15 ms·

>When you think about it, OpenSea would actually be much “better” in the immediate sense if all the web3 parts were gone. It would be faster, cheaper for everyo

by simias 5y ago

>When you think about it, OpenSea would actually be much “better” in the immediate sense if all the web3 parts were gone. It would be faster, cheaper for everyone, and easier to use. That sums up the situation for me. Having a marketplace for purely digital goods might be a concept with a future. Having standard ways to interoperate between different platforms and query and update these goods might make sense (although I still think it goes opposite to the general trend of walled gardens vs. decentralized web, I don't see why the IP owners would play ball and accept the loss of control). The thing is that in most case those NFTs wouldn't be trustless. I see people putting forward that a use case would be an NFT that proves that your Rolex is real, or for Fortnite skins, or for the ownership of your house. But in all these situations, there's a very clear authority (Rolex, Epic Games and the municipal authorities, respectively). These authorities will be allowed to mint new NFTs at will (because who else?) and as such have to be trusted. That opens up interesting questions btw, like "who is Rolex exactly?" which creates a chain of custody of trusted authority involving trademark management among other things. But I digress. But then as soon as an authority is identified, why bother with the extreme overhead (it terms of resources and costs) of blockchain tech? Couldn't Rolex issue a PGP signed CSV of all valid Rolex serial numbers once a month on IPFS and you'd get the exact same security and trust profile without having to involve any "web3" feature? Like cryptocurrencies, the subset of problems that can only be solved using NFTs is incredibly tiny and speculators rush to make up use cases that, if you think about it for five minutes, clearly make no sense and could be better solved using good old centralized tech.

