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I'll preface this by saying that I'm not a crypto fan, but I felt that NFTs were at least a promising use case for blockchain (* in addition to money, to avoid

I'll preface this by saying that I'm not a crypto fan, but I felt that NFTs were at least a promising use case for blockchain (* in addition to money, to avoid derailing this discussion). They solve a real world problem of ownership of digital assets in an interesting way. We need a solution here and NFTs proposed an "open" one. I wish we keep exploring this space.

buildbot 4y ago
How? They literally just point to a URL right? It's like buying the name of the a star but high tech....
- kipchak 4y ago
  Ones that had larger image sizes did, but some such as Cryptopunks for example are "on-chain", hence the small image size. Definitely a limitation for larger file sizes though.
- burnished 4y ago
  No, that is just one example of a payload - the token itself is non-fungible, so presumably some one could write code to associate the ownership of that token to some game feature. Lets say a mount in WoW, then you could trade said token as part of a secondary market. I dont think its a great idea, largely because making the ledger operate in a zero trust environment isnt a great value add for video game tokens, but it's important to judge things on their merits and in this case you could build a system as described.
  - drusepth 4y ago
    > Lets say a mount in WoW, then you could trade said token as part of a secondary market. This use-case always broke down for me when I realized you inherently can't have a secondary market when you still rely on the first market (the owners/operators of WoW) to maintain the integration(s) with token<->game. If I sell an owned mount token to a friend but the ownership of that mount doesn't actually transfer in-game, the entire system breaks down. Ergo, the livelihood of any secondary market relies entirely on Blizzard maintaining whatever in-game functionality uses the tokens, rather than solidifying a promise of any real decentralized ownership.
    - burnished 4y ago
      Correct, in this case Blizzard would have to release a mount NFT whose ownership their code checked. There must be a first party NFT market for the second party one to make sense. The system as described doesnt 'break down' if that transfer doesnt relay to in game, it never launched whatsoever. I dont know what would be in it for developers to tie into such a system - unregulated video game markets are notorious for the scams they breed (don't believe me? Meet me in Thais depot for some fast hands), so ceding control so that a secondary market can spring up sounds.. counterproductive.
  - raincole 4y ago
    > No, that is just one example of a payload - the token itself is non-fungible, so presumably some one could write code to associate the ownership of that token to some game feature. Lets say a mount in WoW, then you could trade said token as part of a secondary market. I don't know why you started your sentence with "No". What you describe is exactly the same as buying the name of a star, except it's on blockchain instead of some kind of database. If you like, you can write code to associate the ownership of that star (by access whichever star registry institution you like) to some game feature. Or you can let the player submit a "star ownership certfication. It's just the same except the data source is decentralized.
    - burnished 4y ago
      I read your dismissal as 'that is stupid that would not work'. Right now I dont think there is a programmatic way to do that with star certificates. I guess I dont see what your point is - are you just trying to link two things that seem frivolous to you?
      - raincole 4y ago
        My point is that they're stupid for the exact same reason. You buy "something". That "something" doesn't represent any legal right for you. If you buy a NFT of an image, you won't be the copyright owner of that image. You can't stop other people from using it either. Maybe there are some exceptions, but generally you just don't get anything legally. Similarly, buying a star doesn't give you legal right on that star. Why does doing this programatically make it different? Plus, buying a star is not inherently non-programmable. You can launch a star registry with an API. You can laucnh an NFT for stars. What makes buying a star stupid is that it doesn't represent any legal right, not that it's doesn't scale.
