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I still can't get over that NFT's are just a URL pointing to the data. They don't even have an on-chain hash of the digital asset. It's like selling a sign poin

• wmf 5y ago
  Good NFTs do use a hash, but it's a shame that marketplaces don't mandate even this simple thing.
• blowski 5y ago
  I too struggle with the concept. But I imagine the supporters of NFTs would say the value is in being the only person who can put that sign. It seems like an extremely bizarre form of conspicuous consumption, but there we go.
  • felipellrocha 5y ago
    > But I imagine the supporters of NFTs would say the value is in being the only person who can put that sign If only that were true
  • yashg 5y ago
    >being the only person who can put that sign And even that is not true. There is nothing preventing literally anyone from creating as many signs they want and point it to any house they want.
  • manquer 5y ago
    as the other poster there is no uniqueness , drm or any restrictions on copying in chain or outside of it. There is only value because many people think there is value. Most people are only paying some x for an NFT because they think it is possible to flip it at y >x.
• omegacharlie 5y ago
  El oh el. If this is not ripe for a rugpull. I do not know what is.
• sirnicolaz 5y ago
  In the world of digital art, there are actually people developing NFTs that are purely generated on-chain. It's still a relatively small school, but you can check some of them out here https://www.0xchain.art/ https://www.0xchain.art/
  • testesttest 5y ago
    It is about 9% on ETH. yournfts.org
  • greggsy 5y ago
    Almost all of these are just graphic doodles with an arty name, or low res avatars. They’re art in the sense of being made and appreciated by someone, but they’re certainly not worthy of being called ‘fine art’, or unique.
    • sirnicolaz 5y ago
      Yeah well, let's not open that pandora's box
    • JofArnold 5y ago
      Gatekeeping what defines art.... Not a great look even if I understand where you're coming from. But check out Cyber Brokers which is super detailed and entirely on-chain.
• vmception 5y ago
  I think of them as digital digital picture frames. A market for digital, digital picture frames currently exists and it has high margins. That is the extent of my thought on the what people are buying. They aren't advertised that way though and the transaction receipt of purchasing the digital, digital picture frame can be a valuable asset. Regarding where the images being viewed are stored, many are not following best practices and should be scrutinized for that, but that is separate from the concept of digital digital picture frames, as many do leverage the sales pitch of the technology pretty well and store the entire image onchain or pin them on another censorship resistant storage system. But I think people overthink it. Who cares that people are buying digital digital picture frames? Just sell digital digital picture frames!
  • unmole 5y ago
    > I think of them as digital digital picture frames. I don't understand this analogy. A digital picture frame lets me look at pictures. What on earth is a digital digital picture frame?
    • eru 5y ago
      Perhaps it's a digital frame for a digital picture? (As opposed to a physical frame for a digital picture?)
      • unmole 5y ago
        Again, how is an NFT a picture frame? Is a URL a picture frame?
        • eru 5y ago
          Maybe? Not sure how the original commenter meant their metaphor.
    • vmception 5y ago
      A digital picture frame is a physical device that lets you look at preconfigured digital pictures. There is typically a mechanism for changing them, you purchased the device though. A digital digital picture frame is a set of classes that lets you look at preconfigured digital pictures. There is typically a mechanism for changing the image, you purchased the set of classes, typically following one of the NFT standards. Those are the ways at which they are similar.
• LdSGSgvupDV 5y ago
  Sound like "pointer" to me.
• exdsq 5y ago
  To be specific, an NFT can be anything - even a Turing complete program - but common ones are simply containing a string of a URL. Edit: I was loosely involved in some of the conversation around smart contract and token implementation on a top 10 chain and there’s actually a lot of interesting issues with on chain data, such as if child pornography is added suddenly in some countries hosting a node can be seen as distributing CP (so only allowing URLs and then having filters to remove that at a community level is an easy solution). I currently only like NFTs as representations of digital licenses or tickets etc anyway, so simple hashes work for me.
  • quickthrower2 5y ago
    How do you avoid anyone else putting CP on a blockchain because they can. And so a node runner always has this problem regardless of what say OpenSea does for example.