pshc 5y ago
> Couldn't Rolex issue a PGP signed CSV of all valid Rolex serial numbers once a month on IPFS and you'd get the exact same security and trust profile without having to involve any "web3" feature? A serial number can be copied and engraved onto a forged watch, so not really. A more analogous scenario would be if Rolex embedded an NFC hardware chip with a private key inside the watch, such that anyone could wave their phone over their watch and verify that the chip’s cert was indeed signed by Rolex.
- simias 5y ago
  Well sure but that's the "analog gap" problem. NFTs don't fix that, do they? In the end there'll have to be something that will tie a given NFT to a given watch, and one way or the other it'll be the same issue as tying my CSV to a given watch.
  - pshc 5y ago
    I agree, one can’t easily tie an NFT to a physical object. Nothing guarantees that the watch and NFT change ownership in tandem. All I’m saying is that a serial number doesn’t really prove anything because it’s trivial to copy. A private key inextricable from the object would be better, because it could generate timestamped signatures as proof.
    - lolinder 5y ago
      But whatever you use would still be easier to implement using traditional tech than web3, because the problems they solve are orthogonal.
      - pshc 5y ago
        Yes. I regret not being more clear in my original comment, because the scheme I alluded to is an application of public key cryptography, such as Certificate Authorities, and is not about cryptocurrencies specifically.
    - meheleventyone 5y ago
      Even with time stamped signatures you can clone the signature onto a fake watch.
      - pshc 5y ago
        The point of a signed timestamp (and/or challenge string) is that it demonstrates the signature is freshly generated, proof that the device is authentic right then and there. An old copied signature would not have this property.
not2b 5y ago
As the article points out, many NFTs are implemented by storing a URL in the blockchain; the digital artwork sits on some server and is reachable by that link. Fine, you can prove that you own the URL. But what that URL points to can change out from under you, so there's no way to make that trustless. If you own the domain and the server that it points to, the registrar can take the domain away from you and give it to someone else. In a sense, NFTs are a lot like those schemes we used to see where some company will promise to name a star after you, even though no one recognizes their authority to do this. Fine, that URL is "yours". You just own a sequence of bytes, the ones in the URL, not the ones that the URL (temporarily) points to.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  So, this has a really easy fix. The NFT points to a content hash, and the content is uploaded to the Internet Archive (and they're compensated for the storage) as part of the NFT minting process. Your ownership is now on a distributed ledger, with a cryptographic hash of the content, paired with long term storage of said digital artwork. The Internet Archive's costs are ~$2/GB to store content in perpetuity, which seems insanely cheap to carve off as part of a transaction (Eth gas fees aside).
  - bricemo 5y ago
    But then it’s just back to trust based web2, you’re trusting internet archive. That’s his point: this isn’t leading to trust less decentralization in practice. To do that, you’d have to store the NFT data on chain, which is prohibitively expensive
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      > But then it’s just back to trust based web2, you’re trusting internet archive. Correct, because it's clear storing the content in web2 Internet Archive is superior ("you’d have to store the NFT data on chain, which is prohibitively expensive"). They will persist regardless of web3 shenanigans, and hash addressing ensures content integrity. You could even use a torrent to store and serve the content (again, which uses hashes to identify and preserve integrity of content). Why would one trust a distributed ledger over a centralized archive run by folks whose primary focus is on preservation of the bits they're storing? The economic benefit of running storage nodes of encrypted content is unlikely to ever be sufficient to provide the same economic incentives a corporation or non profit realizes by offering the durability a centralized service provides (due to scale). EDIT: @Ragnarork It seems like web3 is making some promises it can't keep?
dsanchez97 5y ago
I definitely agree that most people/projects/etc gloss over that fact that there still needs be a 'start of authority' to be trusted with NFTS. I think a major upside of doing the digital transactions on a Blockchain (as opposed to the system you described) is that the start authority does not need to be present or keep track of any future transactions. In your Rolex example, I believe that there would be no way of person A selling their Rolex (and digital rights of the Rolex) without notifying Rolex and Rolex having to keep track of transaction. With a Blockchain, the people could agree that the 'start of authority' matches the public address that is associated with Rolex and then proceed with the transaction with no need for any middle party. I played a decent amount of Runescape growing up, so when I first heard of NFT's I naturally thought of that game. I would definitely find intrinsic value in truly owning an NFT of some of the rare in game items. And knowing that even if Jagex (parent company) disappears that I still have ownership over the items definitely adds a lot of value.
- simias 5y ago
  But see, this is where I get lost in this concept. Should Jagex fold and the game become unplayable, what do you own? An entry in a database that says that you once had this item but you can't do anything with it? Why is that valuable? I can sort of see the argument if other game developers allow for these items to be reused in other environments, and that's something pushed by NFT enthusiasts, but I don't see how that makes economical sense. For one thing that puts a lot of work on the table of other game developers. If every NFT of every game needs to be usable in other games, can you imagine the headache? It's a combinatorial nightmare. Besides devs want to make money selling their own NFTs, not adding items made by others for free, so what incentive is there for adding support for your rare Runescape item in some other game? Seems like devs would rather sell you a special "Runescape retro item set pack, only $9.99!" And then we haven't even touched on IP issues. If you have an NFT of Lara Croft, can the devs of another game just clone the model in order to let you import her? I feel like all of these issues by far dwarf whatever convenience NFTs bring to the table. The problems I outline above are the ones that need solving, and if you find a way around those you could very easily achieve what you want without "web3" tech (see Steam trading cards and Nintendo's Amiibos for instance).
