NFTs have no idea how it works, I'd bet they'd love it. GitCoin? I'm out of energy, feel free to steal this idea.

Zamicol 5y ago
Gitcoin is very much so already a thing: https://gitcoin.co/ https://gitcoin.co/ It's used to fund public goods/open source projects.
throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
That's basically how this works. NFT's are store in IPFS which is essentially git + bittorrent https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ipfs/papers/master/ipfs-cap2pfs/ipfs-p2p-file-system.pdf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ipfs/papers/master/ipfs-ca...
teraflop 5y ago
Stripe did something very similar as part of a programming challenge several years back. https://abiusx.com/stripe-ctf-v3-writeup/ https://abiusx.com/stripe-ctf-v3-writeup/
cortesoft 5y ago
How would you gain consensus on which git repo is the original? How do you distinguish between the original repo and a fork? Crypto is git + a way to determine who is a fork
- nkrisc 5y ago
  Would it even matter? What percentage of people who’ve bought into the cryptocurrency/NFT craze without even know how to verify something that?
  - cortesoft 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

everfree 5y ago

If ownership is not transferable, then how can you call it a token, and what is it non-fungible in relation to? This categorically seems like it is not a non-fungible token, or even a token at all. It's just an artist signing a file using PGP. So many articles throw around the term "NFT" nowadays without stopping to even break down the acronym, let alone consider what it actually entails.

Aeolun 5y ago
The NFT part is only the “I paid for this item” part. You can make a chain by making a further transaction with the ID of the last one (which arguably indicates you own the file hash indicated). I don’t think the NFT actually does anything but identify a certain bunch of content? The important part is the transaction history.
- everfree 5y ago
  > You can make a chain by making a further transaction with the ID of the last one (which arguably indicates you own the file hash indicated). You can, but then you either have to host a central transaction history somewhere or you run into the double-spending problem.
  - stagas 5y ago
    The difference with NFT is that it's used for art, and art comes from a specific artist, and usually in the world of art what gives value to the art is the artist. So, if I have a thing signed from the artist, it's as good as it can get. If they want to double spend or do other things, then they will lose credibility as artists and will no longer be able to sell what they sold so there's no incentive in cheating, hence no need for a central authority or blockchain. All you need is them publishing their public ledger of what was sold to whom, no blockchain necessary.
    - everfree 5y ago
      > If they want to double spend or do other things, then they will lose credibility as artists Double spending is a property of ownership, not creation.

eightysixfour 5y ago

> Without a published chain of transactions, there is no guarantee that the artist hasn't sold the same item multiple times. > Without a verified on-chain transaction, there is a risk that either the buyer or the seller may be lying about the transaction price. I mean, this is kind of the whole point - the published record on the chain is what actually matters. I don't like NFTs, but the anti-NFT crowd doesn't seem to get it and that is just as frustrating. People value status signaling tools. A lot. Image 99 of 1000 isn't a status signaling tool, showing you paid for the image is, the verifiable receipt is what matters. This article is like suggesting the signature on art is what matters, but what matters is the actual provenance.

stale2002 5y ago
> I mean, this is kind of the whole point - the published record on the chain is what actually matters. Sure, but you don't need a blockchain for that. It could be published anywhere. When it comes to publishing information, a blockchain is one of the least efficient ways of doing that. The blockchain doesn't change much in the equation here.
- eightysixfour 5y ago
  It is inefficient but it absolutely provides things "anywhere" doesn't, with a much longer likelihood of surviving than "anywhere."
coolestguy 5y ago
It's like the author has absolutely 0 idea what the reason for blockchain is
meheleventyone 5y ago
Right but which chain and which NFT? NFTs on the blockchain suffer the same problems which is the point made in the article. There are multiple blockchains and no guarantee that a particular NFT is unique or even published by the actual author.
- 5y ago

laluser 5y ago

How would people validate ownership of an NFT when there could be hundreds of blockchains in the future? Would I have to go and verify each one of them to make sure my NFT hasn't been sold multiple times already?