  • smt88 5y ago
    Digital licenses and tickets are useless if the central authority doesn't honor them. There's absolutely no benefit to making NFTs out of them. For example, if I buy an NFT ticket to a concert and the venue doesn't let me in, what was the point of the decentralization?
    • divs1210 5y ago
      That's not why making an NFT out of the ticket is interesting. It's interesting because I can, for example, resell my Woodstock ticket on an open market.
      • dmitriid 5y ago
        "It's interesting because I can hoard tickets and resell at profit". Why is that interesting, exactly? Edit All that is marked as "interesting" in crypto is inevitably "how can I profit/get rich quick off something".
        • 5y ago
• seanhunter 5y ago
  Very often the tokenURI is on IPFS meaning that the URI is in fact a hash of the digital asset. The digital asset can't change because that would result in a different IPFS uri.
  • testesttest 5y ago
    Fyi, about 36% of NFTs use IPFS on eth and another 9% are entirely on chain. See yournfts.org
• testesttest 5y ago
  > They don't even have an on-chain hash of the digital asset Yea... 45% of NFTs have their hash on chain https://yournfts.org/#stats https://yournfts.org/#stats. It isn't great but it isn't none.
  • mmaunder 5y ago
    Interesting point from the same source: > For example, OpenSea serves most of the NFTs they mint over HTTP. If the OpenSea ever collapses, ~8% of NFTs vanish.
    • cbovis 5y ago
      The NFTs will still exist and be tradeable outside of OpenSea even if OpenSea itself disappears because they live within a smart contract.
      • tpxl 5y ago
        They will point to nothing and hence (hopefully) be worthless
        • testesttest 5y ago
          Yep, exactly. Opensea hosts most of their minted NFTs on HTTP.
      • testesttest 5y ago
        Open seas contract code is not open AFAIK (binary is obviously available but I have not seen source other than decompile) Many contracts can be updated by leveraging proxy contracts. They can delete your nft if you mint with their contact.
• threatripper 5y ago
  Legally owning a house is literally just having your name and the address of your house in a book. EDIT: The actual power does not reside in the book. It resides in the mindshare this specific book has. Anyone can put anything in a book but only some people control the book that people pay attention to. Similar it is with fiat, cryptos and nfts. The power is not in the technology itself but in the mindshare they occupy. It is more about social engineering than software engineering.
  • oblio 5y ago
    I physically live in that house and nobody can trivially and completely legally take it down for good.
    • threatripper 5y ago
      You can physically live in a house that you don't legally own. Those are two different concepts.
      • meheleventyone 5y ago
        Not really the ability to physically occupy the house is one of the rights owning it gives you. There are other ways to gain that right but there is conceptual overlap there.
        • FeepingCreature 5y ago
          In some legal systems, physically occupying the house gives you ownership rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession
        • ben_w 5y ago
          My tenant in the UK does not own the flat they occupy; my landlord in Berlin does own the flat I occupy. There are rules to say that landlords can’t just enter on a whim, and rent is a very common way to occupy a property.
• lawrenceyan 5y ago
  Does it matter for the 99% who will never look at the on chain transaction or smart contract? Sometimes knowing the technical layer and low level implementation details too well impedes in understanding / utilization of the actual abstracted task imo
• miracle2k 5y ago
  > They don't even have an on-chain hash of the digital asset. It's like selling a sign pointing to houses for the price of the house, and claiming you own the house, hoping that the sign will increase in value the way the house does, and bragging about it. If your metaphor is correct, it remains correct even with a hash being stored on-chain. Frankly, most NFT critiques seem just as thinly thought through as yours. The NFT is a ledger entry that says you own an edition of a piece of digital art. People coalesce around this believe, because the edition was released by whoever owns the actual copyright (ideally the artist). The link is conceptually irrelevant. Cryptopunks never had one. As long as the community of collectors remembers and agrees on what each ledger entry represents, there is no problem. A hash can help with this, which is why almost all high-value fine art NFTs have one (in their IPFS-url). No, moxie could not be more wrong when he thinks IPFS should be enforced; the NFT never represents a set of bytes, it always represents an idea. The NFT may link to a 4K render of the artist's 3D scene, but it also represents the 8K render. The first tweet will always be the first tweet, in the same way as the first transatlantic flight has no physical presence. If Jack sells the first tweet as an NFT, it is no requirement that Twitter stay online for ever. It is merely strongly preferred that someone will archive it so it doesn't disappear from our collective memory, but that need not be the job of the NFT. The job of the NFT is simply to record your ownership of the concept. And you need a blockchain for this, to give it the credible neutrality needed for it to be considered something equivalent to real ownership; you can't have it be at the mercy of a single entity. If you think paying money for database entries is stupid now, imagine how stupdi it would be if they were in Google Art, a product that will shut down in 3 years, and where Google will delete all your art when your country attacks a neighbour.