fnord77 5y ago
> the subset of problems that can only be solved using NFTs is incredibly tiny What problems can only be solved by using NFTs?
CryptoPunk 5y ago
>>Rolex issue a PGP signed CSV of all valid Rolex serial numbers once a month on IPFS and you'd get the exact same security and trust profile without having to involve any "web3" feature? This doesn't enable real-time transfers of NFTs. Ideally, the blockchain allows the NFTs to be traded without Rolex relying on another company acting as a trusted third party platform keeping track of ownership, or Rolex itself running its own transaction database. The blockchain is a common open platform for transactions, and that's useful.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  The NFTs are useless. The watches - the thing people care about - can still be traded without relying on Rolex or any other company.
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    That's a different topic. I was addressing why Rolex might prefer a blockchain ledger over their own internal one.
SkyMarshal 5y ago
> I don't see why the IP owners would play ball and accept the loss of control). The main reason would be if they could make more money on their digital goods by floating them in a large, open, heterogeneous market rather than in their smaller walled-garden. That's what traditional capital markets are good for, and the name of the game here is figuring out how to recreate those benefits in decentralized digital markets.
- angryasian 5y ago
  ehh.. why sell the item once to a person in a large open market, when you can sell the item multiple times to the same person in multiple markets.
Joeri 5y ago
The problem with traditional authority models is that the authority may disappear or be subverted. In regions with unstable governments you cannot rely on the government to keep saying that your house is your house. This is why I think the really valuable and underserved use case of the blockchain is decentralized identity. You can prove you are who you say, you’ve studied where you claim, you’ve worked at the places on your resume, and do this in ways that cannot be subverted or lost. This would be invaluable for refugees who often struggle for months or years with proving they are who they are. For people that live in stable countries with reliable governments and strong enforcement of contracts this does not provide much value however, and I think this is why this subdomain of web3 remains underserved.
- schoen 5y ago
  > This is why I think the really valuable and underserved use case of the blockchain is decentralized identity. You can prove you are who you say, you’ve studied where you claim, you’ve worked at the places on your resume, and do this in ways that cannot be subverted or lost. This would be invaluable for refugees who often struggle for months or years with proving they are who they are. That's a very interesting use case, but it's hard for me to see exactly how this can be made to work. Suppose you study at the National University of Unstabilia, which is located in a disaster-prone and conflict-riven environment. You complete your B.A. there, and you get the NUU to record this fact on a public blockchain. A few years later, things are really bad in Unstabilia, so you move to Belgium. After you arrive there, you tell someone (maybe a prospective employer?) "hey, I'm Joeri, I'm a refugee from Unstabilia, and I have a B.A. degree!". For some reason this person is skeptical, so you say "it's OK, just look up the blockchain record with the following hash!". Sure enough, the public blockchain contains an entry reflecting that someone named Joeri did, indeed, earn a B.A. at NUU a few years back. This is great, because maybe * Unstabilia City was mostly destroyed in an earthquake, making it hard to contact people there, and many of the people who would have known you during your studies have likely died or become refugees themselves; and * Lately, the new NUU administration really hates your ethnic group, so much so that it prefers to deny that people of your ethnicity were just recently widely represented among its student body; and * Many of NUU's records were previously lost in a fire; and * Before that, someone reputedly hacked NUU's computer systems and stole all of their records, and probably all of their cryptographic keys. But thanks to the blockchain records, your new Belgian friends can still confirm that you actually studied at NUU, right? But, how do they know that that record is really from NUU? How do they know that NUU really exists? How do they know what its signing keys were, and how long they remained under the university administration's control? How do they know whether it's a legitimate university? And, maybe most significantly, how do they know that you're the same Joeri who earned that degree back in the day, as opposed to some other Joeri? Are these records including some kind of digitally signed biometrics?
bcherny 5y ago
> Couldn't Rolex issue a PGP signed CSV of all valid Rolex serial numbers once a month on IPFS and you'd get the exact same security and trust profile without having to involve any "web3" feature? They totally could. But what’s interesting about NFTs is they standardize this process across all kinds of assets and issuers. Instead of a CSV for Rolex, a Twitter history for an artist, a deed for a house, a rental agreement for an Airbnb, it’s all just one format. In the past, there’s been tremendous value that’s come out of standardizing stuff, allowing infrastructure and new kinds of businesses to be built on top.
- acjohnson55 5y ago
  It would be easy to create standards for Digital Asset and Identity so that producers could represent ownership on their servers and allow for trade. The only thing NFTs give you is hosting for this in a logically centralized network. Hypothetically, this allows for operations on different contracts to be composible, but I don't think this happens much in practice.
  - bcherny 5y ago
    It’s two sides of the same thing, I think. Some things are standardized with protocols: IP, TCP, SQL, etc. Other things are standardized with storage formats: FAT, NTFS, etc. NFTs fall into the latter bucket, with some conventions for the former but nothing as mature as a protocol.
machiaweliczny 5y ago
I am only interested by money aspect of crypto and especially on ability to fund companies easily via labor (actually that worked well in Communism). Will see if central bank currencies will allow for the same. That could be big boost to economy and big hit to VCs so I expect this to come from EU. All those creator economy apps show that there's a need to democratise economy. I am again tempted to quote hustlers here.
- simsla 5y ago
  > and especially on ability to fund companies easily via labor Not sure I'm following. How would that work, and how would crypto facilitate this?