doopy1 5y ago
I think each chain is its own economy when it comes to NFTs.
edent 5y ago
We'll have to create a centralised registry of all tokens on all chains‽
- CharlesW 5y ago
  And even though there may be tens of thousands of these search engines/registries built in the next two years, Google (for example, pick your poison) can step in any time and own this if NFTs turn into something more than pet rocks.
- Zamicol 5y ago
  Just as there's a central ledger of all the various citizens of the word's countries? A few trusted ledgers is all that's needed.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  It’s the circle of liiiiiiiiiife!
thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
Artificial scarcity is artificial. Nothing prevents someone from making copies and selling each "unique" one. Since it is decentralized, there is no centralized authority to take down the copies (that is, a DMCA-style take down). The "no one can censor you" upsides of decentralization are not without downsides: you cannot censor or take down others, even in cases of copyright breach.
5y ago

cortesoft 5y ago

It is silly to try to save money on the mechanism for NFTs. That defeats the entire purpose. The entire purpose of of an NFT is to publicly demonstrate that you wasted money on it. This is the case for all status symbols; if you are saving money on it, it loses its value as a status symbol.

edent 5y ago
My proposal saves money for the artist creating the token. Investors can pay as much as they like - with no middle-man.

beebeepka 5y ago

Remember what Victor Chaos said about NFT - you don't make money with them, you earn money by making people to invest in them. I think it's stupid by really not much different to people spending money on hats in TF2 or whatever. People used to lose their shit over virtual items in Diablo and MMOs. It's the same thing. Plenty of suckers out there

moffkalast 5y ago
Yeah it was never about the so called art, it's just the latest way to hype up and get people to fork over cash for something that's functionally the same as buying crypto anyway. Though you do get the bonus tax evasion, so that's neat.
- doopy1 5y ago
  Has the tax evasion claim been at all substantiated beyond hypothetical pontification?

colpabar 5y ago

I highly recommend the new south park post covid special for anyone who still doesn’t understand what an NFT is or who just thinks the whole thing is kind of silly.

CharlesW 5y ago
https://decider.com/2021/12/16/south-park-covid-part-2-nfts/ https://decider.com/2021/12/16/south-park-covid-part-2-nfts/
k__ 5y ago
It really is a good episode, even the crypto crowd liked it. The scammers and the clueless critics all get their moment, lol.

er4hn 5y ago

This raises a very interesting point. Much of the problems with blockchain's, i.e. proof-of-work, on-chain transactions needing everyone to know about them, are because there are no central authorities baked into the design that can behave in opaque ways. Yet, centralized services still spring up to handle transactions: OpenSea for NFTs, Coinbase for cryptocoin transactions. These services in turn still rely on a sea of middlemen which take a cut, or "gas" fees for their work. If you are transfering coins among several services then there are fees for each transfer, etc. So tying this back to present day, mainstream, finance: When you run a credit card there are several middlemen between the cardholder and the merchant. This diagram (https://merchantcostconsulting.com/lower-credit-card-processing-fees/understanding-credit-card-networks/ https://merchantcostconsulting.com/lower-credit-card-process...) suggests 4 intermediaries, each taking a cut. In theory each of these provides a service - but how many are required in modern times? Let's say that the cardholder just wants to pay the merchant, and the merchant wants to maximize their take. In cryptocoin-land you would have a direct transaction with the merchant. This works because you cannot double pay. In trad-finance land you need to have your issuing bank state that you have the funds. Credit cards provide a level of abstraction where the merchant gets paid now and the credit card provider collects later. This all happens live. What if instead you had a system where: - Card holder uses a computing device (say a smartphone with TPM) and that cryptographically signs transactions to say that the card holder requested this. - Issuing bank gives the card holder a signed certificate each week saying: This is account holder #XXXXX. They can purchase up to $YYY at one time. - Card holder provides the cert to merchant upon wanting to make a purchase along with a signed receipt indicating a transfer of money. You could add a pin to be entered on each transaction as 2FA. - Merchant gets this crypto-receipt and has some reasonable amount of time to turn it in to the issuing bank (say 1 month) and collect payment. - Issuing bank gives merchant money for receipt and charges account holder. Account holder does normal procedures of paying for things, complaining about charges, etc. This scheme has a few advantages and feels very similar to how I sort of understand credit cards work in Europe. - Issuing bank can get a larger take since there are less intermediaries. - Merchant can get a larger take since there can be less fees. - There is a reasonable assurance of lack of fraud due to 2FA, and TPM storing signing key. - This does not require live internet access nor live responses. Why is there nothing like this? What are the drawbacks? Tying back to the parent discussion, is this a reasonable optimization on top of crypocurrency as it exists today?