  • smaudet 5y ago
    The problem is that NFTs aren't legally binding (and they really should never be, I'll start the campaign to assinate anybody who tries that). It's all well and good to say you are selling some deed, but that doesn't provide you ownership in any meaningful way. Any of these knock off websites making bank off of "NFT" assets would be better served by dropping the NFT nonsense and just straight up selling links to your logged in account. Congrats, you have rediscovered online token stores. We already paid too much money for world of warcraft gold, now we get to kill trees doing it. Honestly, the idiots these days...
• Kiro 5y ago
  What would the image being on the chain change? You're buying a signature.
  • black_puppydog 5y ago
    you would be, if the reference at least contained a content hash. as is, you literally just buy a link
    • Kiro 5y ago
      The content hash would prove nothing. What you're buying is "this NFT was minted by this artist, as confirmed by their Twitter or verified OpenSea account or whatever". The value is totally dependent on the social contract. Some random person minting the same NFT with the same hash would be worthless, unless they impersonate the artist.
      • black_puppydog 5y ago
        Fair point. Indeed content hash and signature from the artist would have to be on-chain, and somehow the signing party needs to be established as the real one as well. So... it's even worse that none of that is happening. With NFTs, to me it really just looks like BS all the way down.
        • Kiro 5y ago
          I also think it's BS but not because of what the NFT contains or not. The signature is already intrinsically part of the NFT since you can see what wallet minted it on the blockchain. When you mint an NFT you sign the transaction on the blockchain with your wallet. As you say what actually matters is proof that the signing party is the real one. And this is where the social contract matters. What gives it value is that artist X says they own wallet Y and that you can see that NFT Z was minted by wallet Y. It's just a fugazi but it can't be fixed by adding stuff to the NFT object.
    • kllrnohj 5y ago
• meribold 5y ago
  I could write on a piece of paper that I grant you exclusive rights to something I created for $x and then you give me $x and we both sign the piece of paper. A court would consider that piece of paper valid which makes the contract real. Replace the piece of paper with a text file with cryptographic signatures and a court may consider that valid as well. Isn't an NFT basically such a text file embedded into a decentralized marketplace? It's real if you can find a court that says it's real.
  • kgwgk 5y ago
    I could write on a piece of paper that I grant you exclusive rights to the piece of paper and sell it to you for $x. The piece of paper is real, but it doesn’t matter if there is the address of a house written on it or whatever - the only think you own is the piece of paper. That seems a better description of most NFTs which have no contract meaning at all.
  • dfabulich 5y ago
    Absolutely not. We can't have NFT land deeds (for example) because the legal system has the power to takeover your land (e.g. if you fail to pay taxes), but the legal system doesn't have the capacity to force you to transfer your NFT, especially if you delete your private key, in which case nobody can ever transfer it again. If the legal system says you don't own the land, but the NFT says you do, the legal system wins. The NFT appears useful only when it happens to do exactly what the legal system would already do, and is useless when it disagrees with the legal system. As a result, minting and transferring was a giant waste of electricity; you should have just registered your deed at the county recorder's office, the old fashioned way.
