5 ms·

>NFTs: the thing nobody needed, let alone wanted Its a good idea to handle ownership of finite digital assets. Imagine buying a song or video game online, and

>NFTs: the thing nobody needed, let alone wanted Its a good idea to handle ownership of finite digital assets. Imagine buying a song or video game online, and then being able to sell it or give it to a friend later, without having to go through a central authority (and not be breaking copyright law). Just like with a CD. Unfortunately, 99% of NFT projects have been essentially penny stock schemes, so now that's what everyone thinks of them as.

harph 4y ago
> finite digital assets That's a nice oxymoron you have there. Digital assets are not "finite" or scarce, that's their biggest strength: that they can be copied and shared infinitely. I know that some people hate that, and would love to change it (see DRM). But to hell with that.
- PurpleRamen 4y ago
  That's not true at all. Any deed of ownership can be finite, especially if they refer to a physical object where there is a natural limit on the number of owners. Just because you can make infinite copies of the document, doesn't mean the legal system allows you to do that.
  - adammarples 4y ago
    And there we end up relying on a legal system again to verify the asset and we're back to square one. If my NFT needs to be verified when I sell it, which it will, because there will be fakes, then we still need a third party.
    - PurpleRamen 4y ago
      Welcome to the real world, where technology can't solve social problems.
      - fknorangesite 4y ago
        Can we pin this comment to the top of every HN thread?
  - MomoXenosaga 4y ago
    The whole point about digital goods is that you don't "own" them. Read the contract.
    - PurpleRamen 4y ago
      You talk about consumers who buy a usage-license. But someone must create those content first, and holds the ownership on them. Which is usually the creator, or publisher, or someone who bought the ownership. And there are usually proof of this ownership, like contracts and such.
  - rakoo 4y ago
    But why cram a finite-based system into a non-finite universe ? What's the point ? Haven't we understood that private property and ownership are not, in fact, better than sharing and common usage ? The digital world allows us to actually touch this, and we still import artificial restrictions that only benefit those who already have ?
Yizahi 4y ago
How do you plan to buy or sell a song or a video game using NFT, WITHOUT A CENTRAL AUTHORITY? (emphasis on the important part of the question)
- weberer 4y ago
  You would need a central authority (the copyright holder) to maintain a list of legitimate NFTs. However, you would not need to get their permission whenever you want to sell them.
  - Yizahi 4y ago
    How do you plan to sell some digital artifact is you either a) don't have a right do this, or b) have a right but the medium (NFT and blockchain) doesn't support transfer of the IP rights in any form? You would need the central authority to track IP rights and ownership in the centralised DB and which point why use NFTs in the first place?
    - lmm 4y ago
      > You would need the central authority to track IP rights and ownership in the centralised DB and which point why use NFTs in the first place? You wouldn't need a single central authority, you could have multiple certifying agencies who would have their own reputation. Similar to how there are multiple ratings agencies that can certify a bond as AAA, or multiple art curators who can certify a painting as genuine, or different comic book graders.
      - Yizahi 4y ago
        The number of centralised authorities doesn't change the core problem in my question - how do you sell anything with attached IP rights when NFT infrastructure doesn't support this operation?
        lmm 4y ago
        The NFT infrastructure supports buying and selling tokens. Attaching IP rights to that token can be done through the legal system, and third party agencies could attest on the blockchain that they believe the token has such a legal structure in place and properly set up (e.g. that the legitimate rightsholder has signed the release/deed/what-have-you in question).
xwolfi 4y ago
I want to copy more, why would I pay to copy less?
- weberer 4y ago
  The only reason to do that is if you want to obey copyright law. There is no technical reason stopping you.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    This is something that NFTs don't address at all, though.
pornel 4y ago
Even if ownership of digital assets or false scarcity were good ideas, NFTs never did any of this. The spec was technically amateurish — basically just URLs in a bit of JSON in a slow database, with barely any connection to the asset. NFTs allowed regular non-IPFS URLs without any checksum, which allowed HTTP servers to change the asset at any time! And they had absolutely no uniqueness checks, allowing automating piracy! https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/14/22726556/signal-founder-moxie-marlinspike-nft-whim-change-platform-shit-emoji-fragility https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/14/22726556/signal-founder-... You could literally copy an image, and make a new token for it, and there was no way to decide which token was the true one for any given image, except maybe if you trusted some central authority, haha.
JohnFen 4y ago
> Imagine buying a song or video game online, and then being able to sell it or give it to a friend later, without having to go through a central authority (and not be breaking copyright law). I don't have to imagine it. That's the reality right now without NFTs in the mix.
antifa 4y ago
> Imagine buying a song or video game online, and then being able to sell it or give it to a friend later, without having to go through a central authority Way too complicated, I'll stick with mp3s.

harph 4y ago

> finite digital assets That's a nice oxymoron you have there. Digital assets are not "finite" or scarce, that's their biggest strength: that they can be copied and shared infinitely. I know that some people hate that, and would love to change it (see DRM). But to hell with that.