csmarshall 5y ago

So…art, you're talking about art…

drdeca 5y ago

This works if you just want to prove that you and the artist agree that you paid the artist “for” the work. But, if you can’t transfer it to someone else, is it really a “token” in the relevant sense? Not that I think there’s much value in the NFTs corresponding to digital images, outside of from people being somewhat silly in what they value, but this nevertheless doesn’t satisfy all of use-cases of those blockchain tokens. With those blockchain tokens, as this article mentions, you do have to trust that the author is the actual author, and that they aren’t like, issuing more than they say they are (perhaps using different addresses), but these are adequately handled by reputation and the author simply having a single well-known-to-be-their-only-official address/public-key . But, this trust is only needed for the origin of the token, not for resale of the token. Whereas, with this system, attempting to use these “tokens” as something that can be resold, would be vulnerable to the double spend problem. Now, if all you want is to be able to prove to others that you and the author agreed that [you paid the author money in relation to the image or other document, and that they received the payment], then 100% yes this is a better solution. Why get an expensive public ledger involved if all you want it is to be able to prove to others is that you and someone else both attested to a particular claim? That sort of thing is exactly solved by public key cryptography. (If people don’t know your public key is yours, but they do recognize the artist’s public key, there are standard ways to prove you control a key (though not that no one else does)) Whether this serves the purpose that people want NFTs “of”/about digital images to serve, well, that depends on what that purpose is. And, I’m not sure what that purpose is exactly, seeing as, again, while I recognize the subjectivity of economic value, I still think buying such tokens is kind of silly.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

The interesting thing to me is that many discussions around NFTs (my previous comments included) focus on whether people will treat these digital markers of provenance the same as physical markers of provenance (like a signed portrait). The thinking goes that since the physical markers of provenance obviously and provably have value (sometimes multi-hundred millions in value), the digital ones should as well. I wish instead that there would be more discussion around how fucked up it is that provenance is a thing that has value to begin with, digital or physical. There are literally huge swaths of humanity that are nearly starving on a daily basis, yet others spend obscene amounts of money on things with 0 tangible value. Say what you want around billionaires blowing their wad on flights-of-fancy space projects, at least they are building something real that could have value to humanity. Paying for provenance is just a place to stash wealth, when extreme wealth inequality has made it difficult to find places for the wealthy to store their dough. I don't really have any purpose with this post - human nature is what it is, and having value in displays of status is as old as the species. I still think it's horribly fucked up.

samvega_ 5y ago
The money they pay also has 0 tangible value. You can't pay humanity out of poverty, that's a ficticious dream. Poverty is a structural problem, and a political one. It has more to do with what other countries are allowed and not allowed to do within the larger financial superstructure dominated by western capital.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  > The money they pay also has 0 tangible value Inflation may be a bitch, but last I checked I could walk into McDonald's with a green piece of paper with a "$5" printed on it and walk out with a Big Mac, no questions asked.
  - samvega_ 5y ago
    It doesn't scale, is the thing. You can't walk into a macdonalds and walk out with a billion burgers just because you're a billionaire. What seems to make sense on a micro level is completely nonsensical on a macro level. Money is mostly tied up in property, stock, loans and financial derivatives anyway. It's largely a ficticious element, which is printed by the billions every day.

emersonrsantos 5y ago

It hurts a lot when the shit hits the fan and you notice things that were clear all the time and you just didn't notice it before because you didn't want it to be true.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

vmception 5y ago

> Whether that claim can be meaningfully sold on to someone else is outside the scope of this discussion. Taking the non fungible part too literally then

trutannus 5y ago

>But how can you prove that you've paid an artist for a specific piece of work? Again, another author talking about NFTs who doesn't understand what an NFT signifies. An NFT does not confer ownership of the underlying work it just confers ownership of the NFT itself, unless you ALSO agree to a secondary contract in the process of buying the NFT. Which, at that point, you've just negated the supposed value of owning the NFT in the first place.

