How NFT's reference the media you're “buying”
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Say you buy a JPEG of an artwork. This is equivalent to a print which can be reproduced indefinitely.
The NFT is essentially just the artists signature on a print. It’s literally the artist signing a hash of the content.
The storage location of the content isn’t important. It’s really just part of the history of the artwork.
The owner only needs to keep a copy for their own collection, and can put it online themselves if they like.
The NFT will verify that the owner bought a signed copy from the artist regardless of where the JPEG is actually stored at the time.
I’m not commenting on how we should value this - just that the storage location going away doesn’t seem to be a showstopper.
1. It's a bummer if your NFT URL is bust even if you have a copy. I wonder if there would be a way for owner to append NFT URL information with non-broken URL. This way owner could ensure source files availability.
2. Playback options are very limited and often require derivative formats. It seems there is an opportunity for a service that indexes NFTs and provides convenient access to their owned content. Wallets are too limited right now. I would like to have an Apple TV app that showcases my NFT collection.
There are many negative things about the current NFT bubble we're seeing however it does feel that blockchain is finally taking off and we'll be be seeing a lot of interesting dapps in the upcoming years.
I'm not sure to what extent this even matters for an NFT as I'm not sure why someone would even want to buy a signature of a thing but not even get the thing itself (in which case you're responsible for the storage). But to each their own. I've given a few grand to the local YMCA over the past two and a half years just because I'm too lazy to go through the process of canceling over the phone. May as well be setting money on fire, but I don't care. If other people want to set money on fire to buy a string of bits assigning a not legally enforceable claim of ownership to some item they never take physical possession of, let them.
Do NFTs come with actual redistribution rights? In a way that a court would actually say "yes, you bought this digital artwork, you are allowed to redistribute it", as opposed to "lol, you paid fantasy money for a database entry claiming that you 'own' a URL that was hosted by some startup that is now out of business"?
It's not clear at all that the owner of the NFT can put the artwork online.
True.
They can keep a copy for themselves though.
We’ve thought a lot about this over the last few years. IPFS is the standard for content verifiability of NFTs. Can you prove that the content is what the original creator said it was? That's what IPFS solves for better than anything else. Watch this video to learn why: https://youtu.be/vttw1bjC2no?t=478
With IPFS solving content verifiability for NFTs first, you then have to solve for who is responsible for the NFT data. Decentralized storage doesn't inherently solve for this. Someone still needs to pay for it and this creates massive friction. We discuss this problem here: https://medium.com/pinata/who-is-responsible-for-nft-data-99...
Ultimately, the person who cares most about an NFT is the person who currently owns it. Whether that is the platform, the creator, or the collector, enabling them to easily ensure their NFTs survive ownership changes is going to be crucial to the success of NFTs long-term.
The digital data itself that was bought with it can be copied as many times as anyone wants and it can be shared with anyone its completely irrelevant.
Future token may be legally accepted as "ownership/license" to something for example if you bought a song. You can now proof to any streaming service that you bought it by digitally signing something only the token holder can. So no matter which streaming service you use you keep you music. This however is far from reality and no one know if it ever will happen.
The easiest analogy I have come up with to describe NFTs are collectable baseball cards. You don't get rights to the player's salary, publishing rights to the image, ect. You own the card/token only.
Nor would I buy such a collectible that is damaged the moment that the producing company goes out of business.
Let's see what a signed one-of-a-kind limited edition beeple goes for if you can't resell the piece.
Even with this though, the data will likely need to be cached somewhere more "traditional" though. Accessing on chain storage likely wouldn't be free.
There are projects though with "trustless" storage, where people are paid to store data offchain, and they periodically prove they still have the data available.
Bits are bits - all that matters is nominal ownership of the bit pattern representing the artwork as attested to by the artists signature.
There is no original version of the stored bits.
The URLs currently stored on-chain point at something mutable, ideally they would point to something as immutable as the signature itself.
It’s just an interesting piece of metadata. Like a certificate of authenticity saying which gallery a piece of artwork was first shown in.
You could even make the case that the original storage company ceasing to exist increases the historical value and rarity of the artwork since it becomes anchored to an era which is now past.
Without it, you need some communication channel / hosting _outside_ of the blockchain to communicate what I'm trying to sell, it complicates things for a NFT market smart contract.
I don't buy that a broken link on an NFT would make it worth more. In a year 99% of these NFT projects will be gone, broken links won't be anything special..
Don’t you always need a communication channel outside the blockchain to communicate what you are trying to sell?
It’s not clear what a smart contract would do differently with the URL from any other kind of seller.