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Your knowledge of NFTs is likely greater than mine so correct me if I'm wrong. Pointing to a URL is fine if you trust URL digital signatures. Hypothetical situa

Your knowledge of NFTs is likely greater than mine so correct me if I'm wrong. Pointing to a URL is fine if you trust URL digital signatures. Hypothetical situation: I'm a famous artist X. I produce great painting 123 and want to issue a certificate of authenticity for it. So I post on my webpage X.com/123 a sentence "I just produced painting 123 and generated NFT 456 for it on the Ethereum blockchain" NFT 456 points to X.com/123 and the Ethereum blockchain contains the ownership information (namely that X currently owns it). Since this is on the Ethereum blockchain, I assume dilettante Y can now purchase NFT 456 from me for 1M Ethereum as a single transaction. Is this not how it's supposed to work? Is there an obvious attack vector here I'm missing? Edit: maybe the obvious attack vector is the mutability of the sentence posted to X.com/123, so I feel like I'm close to a good system but missing something.

clhodapp 5y ago
Also: Someone else can generate an NFT with the same URL in it. Thus, it becomes an exercise to verify the NFT out of band. At that point, in a lot of situations, it's not the NFT that's certifying the ownership, it's the public announcement by the artist. There's maybe a little to be gained because from that point forward, any transfers may be verified but... In the end the root of trust remains the public, out-of-band announcement of the NFT. It is also worth noting that, in a lot of cases, NFTs don't actually confer any sort of special rights or ownership over the art. Often, NFTs are really just signed links to a thing that was not actually sold to you, with the actual legal ownership of the art staying with the seller.
marcan_42 5y ago
> I just produced painting 123 and generated NFT 456 for it on the Ethereum blockchain" Upon which you have to trust the artist that they actually did produce the painting themselves, and own the copyright to it, and are authorized to mint an NFT of it. If it later turns out they didn't, the NFT is a fraud. So you're still relying on centralized trust. You also have to trust the artist not to "double-spend" their work and put it up as an NFT elsewhere or sell its copyright. The NFT itself is not tied to copyright, so there is no legal nor technical protection here. NFTs are solid blockchain technology resting on a foundation of centralized trust (sure, distributed, but still individually centralized). It's completely against everything those crypto people claim they stand for and they don't even realize it. It's in the damn name too. Non-Fungible Token. Token. Not Picture. The only thing you're buying and selling is a meaningless token. I say this every time NFTs come up: go commission some custom artwork from your favorite artist instead, the normal way. At least that way you'll have something unique and personal instead of a procedurally generated monkey, and you don't need cryptononsense to know it's yours.
- grog454 5y ago
  I agree with your assessment of the importance of trust in this example and the issues that go with it. I suspect similar issues crop up with non crypto systems as well but that's not really what I want to discuss. NFTs still seem potentially useful to me. Let's take one more example: the Mona Lisa currently in the possession of France and held in the Louvre. How do I know all that? I looked it up on Wikipedia and "trust" what I've read. I trust it because I assume any time this painting changes hands its a carefully managed transactions likely involving 6 to 7 figures of USD (just for transaction "fees", not the value of the painting) toward dozens of people to verify various things (the authenticity of the painting, and the authenticity of the purchaser and purchaser's funds, and seller) as well as security, transportation, insurance, and desired publicity. But maybe there's a different way to go about that kind of transaction. As long as we can establish a few initial conditions collectively with "trust", any future transactions for the Mona Lisa can be, in a way, protected with an NFT. Let's start by collectively agreeing to give the Mona Lisa NFT id "1" on the Ethereum blockchain and give France address "0x01". For whatever reason, the Mona Lisa gets sold to "0x05" as an Ethereum transaction. We no longer need to verify the authenticity of the purchaser's funds (hopefully obvious), nor do we really care who "0x05" is. Everyone who believes in cryptography can now establish that indeed "0x05" is the rightful owner of the Mona Lisa. I no longer need to trust a Wikipedia article, or be important enough to "know someone" who knows how to get in touch with "France" or whoever the current owner is if I'm a serious candidate to purchase it. If the Mona Lisa gets stolen and later turns up, physically, anywhere, in anyone's hands, the world at least has the ability to say "prove you're 0x05". Anyone who has the ability to do so gets it. Yay! In theory, "0x05" can even sell the Mona Lisa to "0x06", WHILE IT IS IN A THIEF'S "POSSESION", and the rest of the world sans thief can agree that, indeed, "0x06" is now the rightful owner of the Mona Lisa. Pretty much the only thing the NFT doesn't help with at all here is destruction of underlying asset (the ink and canvas we collectively designate "The Mona Lisa"). I don't know. Maybe its a crazy idea. Maybe it just requires re-evaluating the importance we place on a particular organization of molecules (that are technically fungible!) with no utility. An atom-level, "perfect", physical reproduction of the Mona Lisa may even become a possibility one day. So maybe the more important thing really is the abstract idea of proof of ownership of some cryptographically protected numbers.