acdha 5y ago
That seemed reasonable because almost everyone selling NFTs conflates the two unless pressed. The way the community talks to journalists and potential customers seems very bait and switch — go through this thread alone and see how many people are talking about ownership without even a tiny footnote saying “… of the receipt, not the referenced URL”.
- trutannus 5y ago
  > go through this thread alone and see how many people are talking about ownership without even a tiny footnote I think it's because of how it's talked about, like you said. There's no real understanding among most people what an NFT actually is.
  - acdha 5y ago
    > There's no real understanding among most people what an NFT actually is. Which immediately raises the question about why so few people learned what that was before they bought some to resell.
    - trutannus 5y ago
      Likely FOMO, and being hyped into it by shills.

dom96 5y ago

I can't help but feel like it doesn't even matter if NFTs (and cryptocurrencies) are a scam. At this point just the mere fact that you can provably show some NFT was sold for millions is enough, some people entering these scams will still get rich, it's just the people at the end that won't. But looking at it this way, there are plenty of people willing to take the risk to try and be those early people that get the money and don't get screwed, so it doesn't really matter if it's a scam or not in the end.

thinkingemote 5y ago
Would you say that gamblers that choose to gamble and destroy their lives doesnt matter or not in the end because it's their choice? Is morality just relative and unconnected to your neighbor?

dqpb 5y ago

An NFT is not a digital representation of a piece of art. An NFT is a token whose identity and value is independent of all other tokens.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

gigatexal 5y ago

So a jpeg? ;)

bitwize 5y ago

Something I realized: NFTs are basically "adoptables" from DeviantArt, with crypto mumbo jumbo attesting that you have adopted the adoptable, instead of relying on the community. A lot of the artwork involved even looks like adoptables.

timdaub 5y ago

As a person that has worked on a product that did NFTs before they reached mainstream [1]: This is not what we were trying to achieve. And before anyone comes with the classic HN argument that blockchain is a hammer looking for a nail. Sorry no. In 2015, we did what any other startup would do to create a product and talked to a whole lot of customers and did story elicitation. What customers were interested in was: - being able to prove the existence and hence authorship of their digital artwork upon creation: blockchain anchoring was a good fit - being able to make their art digitally ownable (precursors were e.g. Rafaël Rozendaal's ownable TLDs) - making money from their creations - transferring/consigning/loaning - generating a certificate of authenticity - licensing/copyright claims Many of these things aren't important in today's modern NFTs anymore. But what the author has created is not what artists were looking for in those days and it's not what they're looking for today. If they did, surely they'd do what the author suggests. - [1] https://ascribe.io https://ascribe.io

rglullis 5y ago

For anyone that still thinks that NFTs are only meant to be overpriced jpegs to be used for money laundering, consider two different projects: ENS [0] and Unlock Protocol [1]. ENS treats domain names like NFTs. So we can have applications that use your ENS domain as your identity, it can work as a decentralized / uncensorable alternative to OpenID, it can be used as an actual domain (you can use <your ens name>.eth.link to redirect to a IPNS name for instance, and the ENS devs are working to get a top-level domain that can integrate with actual DNS. Unlock uses NFTs as keys for access control. This means that you could have decentralized alternatives to substack or any kind of paywalled content, but one thought that really interests me is that we could imagine in the future that kind of service provider will not be able to lock you into a contract, and we will be able to avoid any type of billing overcharges of surprise bills. Coupled with the idea of "streaming payments" (i.e, periodic transfers of micro-payments), we could be able to run subscription services by the hour/minute/second, and to cancel it you can simply close the payment stream. [0]: https://ens.domains https://ens.domains [1]: https://unlock-protocol.com https://unlock-protocol.com

fernly 5y ago

Can someone ELI5 why at least some of the problems mentioned can't be solved by a third-party escrow[0]? There even already exist "Internet Escrow" companies, per that article. The escrow can provide a signed message to the effect, "I, Jess Crow, have received .01BTC from Joe Buyer, and on receipt of signed assurance from Joe Buyer that monkey.jpg has been received by them in satisfactory condition, I have disbursed that amount (less my fees) to Sue Seller who has acknowledged receipt." This at least removes the question, "was the transaction price as stated, and was it actually paid". It reduces the motivation for fake transactions (immediate kickback to buyer) because of the fee paid to the escrow. Escrow could be performed in the same, informal way as proposed in the topic article. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escrow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escrow

scotty79 5y ago

> Without a published chain of transactions, there is no guarantee that the artist hasn't sold the same item multiple times. That's not the problem. The problem is every "owner" of such item could just copy it and sell it to multiple people. And they would have no way of knowing they are not the unique owner. Preventing double-spend is the only thing block-chains do that other things don't. That's why they exist.

