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> We were talking about how you were going to solve double spends without a chain. "Double spend" is a cryptocurrency problem, NFTs do not have this problem si

> We were talking about how you were going to solve double spends without a chain. "Double spend" is a cryptocurrency problem, NFTs do not have this problem since unlike "currencies" the goal is to create a "non fungible" record of ownership for an off-chain asset; a chain of digital signatures satisfies this need, the double spend issue is not relevant to the stated use-case.

quickthrower2 5y ago
The genesis of this discussion is “NFTs are a scam and are retroactively obsoleted by digital signatures”. I basically said “how to avoid double spend in digital signatures”, someone replied “but you can clone NFTs!”. I said “yes but that is different”. You are correct double spend is not a problem with NFT because they piggy back on crypto layers. However double spend is a problem with just digital signatures that “retroactively obsoleted” NFTs. Since there are multiple people commenting and steering the thread in different directions I feel this is being filibustered. So ill stop replying. Im exhausted!
- root_axis 5y ago
  > However double spend is a problem with just digital signatures that “retroactively obsoleted” NFTs. As I already stated, this is not true. Nobody can stop an author from minting two different blockchain NFTs pointing to the same content, there's no difference between that and "double spending" a digital signature NFT. At the end of the day, the only thing the NFT does is prove "the author authorized this verbal statement of ownership", a digitally signed text file does exactly the same thing.
  - jboy55 5y ago
    I think what you are missing is that for NFT adherents, they don't care about the original content, just the NFT. btw, I own an NFT that represents all natural numbers, therefore all possible NFTs.
saurik 5y ago
The only difference between a fungible token and a non-fungible token is its fungibility: everything else is the same. The stated use case for both is "I want to know for certain who owns something". A chain of digital signatures fails to satisfy that need. Please stop being so assertive about something you clearly don't know anything about: there are tons of useful complaints about how people are using NFTs, but this is not one of them.
- root_axis 5y ago
  A semantic distinction without an actual difference. At the end of the day all an NFT does is state "author X gives ownership of Y to Z", if you trust the public key of X a signed text file stating "author X gives ownership of Y to Z" gives you identical guarantees to a blockchain NFT stating the same thing. Nothing stops author X from minting a blockchain NFT that states "author X gives ownership of Y to Z" and also an additional blockchain NFT stating "author X gives ownership of Y to Q"... it's literally just a digitally signed string.
  - saurik 5y ago
    What blockchains provide is transaction ordering as a service. If Y is an NFT, what prevents that from happening is the code on the blockchain: the same kind of code (literally, on Ethereum) that prevents Y from being a fungible token for a cryptocurrency that they send to two people (aka "double spend"). If Y is not an NFT, but you know the original owner X, and you wish to create an NFT, the same kind of mechanisms work: the first time you attempt to assign ownership is the canonical one. Which you seemed to get up-thread, you just failed to "do the math" to see why digital signatures alone don't support that as you are so sure cryptocurrencies have no value. If you send two digital signatures to two people claiming they both own something, the big issue is that the second person might not even know the first person exists. You need some kind of mechanism to invalidate the second one by exposing the first one in a trustless global ledger of events.... that's what blockchains provide. If you only care about the semantics of disputes--which is potentially fair for claims over a physical object: it acts as a kind of "second factor"--you get a long way by just including the entire chain back to the root whenever you transfer ownership, allowing people to show prominence over other chains they obviously dominate... ...but any time there is a conflict--and not just on the original sale!--in your histories you can't compare timestamps to resolve the dispute as you can't trust them: digital signatures cannot show that one thing happened before the other thing as any timestamp is just data being signed, attached by the signer, and is meaningless. To resolve these conflicts you need to use your distributed ledger to establish that no such signature has been signed previously: you need a way to authoritatively assign prominence. If you have a solution for this, what you have invented is a cryptocurrency and could be used as such (as there is no relevant difference between fungible and non-fungible tokens). (And note that this is true even if you try to solve this by using some complex web-of trust of a ton of random third-parties or overlapping sets of parties that different people haphazardly might choose to trust instead of a linear blockchain... you are just talking about systems like Holochain or Stellar or Avalanche instead of systems like Bitcoin or Ethereum.)