  • tluyben2 5y ago
    But that is all solved with signing and verifying in cryptography. Why does it need to be on the blockchain? I think you are asking the same thing somewhat. In many countries (at least in the EU) the gov now has mobile apps (and horrible desktop versions but the idea is the same) which generates a key pair on your device, sends the public key to the gov where it is connected to your tax number and that is it. This involved a bunch of security steps like your bank. Works very well but unfortunately it is not useable yet by any company; once it is, signing by pen is in the past. It is efficient and blockchain is not needed. But I guess the blockchain fans will argue that if your gov suddenly turns Russia, this centralised version is now not trusted anymore. And they would be right, but like you say; neither are the courts so it falls apart anyway? What’s the solution that is solved by the chain?
• blenderdt 5y ago
  What also is amazing is that people are now buying art for huge amounts of money, not because it's good art or it has any value, but because it's NFT art. So it's even worse than you say, they are selling a sign pointing to a very cheap house, but not for the price of the house but by overvaluing the sign's value.
  • prox 5y ago
    Because of the speculation and the “hidden” drive to make money (it’s basically a 21th century goldrush) makes it that it will never be what proponents usually advocate (decentralized, everyone benefits, open) 2002-2008 internet (before Facebook) was more Web3 in spirit probably then this Web3 bamboozle.
    • Agamus 5y ago
      My sense is that a lot of people who are zealotic about "web3" are people who never got to experience pre-FB, and want to do something about it. I wish them all the best, but I'm not optimistic yet.
  • verisimi 5y ago
    ... and then the NFT art itself is pixelated - its not vector based - it doesn't scale. So really you've bought art that only looks right at a specific resolution.
• koonsolo 5y ago
  Your house analogy is not really correct, since in a digital space, you can have an infinite number of the same house, and an infinite number of people living in that house. I consider it more like a certificate. Some cool architect made an incredible house. Lots of people live in that exact same house. But there is one who can say he bought the certificate straight from the architect himself. It doesn't give him anything extra legally. You can indeed argue what extra value this 'certificate' really has, except for some bragging rights. But I think that is the point of it: bragging rights.
  • paxys 5y ago
    Exactly. NFTs are digital trading cards. I don't know why people can't wrap their heads around the simple concept.
    • Cthulhu_ 5y ago
      Oh they can, but that's just the public appearance; they get excited over them because they see them as potentially high return investments. But of course, the big fish already got their money (and added it to the pile they earned from a couple of scam coins, artificially inflated crypto, etc). Nobody is under any illusions here. Except the media and their gullible audience; the media is in on it and the people behind it have a financial interest in it, and the gullible audience is easily impressed with techno-jargon, the potential of getting rich overnight, and FOMO.
      • koonsolo 5y ago
        So Shaquille O’Neal bought this Bored Ape NFT: https://opensea.io/assets/0x60e4d786628fea6478f785a6d7e704777c86a7c6/14452 https://opensea.io/assets/0x60e4d786628fea6478f785a6d7e70477... Are you claiming that this NFT, which everybody knows passed the hands of Shaq, will be worthless in the future? Bored Ape is kind of like the art of Andy Warhol. Yes, the creators of bored ape made a lot of money, but so did Andy Warhol. Is there anything wrong with that? If you want to call that all a scam, that's fine. But somehow calling Bored Ape a scam and Warhol art not, is weird. Warhol also had plenty of critics. If you don't like NFT's that fine, no problem with that. But maybe you could at least try to understand why some people want to spend money on that. And not "because they are a gullible audience".
• bbno4 5y ago
  This is not entirely correct. NFTs can and do exist entirely on-chain. For reference: https://skerritt.blog/response-to-moxie/ https://skerritt.blog/response-to-moxie/
  • wildmanx 5y ago
    > > Looking at many of the NFTs on popular marketplaces being sold for tens, hundreds, or millions of dollars, that URL often just points to some VPS running Apache somewhere. > This is a lie. Whenever somebody writes this, I immediately stop reading. A lie is a statement of fact which is incorrect and the one stating it knew that it's incorrect. Claiming that a statement is a lie is an extraordinary claim that needs strong evidence, i.e., that the statement is indeed incorrect and that the author of it was aware of that at the time of writing. Neither is such evidence provided nor is it even attempted.
• JofArnold 5y ago
  Incorrect. Cyber Brokers, Chain Runners and umpteen others going back years are 100% on-chain. But the majority are either on a centralized cloud provider at worst and IPFS at best, yes.