        burnished 4y ago
        Sure, if you use a nonsense example you get nonsense results. Not really blaming you for that, I have no idea why people acted like an NFT with a url payload represented ownership given that it didnt interact with any of our systems of ownership. The hypothetical under examination here is if I built a system that used NFT ownership as ownership of some in game thing - it represents a promise to value a given token, which is wholly different from the star thing (they dont value that certificate in a meaningful way). If your first instinct is to launch into a tirade about how dumb that is then great - total agreement. But, you could build it and it would work, and it would be meaningfully different from star ownership certificates.
- simpsond 4y ago
  They can point to a metadata URL, or store data. But the key is they have a unique id and can be used to verify ownership. Think of it like a global compound primary key: (chain id, NFT contract address, NFT id). For many things a database will suffice here, but it’s also useful to remove the dependency of a central authority. It’s worth exploring more.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    Ownership of an unlimited resource: a link to something. How do you verify ownership when many links point to the same resource?
    - simpsond 4y ago
      Metadata isn’t part of the core spec, so NFTs don’t have to link to anything. You can only verify ownership of the NFT id. What the NFT represents is up to the author. It could be a credential to a web application. It could be a pass to a venue checked at the door. It could be anything to gate access by asserting if the wallet holder has a specific id or balance greater than zero of said NFT. An NFT is a unique token. What builders do with it is up to them. Mostly it’s been art. What else could builders do when they have a permissionless way to assert that a user owns a unique digital id (NFT). It’s worth exploring more.
      - oblio 4y ago
        Well, it's worth exploring with a minimal amount of money and not by somehow squeezing in money from pension funds and the like. They can do that research as part of PhD dissertations.
- holografix 4y ago
  That’s such an apt comparison!
- hzwei 4y ago
  An NFT points to some asset, just as a deed to a house points to that house. The deed is not the house, but owning the deed gives you the right to exclude others from usage of the house. So the fact that an NFT is just a pointer shouldn't somehow disqualify it from being meaningful. Maybe eventually we'll put things like deeds on-chain as NFTs. This would have the benefit of decentralizing the record-keeping power, so we wouldn't have to worry about failure of some central authority in this regard. Enforcement of these ownership rights will probably depend on some centralized power, but if the deeper record-keeping layer becomes decentralized, is that not a win? I can print a copy of the Mona Lisa, but that doesn't devalue the original painting.
Semioj 4y ago
And I thought the idea of digital is that as soon as it is out it's 'free' /shrug
ShamelessC 4y ago
NFT’s are meant to be non-fungible. This isn’t the case at all in practice. Mostly due to the “technology” behind it not doing what it claims (you can hash the same work with imperceptible transformations and claim it is unique). But also due to a variety of factors that effectively amount to “human nature”. For now, you’ll have to settle for a court system and copyright law.
corbulo 4y ago
NFTs best real usecase was in logistics as a kind of unique item-ledger providing a secure history of custody and important details about the item of concern during its movements. All the digital ownership stuff is whack funny money low rates bullshit. That usecase for it is a concession that the copyright industry got it right, which is obviously not the case. NFTs just don't have the muscle to prop themselves up like Copyright does.
jallen_dot_dev 4y ago
> They solve a real world problem of ownership of digital assets in an interesting way. We need a solution here Do we, though?