miracle2k 5y ago
Thank you. The first paragraph says - "resale is out of scope". No, that is the whole scope!
- qqii 5y ago
  > Whether that claim can be meaningfully sold on to someone else is outside the scope of this discussion. The issue of sidestepping future interactions is that such a schema has no meaning. If I go a step further and stipulate that the transaction doesn't need to be proven to third parties then having any schema bar making the transaction itself is completely meaningless! It is only when you attempt to prove or sell the claim in future, to third parties does such a schema and blockchains have some utility.

Exendroinient 5y ago

Value of NFTs is purely fictional and based on some buzzwords with a spice of ponzi scheme on top of it. People who are into NFTs don't care about the functionality and usefulness at all. They are pulled to NFTs and shitcoins by a old get rich quick marketing tactics.

2pir 5y ago

An NFT is not the artwork. In an extreme simplification of the actual technology, an NFT is _conceptually_ an identifier of the form: (Blockchain, Publish Date, Comment, Unique ID, Signature) Ownership of this token is independently verifiable. It’s creation date is independently verifiable. It is transferable via a decentralized market. It is transferable only by the owner. The creator of this token cannot sell multiple, because the token is unique and can only belong to one individual. The token cannot be sold on a different blockchain, because it’s only valid on the blockchain it belongs to. Even if the Token’s creator later creates and sells similar tokens, this token is unique and only one person owns it. One use case for NFTs is to act as a _public_ digital certificate of authenticity. Extra emphasis on _public_. When an NFT is published, it is published with all of the above independently verifiable information. If today Quentin Tarantino publishes an NFT on Ethereum claiming ownership of frame ‘X’ of Pulp Fiction on Ethereum, it would _conceptually_ look something like this: (Ethereum, 12/18/2021, “Pulp Fiction Frame X”, “043f6ca3-f445-46f1-a048-5613d512a7d0”, “xoxo QT”) If tomorrow he decides to publish a new NFT on Ethereum claiming ownership of the very same frame ‘X’ of Pulp Fiction, it would look like this: (Ethereum, 12/19/2021, “Pulp Fiction Frame X”, “ 17aff37e-74f7-4e3e-b5bc-e023c2ded975”, “xoxo QT”) These two tokens cannot be mistaken for each other. This is why NFTs are conceptually and technologically useful. Compare this to physical collectibles, for example artwork. If you had an original painting and a forgery that was identified down to the atom level, but you could verify which one was the original, someone would still value the original more than the forgery. Don’t be mistaken, the NFT landscape today still warrants skepticism and criticism over the concept of ownership many are trying to sell. Many people are being tricked into investing into NFTs thinking what they are purchasing is some actual ownership or copyright of a digital artifact. In the scenario described above there is nothing inherently preventing Quentin Tarantino from selling millions of certificates of ownership for that frame of Pulp Fiction. But one thing he cannot do is sell more than one copy of the NFT he made today, because there can only be one.

okareaman 5y ago

There's going to be a bunch of new laws after enough people lose all their money, especially if they are the adult children of the ruling class in Washington D.C.

operator-name 5y ago

Perhaps the biggest problem that the author does not identify is lack of timestamping. Thus their schema provides strictly weaker guarentees than NFTs as they exist today. Timestamping would have to rely on a trusted third party (an example being publishing the transaction on twitter which already has an identity mechanism, provides timestamping and does not allow editing) or inventing a blockchain like mechanism to reduce the influence on the third party (twitter COULD disable your account and make those tweets unavailable after all). Without publicly verifiable timestamping verifying multiple sale is incredibly difficult, as is guarentee of future unique ownership. Apart from this the author is very on point with his criticisms and I believe most do not realise the limitations of what NFTs can achieve by themselves.

cirrus3 5y ago

> But how can you prove that you've paid an artist for a specific piece of work? What am I missing? This has been solved for literally centuries.

captn3m0 5y ago

I have a similar draft for this in progress (using signed PDFs instead of GPG), where I realised that you can do a lot with a Merkle Tree (Git) alongside a convention set on the public Cert Transparency log. Effectively using the CT log as a cheap side-chain of sorts (LetsEncrypt!).