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zepto

It seems to me that the storage of the content is a red herring in many cases.

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.

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This is maybe truer now assuming the creator actually keeps a copy. It's not true in general. My wife and I are big KMFDM fans (met at a show) and wanted to buy copies of all their album covers only to discover to our dismay that many of the originals don't even exist any longer. Even the original digital copies were stored on floppy disks that someone just lost and you can no longer buy these from the actual artist or any other authentic source.

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.

Makes sense, it is still a very early stage ecosystem. I wonder how this evolves in future:

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.

> The owner only needs to keep a copy for their own collection, and can put it online themselves if they like.

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"?

The NFT itself can be redistributed. That has noting to do with the artwork.

But above you were talking about the artwork, when you wrote "The owner only needs to keep a copy for their own collection, and can put it online themselves if they like."

It's not clear at all that the owner of the NFT can put the artwork online.

> 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.

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