buildbot 4y ago

How? They literally just point to a URL right? It's like buying the name of the a star but high tech....

kipchak 4y ago
Ones that had larger image sizes did, but some such as Cryptopunks for example are "on-chain", hence the small image size. Definitely a limitation for larger file sizes though.
burnished 4y ago
No, that is just one example of a payload - the token itself is non-fungible, so presumably some one could write code to associate the ownership of that token to some game feature. Lets say a mount in WoW, then you could trade said token as part of a secondary market. I dont think its a great idea, largely because making the ledger operate in a zero trust environment isnt a great value add for video game tokens, but it's important to judge things on their merits and in this case you could build a system as described.
- drusepth 4y ago
  > Lets say a mount in WoW, then you could trade said token as part of a secondary market. This use-case always broke down for me when I realized you inherently can't have a secondary market when you still rely on the first market (the owners/operators of WoW) to maintain the integration(s) with token<->game. If I sell an owned mount token to a friend but the ownership of that mount doesn't actually transfer in-game, the entire system breaks down. Ergo, the livelihood of any secondary market relies entirely on Blizzard maintaining whatever in-game functionality uses the tokens, rather than solidifying a promise of any real decentralized ownership.
  - burnished 4y ago
    Correct, in this case Blizzard would have to release a mount NFT whose ownership their code checked. There must be a first party NFT market for the second party one to make sense. The system as described doesnt 'break down' if that transfer doesnt relay to in game, it never launched whatsoever. I dont know what would be in it for developers to tie into such a system - unregulated video game markets are notorious for the scams they breed (don't believe me? Meet me in Thais depot for some fast hands), so ceding control so that a secondary market can spring up sounds.. counterproductive.
- raincole 4y ago
  > No, that is just one example of a payload - the token itself is non-fungible, so presumably some one could write code to associate the ownership of that token to some game feature. Lets say a mount in WoW, then you could trade said token as part of a secondary market. I don't know why you started your sentence with "No". What you describe is exactly the same as buying the name of a star, except it's on blockchain instead of some kind of database. If you like, you can write code to associate the ownership of that star (by access whichever star registry institution you like) to some game feature. Or you can let the player submit a "star ownership certfication. It's just the same except the data source is decentralized.
  - burnished 4y ago
    I read your dismissal as 'that is stupid that would not work'. Right now I dont think there is a programmatic way to do that with star certificates. I guess I dont see what your point is - are you just trying to link two things that seem frivolous to you?
    - raincole 4y ago
      My point is that they're stupid for the exact same reason. You buy "something". That "something" doesn't represent any legal right for you. If you buy a NFT of an image, you won't be the copyright owner of that image. You can't stop other people from using it either. Maybe there are some exceptions, but generally you just don't get anything legally. Similarly, buying a star doesn't give you legal right on that star. Why does doing this programatically make it different? Plus, buying a star is not inherently non-programmable. You can launch a star registry with an API. You can laucnh an NFT for stars. What makes buying a star stupid is that it doesn't represent any legal right, not that it's doesn't scale.
      - burnished 4y ago
        Sure, if you use a nonsense example you get nonsense results. Not really blaming you for that, I have no idea why people acted like an NFT with a url payload represented ownership given that it didnt interact with any of our systems of ownership. The hypothetical under examination here is if I built a system that used NFT ownership as ownership of some in game thing - it represents a promise to value a given token, which is wholly different from the star thing (they dont value that certificate in a meaningful way). If your first instinct is to launch into a tirade about how dumb that is then great - total agreement. But, you could build it and it would work, and it would be meaningfully different from star ownership certificates.
simpsond 4y ago
They can point to a metadata URL, or store data. But the key is they have a unique id and can be used to verify ownership. Think of it like a global compound primary key: (chain id, NFT contract address, NFT id). For many things a database will suffice here, but it’s also useful to remove the dependency of a central authority. It’s worth exploring more.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  Ownership of an unlimited resource: a link to something. How do you verify ownership when many links point to the same resource?
  - simpsond 4y ago
    Metadata isn’t part of the core spec, so NFTs don’t have to link to anything. You can only verify ownership of the NFT id. What the NFT represents is up to the author. It could be a credential to a web application. It could be a pass to a venue checked at the door. It could be anything to gate access by asserting if the wallet holder has a specific id or balance greater than zero of said NFT. An NFT is a unique token. What builders do with it is up to them. Mostly it’s been art. What else could builders do when they have a permissionless way to assert that a user owns a unique digital id (NFT). It’s worth exploring more.
    - oblio 4y ago
      Well, it's worth exploring with a minimal amount of money and not by somehow squeezing in money from pension funds and the like. They can do that research as part of PhD dissertations.
holografix 4y ago
That’s such an apt comparison!
hzwei 4y ago
An NFT points to some asset, just as a deed to a house points to that house. The deed is not the house, but owning the deed gives you the right to exclude others from usage of the house. So the fact that an NFT is just a pointer shouldn't somehow disqualify it from being meaningful. Maybe eventually we'll put things like deeds on-chain as NFTs. This would have the benefit of decentralizing the record-keeping power, so we wouldn't have to worry about failure of some central authority in this regard. Enforcement of these ownership rights will probably depend on some centralized power, but if the deeper record-keeping layer becomes decentralized, is that not a win? I can print a copy of the Mona Lisa, but that doesn't devalue the original painting.

Semioj 4y ago

And I thought the idea of digital is that as soon as it is out it's 'free' /shrug

ShamelessC 4y ago

NFT’s are meant to be non-fungible. This isn’t the case at all in practice. Mostly due to the “technology” behind it not doing what it claims (you can hash the same work with imperceptible transformations and claim it is unique). But also due to a variety of factors that effectively amount to “human nature”. For now, you’ll have to settle for a court system and copyright law.

corbulo 4y ago

NFTs best real usecase was in logistics as a kind of unique item-ledger providing a secure history of custody and important details about the item of concern during its movements. All the digital ownership stuff is whack funny money low rates bullshit. That usecase for it is a concession that the copyright industry got it right, which is obviously not the case. NFTs just don't have the muscle to prop themselves up like Copyright does.

jallen_dot_dev 4y ago

> They solve a real world problem of ownership of digital assets in an interesting way. We need a solution here Do we, though?