by simias 5y ago

pshc 5y ago

> Couldn't Rolex issue a PGP signed CSV of all valid Rolex serial numbers once a month on IPFS and you'd get the exact same security and trust profile without having to involve any "web3" feature? A serial number can be copied and engraved onto a forged watch, so not really. A more analogous scenario would be if Rolex embedded an NFC hardware chip with a private key inside the watch, such that anyone could wave their phone over their watch and verify that the chip’s cert was indeed signed by Rolex.

simias 5y ago
Well sure but that's the "analog gap" problem. NFTs don't fix that, do they? In the end there'll have to be something that will tie a given NFT to a given watch, and one way or the other it'll be the same issue as tying my CSV to a given watch.
- pshc 5y ago
  I agree, one can’t easily tie an NFT to a physical object. Nothing guarantees that the watch and NFT change ownership in tandem. All I’m saying is that a serial number doesn’t really prove anything because it’s trivial to copy. A private key inextricable from the object would be better, because it could generate timestamped signatures as proof.
  - lolinder 5y ago
    But whatever you use would still be easier to implement using traditional tech than web3, because the problems they solve are orthogonal.
    - pshc 5y ago
      Yes. I regret not being more clear in my original comment, because the scheme I alluded to is an application of public key cryptography, such as Certificate Authorities, and is not about cryptocurrencies specifically.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    Even with time stamped signatures you can clone the signature onto a fake watch.
    - pshc 5y ago
      The point of a signed timestamp (and/or challenge string) is that it demonstrates the signature is freshly generated, proof that the device is authentic right then and there. An old copied signature would not have this property.

not2b 5y ago

As the article points out, many NFTs are implemented by storing a URL in the blockchain; the digital artwork sits on some server and is reachable by that link. Fine, you can prove that you own the URL. But what that URL points to can change out from under you, so there's no way to make that trustless. If you own the domain and the server that it points to, the registrar can take the domain away from you and give it to someone else. In a sense, NFTs are a lot like those schemes we used to see where some company will promise to name a star after you, even though no one recognizes their authority to do this. Fine, that URL is "yours". You just own a sequence of bytes, the ones in the URL, not the ones that the URL (temporarily) points to.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
So, this has a really easy fix. The NFT points to a content hash, and the content is uploaded to the Internet Archive (and they're compensated for the storage) as part of the NFT minting process. Your ownership is now on a distributed ledger, with a cryptographic hash of the content, paired with long term storage of said digital artwork. The Internet Archive's costs are ~$2/GB to store content in perpetuity, which seems insanely cheap to carve off as part of a transaction (Eth gas fees aside).
- bricemo 5y ago
  But then it’s just back to trust based web2, you’re trusting internet archive. That’s his point: this isn’t leading to trust less decentralization in practice. To do that, you’d have to store the NFT data on chain, which is prohibitively expensive
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    > But then it’s just back to trust based web2, you’re trusting internet archive. Correct, because it's clear storing the content in web2 Internet Archive is superior ("you’d have to store the NFT data on chain, which is prohibitively expensive"). They will persist regardless of web3 shenanigans, and hash addressing ensures content integrity. You could even use a torrent to store and serve the content (again, which uses hashes to identify and preserve integrity of content). Why would one trust a distributed ledger over a centralized archive run by folks whose primary focus is on preservation of the bits they're storing? The economic benefit of running storage nodes of encrypted content is unlikely to ever be sufficient to provide the same economic incentives a corporation or non profit realizes by offering the durability a centralized service provides (due to scale). EDIT: @Ragnarork It seems like web3 is making some promises it can't keep?