PurpleRamen 4y ago
That's not true at all. Any deed of ownership can be finite, especially if they refer to a physical object where there is a natural limit on the number of owners. Just because you can make infinite copies of the document, doesn't mean the legal system allows you to do that.
- adammarples 4y ago
  And there we end up relying on a legal system again to verify the asset and we're back to square one. If my NFT needs to be verified when I sell it, which it will, because there will be fakes, then we still need a third party.
  - PurpleRamen 4y ago
    Welcome to the real world, where technology can't solve social problems.
    - fknorangesite 4y ago
      Can we pin this comment to the top of every HN thread?
- MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  The whole point about digital goods is that you don't "own" them. Read the contract.
  - PurpleRamen 4y ago
    You talk about consumers who buy a usage-license. But someone must create those content first, and holds the ownership on them. Which is usually the creator, or publisher, or someone who bought the ownership. And there are usually proof of this ownership, like contracts and such.
- rakoo 4y ago
  But why cram a finite-based system into a non-finite universe ? What's the point ? Haven't we understood that private property and ownership are not, in fact, better than sharing and common usage ? The digital world allows us to actually touch this, and we still import artificial restrictions that only benefit those who already have ?

Yizahi 4y ago

How do you plan to buy or sell a song or a video game using NFT, WITHOUT A CENTRAL AUTHORITY? (emphasis on the important part of the question)

weberer 4y ago
You would need a central authority (the copyright holder) to maintain a list of legitimate NFTs. However, you would not need to get their permission whenever you want to sell them.
- Yizahi 4y ago
  How do you plan to sell some digital artifact is you either a) don't have a right do this, or b) have a right but the medium (NFT and blockchain) doesn't support transfer of the IP rights in any form? You would need the central authority to track IP rights and ownership in the centralised DB and which point why use NFTs in the first place?
  - lmm 4y ago
    > You would need the central authority to track IP rights and ownership in the centralised DB and which point why use NFTs in the first place? You wouldn't need a single central authority, you could have multiple certifying agencies who would have their own reputation. Similar to how there are multiple ratings agencies that can certify a bond as AAA, or multiple art curators who can certify a painting as genuine, or different comic book graders.
    - Yizahi 4y ago
      The number of centralised authorities doesn't change the core problem in my question - how do you sell anything with attached IP rights when NFT infrastructure doesn't support this operation?
      - lmm 4y ago
        The NFT infrastructure supports buying and selling tokens. Attaching IP rights to that token can be done through the legal system, and third party agencies could attest on the blockchain that they believe the token has such a legal structure in place and properly set up (e.g. that the legitimate rightsholder has signed the release/deed/what-have-you in question).

xwolfi 4y ago

I want to copy more, why would I pay to copy less?

weberer 4y ago
The only reason to do that is if you want to obey copyright law. There is no technical reason stopping you.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  This is something that NFTs don't address at all, though.

pornel 4y ago

Even if ownership of digital assets or false scarcity were good ideas, NFTs never did any of this. The spec was technically amateurish — basically just URLs in a bit of JSON in a slow database, with barely any connection to the asset. NFTs allowed regular non-IPFS URLs without any checksum, which allowed HTTP servers to change the asset at any time! And they had absolutely no uniqueness checks, allowing automating piracy! https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/14/22726556/signal-founder-moxie-marlinspike-nft-whim-change-platform-shit-emoji-fragility https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/14/22726556/signal-founder-... You could literally copy an image, and make a new token for it, and there was no way to decide which token was the true one for any given image, except maybe if you trusted some central authority, haha.

JohnFen 4y ago

> Imagine buying a song or video game online, and then being able to sell it or give it to a friend later, without having to go through a central authority (and not be breaking copyright law). I don't have to imagine it. That's the reality right now without NFTs in the mix.

antifa 4y ago

> Imagine buying a song or video game online, and then being able to sell it or give it to a friend later, without having to go through a central authority Way too complicated, I'll stick with mp3s.