clhodapp 5y ago

Also: Someone else can generate an NFT with the same URL in it. Thus, it becomes an exercise to verify the NFT out of band. At that point, in a lot of situations, it's not the NFT that's certifying the ownership, it's the public announcement by the artist. There's maybe a little to be gained because from that point forward, any transfers may be verified but... In the end the root of trust remains the public, out-of-band announcement of the NFT. It is also worth noting that, in a lot of cases, NFTs don't actually confer any sort of special rights or ownership over the art. Often, NFTs are really just signed links to a thing that was not actually sold to you, with the actual legal ownership of the art staying with the seller.

marcan_42 5y ago

> I just produced painting 123 and generated NFT 456 for it on the Ethereum blockchain" Upon which you have to trust the artist that they actually did produce the painting themselves, and own the copyright to it, and are authorized to mint an NFT of it. If it later turns out they didn't, the NFT is a fraud. So you're still relying on centralized trust. You also have to trust the artist not to "double-spend" their work and put it up as an NFT elsewhere or sell its copyright. The NFT itself is not tied to copyright, so there is no legal nor technical protection here. NFTs are solid blockchain technology resting on a foundation of centralized trust (sure, distributed, but still individually centralized). It's completely against everything those crypto people claim they stand for and they don't even realize it. It's in the damn name too. Non-Fungible Token. Token. Not Picture. The only thing you're buying and selling is a meaningless token. I say this every time NFTs come up: go commission some custom artwork from your favorite artist instead, the normal way. At least that way you'll have something unique and personal instead of a procedurally generated monkey, and you don't need cryptononsense to know it's yours.

grog454 5y ago
I agree with your assessment of the importance of trust in this example and the issues that go with it. I suspect similar issues crop up with non crypto systems as well but that's not really what I want to discuss. NFTs still seem potentially useful to me. Let's take one more example: the Mona Lisa currently in the possession of France and held in the Louvre. How do I know all that? I looked it up on Wikipedia and "trust" what I've read. I trust it because I assume any time this painting changes hands its a carefully managed transactions likely involving 6 to 7 figures of USD (just for transaction "fees", not the value of the painting) toward dozens of people to verify various things (the authenticity of the painting, and the authenticity of the purchaser and purchaser's funds, and seller) as well as security, transportation, insurance, and desired publicity. But maybe there's a different way to go about that kind of transaction. As long as we can establish a few initial conditions collectively with "trust", any future transactions for the Mona Lisa can be, in a way, protected with an NFT. Let's start by collectively agreeing to give the Mona Lisa NFT id "1" on the Ethereum blockchain and give France address "0x01". For whatever reason, the Mona Lisa gets sold to "0x05" as an Ethereum transaction. We no longer need to verify the authenticity of the purchaser's funds (hopefully obvious), nor do we really care who "0x05" is. Everyone who believes in cryptography can now establish that indeed "0x05" is the rightful owner of the Mona Lisa. I no longer need to trust a Wikipedia article, or be important enough to "know someone" who knows how to get in touch with "France" or whoever the current owner is if I'm a serious candidate to purchase it. If the Mona Lisa gets stolen and later turns up, physically, anywhere, in anyone's hands, the world at least has the ability to say "prove you're 0x05". Anyone who has the ability to do so gets it. Yay! In theory, "0x05" can even sell the Mona Lisa to "0x06", WHILE IT IS IN A THIEF'S "POSSESION", and the rest of the world sans thief can agree that, indeed, "0x06" is now the rightful owner of the Mona Lisa. Pretty much the only thing the NFT doesn't help with at all here is destruction of underlying asset (the ink and canvas we collectively designate "The Mona Lisa"). I don't know. Maybe its a crazy idea. Maybe it just requires re-evaluating the importance we place on a particular organization of molecules (that are technically fungible!) with no utility. An atom-level, "perfect", physical reproduction of the Mona Lisa may even become a possibility one day. So maybe the more important thing really is the abstract idea of proof of ownership of some cryptographically protected numbers.