dsanchez97 5y ago

I definitely agree that most people/projects/etc gloss over that fact that there still needs be a 'start of authority' to be trusted with NFTS. I think a major upside of doing the digital transactions on a Blockchain (as opposed to the system you described) is that the start authority does not need to be present or keep track of any future transactions. In your Rolex example, I believe that there would be no way of person A selling their Rolex (and digital rights of the Rolex) without notifying Rolex and Rolex having to keep track of transaction. With a Blockchain, the people could agree that the 'start of authority' matches the public address that is associated with Rolex and then proceed with the transaction with no need for any middle party. I played a decent amount of Runescape growing up, so when I first heard of NFT's I naturally thought of that game. I would definitely find intrinsic value in truly owning an NFT of some of the rare in game items. And knowing that even if Jagex (parent company) disappears that I still have ownership over the items definitely adds a lot of value.

simias 5y ago
But see, this is where I get lost in this concept. Should Jagex fold and the game become unplayable, what do you own? An entry in a database that says that you once had this item but you can't do anything with it? Why is that valuable? I can sort of see the argument if other game developers allow for these items to be reused in other environments, and that's something pushed by NFT enthusiasts, but I don't see how that makes economical sense. For one thing that puts a lot of work on the table of other game developers. If every NFT of every game needs to be usable in other games, can you imagine the headache? It's a combinatorial nightmare. Besides devs want to make money selling their own NFTs, not adding items made by others for free, so what incentive is there for adding support for your rare Runescape item in some other game? Seems like devs would rather sell you a special "Runescape retro item set pack, only $9.99!" And then we haven't even touched on IP issues. If you have an NFT of Lara Croft, can the devs of another game just clone the model in order to let you import her? I feel like all of these issues by far dwarf whatever convenience NFTs bring to the table. The problems I outline above are the ones that need solving, and if you find a way around those you could very easily achieve what you want without "web3" tech (see Steam trading cards and Nintendo's Amiibos for instance).

fnord77 5y ago

> the subset of problems that can only be solved using NFTs is incredibly tiny What problems can only be solved by using NFTs?

CryptoPunk 5y ago

>>Rolex issue a PGP signed CSV of all valid Rolex serial numbers once a month on IPFS and you'd get the exact same security and trust profile without having to involve any "web3" feature? This doesn't enable real-time transfers of NFTs. Ideally, the blockchain allows the NFTs to be traded without Rolex relying on another company acting as a trusted third party platform keeping track of ownership, or Rolex itself running its own transaction database. The blockchain is a common open platform for transactions, and that's useful.

tsimionescu 5y ago
The NFTs are useless. The watches - the thing people care about - can still be traded without relying on Rolex or any other company.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  That's a different topic. I was addressing why Rolex might prefer a blockchain ledger over their own internal one.

SkyMarshal 5y ago

> I don't see why the IP owners would play ball and accept the loss of control). The main reason would be if they could make more money on their digital goods by floating them in a large, open, heterogeneous market rather than in their smaller walled-garden. That's what traditional capital markets are good for, and the name of the game here is figuring out how to recreate those benefits in decentralized digital markets.

angryasian 5y ago
ehh.. why sell the item once to a person in a large open market, when you can sell the item multiple times to the same person in multiple markets.