quickthrower2 5y ago

The genesis of this discussion is “NFTs are a scam and are retroactively obsoleted by digital signatures”. I basically said “how to avoid double spend in digital signatures”, someone replied “but you can clone NFTs!”. I said “yes but that is different”. You are correct double spend is not a problem with NFT because they piggy back on crypto layers. However double spend is a problem with just digital signatures that “retroactively obsoleted” NFTs. Since there are multiple people commenting and steering the thread in different directions I feel this is being filibustered. So ill stop replying. Im exhausted!

root_axis 5y ago
> However double spend is a problem with just digital signatures that “retroactively obsoleted” NFTs. As I already stated, this is not true. Nobody can stop an author from minting two different blockchain NFTs pointing to the same content, there's no difference between that and "double spending" a digital signature NFT. At the end of the day, the only thing the NFT does is prove "the author authorized this verbal statement of ownership", a digitally signed text file does exactly the same thing.
- jboy55 5y ago
  I think what you are missing is that for NFT adherents, they don't care about the original content, just the NFT. btw, I own an NFT that represents all natural numbers, therefore all possible NFTs.

saurik 5y ago

The only difference between a fungible token and a non-fungible token is its fungibility: everything else is the same. The stated use case for both is "I want to know for certain who owns something". A chain of digital signatures fails to satisfy that need. Please stop being so assertive about something you clearly don't know anything about: there are tons of useful complaints about how people are using NFTs, but this is not one of them.

root_axis 5y ago
A semantic distinction without an actual difference. At the end of the day all an NFT does is state "author X gives ownership of Y to Z", if you trust the public key of X a signed text file stating "author X gives ownership of Y to Z" gives you identical guarantees to a blockchain NFT stating the same thing. Nothing stops author X from minting a blockchain NFT that states "author X gives ownership of Y to Z" and also an additional blockchain NFT stating "author X gives ownership of Y to Q"... it's literally just a digitally signed string.
- saurik 5y ago
  What blockchains provide is transaction ordering as a service. If Y is an NFT, what prevents that from happening is the code on the blockchain: the same kind of code (literally, on Ethereum) that prevents Y from being a fungible token for a cryptocurrency that they send to two people (aka "double spend"). If Y is not an NFT, but you know the original owner X, and you wish to create an NFT, the same kind of mechanisms work: the first time you attempt to assign ownership is the canonical one. Which you seemed to get up-thread, you just failed to "do the math" to see why digital signatures alone don't support that as you are so sure cryptocurrencies have no value. If you send two digital signatures to two people claiming they both own something, the big issue is that the second person might not even know the first person exists. You need some kind of mechanism to invalidate the second one by exposing the first one in a trustless global ledger of events.... that's what blockchains provide. If you only care about the semantics of disputes--which is potentially fair for claims over a physical object: it acts as a kind of "second factor"--you get a long way by just including the entire chain back to the root whenever you transfer ownership, allowing people to show prominence over other chains they obviously dominate... ...but any time there is a conflict--and not just on the original sale!--in your histories you can't compare timestamps to resolve the dispute as you can't trust them: digital signatures cannot show that one thing happened before the other thing as any timestamp is just data being signed, attached by the signer, and is meaningless. To resolve these conflicts you need to use your distributed ledger to establish that no such signature has been signed previously: you need a way to authoritatively assign prominence. If you have a solution for this, what you have invented is a cryptocurrency and could be used as such (as there is no relevant difference between fungible and non-fungible tokens). (And note that this is true even if you try to solve this by using some complex web-of trust of a ton of random third-parties or overlapping sets of parties that different people haphazardly might choose to trust instead of a linear blockchain... you are just talking about systems like Holochain or Stellar or Avalanche instead of systems like Bitcoin or Ethereum.)