Joeri 5y ago

The problem with traditional authority models is that the authority may disappear or be subverted. In regions with unstable governments you cannot rely on the government to keep saying that your house is your house. This is why I think the really valuable and underserved use case of the blockchain is decentralized identity. You can prove you are who you say, you’ve studied where you claim, you’ve worked at the places on your resume, and do this in ways that cannot be subverted or lost. This would be invaluable for refugees who often struggle for months or years with proving they are who they are. For people that live in stable countries with reliable governments and strong enforcement of contracts this does not provide much value however, and I think this is why this subdomain of web3 remains underserved.

schoen 5y ago
> This is why I think the really valuable and underserved use case of the blockchain is decentralized identity. You can prove you are who you say, you’ve studied where you claim, you’ve worked at the places on your resume, and do this in ways that cannot be subverted or lost. This would be invaluable for refugees who often struggle for months or years with proving they are who they are. That's a very interesting use case, but it's hard for me to see exactly how this can be made to work. Suppose you study at the National University of Unstabilia, which is located in a disaster-prone and conflict-riven environment. You complete your B.A. there, and you get the NUU to record this fact on a public blockchain. A few years later, things are really bad in Unstabilia, so you move to Belgium. After you arrive there, you tell someone (maybe a prospective employer?) "hey, I'm Joeri, I'm a refugee from Unstabilia, and I have a B.A. degree!". For some reason this person is skeptical, so you say "it's OK, just look up the blockchain record with the following hash!". Sure enough, the public blockchain contains an entry reflecting that someone named Joeri did, indeed, earn a B.A. at NUU a few years back. This is great, because maybe * Unstabilia City was mostly destroyed in an earthquake, making it hard to contact people there, and many of the people who would have known you during your studies have likely died or become refugees themselves; and * Lately, the new NUU administration really hates your ethnic group, so much so that it prefers to deny that people of your ethnicity were just recently widely represented among its student body; and * Many of NUU's records were previously lost in a fire; and * Before that, someone reputedly hacked NUU's computer systems and stole all of their records, and probably all of their cryptographic keys. But thanks to the blockchain records, your new Belgian friends can still confirm that you actually studied at NUU, right? But, how do they know that that record is really from NUU? How do they know that NUU really exists? How do they know what its signing keys were, and how long they remained under the university administration's control? How do they know whether it's a legitimate university? And, maybe most significantly, how do they know that you're the same Joeri who earned that degree back in the day, as opposed to some other Joeri? Are these records including some kind of digitally signed biometrics?

bcherny 5y ago

> Couldn't Rolex issue a PGP signed CSV of all valid Rolex serial numbers once a month on IPFS and you'd get the exact same security and trust profile without having to involve any "web3" feature? They totally could. But what’s interesting about NFTs is they standardize this process across all kinds of assets and issuers. Instead of a CSV for Rolex, a Twitter history for an artist, a deed for a house, a rental agreement for an Airbnb, it’s all just one format. In the past, there’s been tremendous value that’s come out of standardizing stuff, allowing infrastructure and new kinds of businesses to be built on top.

acjohnson55 5y ago
It would be easy to create standards for Digital Asset and Identity so that producers could represent ownership on their servers and allow for trade. The only thing NFTs give you is hosting for this in a logically centralized network. Hypothetically, this allows for operations on different contracts to be composible, but I don't think this happens much in practice.
- bcherny 5y ago
  It’s two sides of the same thing, I think. Some things are standardized with protocols: IP, TCP, SQL, etc. Other things are standardized with storage formats: FAT, NTFS, etc. NFTs fall into the latter bucket, with some conventions for the former but nothing as mature as a protocol.

machiaweliczny 5y ago

I am only interested by money aspect of crypto and especially on ability to fund companies easily via labor (actually that worked well in Communism). Will see if central bank currencies will allow for the same. That could be big boost to economy and big hit to VCs so I expect this to come from EU. All those creator economy apps show that there's a need to democratise economy. I am again tempted to quote hustlers here.

simsla 5y ago
> and especially on ability to fund companies easily via labor Not sure I'm following. How would that work, and how would crypto facilitate this?