People's Expensive NFTs Keep Vanishing. This Is Why
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This is pretty funny. So the NFT isn't even of the actual image itself but just a URL to a JPEG image hosted somewhere.
The only thing "revolutionary" about NFTs seems to be that artists now have a new and exciting way to hawk their work to suckers.
I'm no artist but when I had the desire to learn no obstacles would discourage me in my quest to afford materials and the process of obtaining a new watercolour book would take weeks and weeks I think the first third of school summer holidays actually.
now I'm wondering if I inadvertently lost interest in the impatience of adolescence...
but access to incredible artists materials is equally amazingly nearly ubiquitous in the western world along with peak uninstructed leisure time for young people to dabble but unfortunately not study and practice and master their tools in the dedicated way I remember absolutely everyone who had aspirations applied themselves in my youth.
by no means do I mean to hand waving dismiss the younger generations for laziness, but the economic realities are radically different from the seventies and maybe we haven't culturally adjusted quite yet to the increase in availability of purported artwork which might have formerly been graded as something less. Certainly the self regarding high social status of the art world at the time I was growing up excluded too many worthy creative talents from serious consideration, but that seems to have flip flopped to most liberally apply the glaze of authenticity over a entirety of output with unclear to me discrimination.
There was a joke I saw the other day on Mastodon that "if NFTs actually worked as promised then the furries would have invented them years ago". While an amusing joke, it's also one of those things with buried bits of truth that stick out like wisdom. The furry commission markets have generally seemed to be stable over the life of the internet, the prices haven't converged to zero, and generally there seems to be respect for the labor costs of the artists in that market. Obviously a lot of other art markets wish they were that stable, and it's a weird benchmark (thus the humor to it), but it's still a benchmark.
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped
When you put you life savings in a bank you don't have even the money itself - just some 0s and 1s in the bank's database. A lot of things work that kind of way.
I guess the important thing is not the digital representation but whether you can get you funds back at a later date. Which kind of works with bitcoin. NFTs I dunno.
* inheirent worthless. Real worth is what some is willing or can be convinced to pay.
If you're just "buying" a URL, it's even sillier than I thought.
With the NFT, it's bullshit every step of the way.
I'm beginning to suspect that's not why I don't get NFTs.
But really, they're not that different than any other asset. They have value for as long as someone is willing to pay for them. Gold works the same way, except that if you can't find a buyer for your gold you can make jewelry or electronics connectors with it instead. With a NFT if there is no buyer then you have absolutely nothing.
No, as it turns out, it was just another crypto scam
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He meant to say Ponzi scheme, right? This is not how casinos work.
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2019/oct/30/counter-strike...
I know from interacting with different painters and sculpturers who's works I have in my apartment, that the price on the bill often isn't the one being paid ...
This ERC721MetaData json document could disappear/be swapped out, unless it is an ipfs URL, in which case it could could disappear, but not be swapped out. Ipfs URLs are a commitment to the file contents, eg: hash. IPFS thus allows commitment to a given image in the json that may no longer actually be hosted. There is no guarantee that an IPFS NFT's referenced content will exist in future, let alone the ones on personal domains or s3, etc.
A signature exists to authorize contract calls to the 'transfer()' function, allowing the mapping of id to owner to be updated.
There are hashes, there are signatures, but to say 'artwork is hashed-and-signed' is a big stretch!
Folk's are having trouble understanding the idea of owning 'nothing' and 'digitally enforced scarcity', so using the concept of a house deed is probably a good analogy. It's just an electronic record at the bank, but it lets you 'own' a house. Deeds of course have a long history of standardized legal definition and regulations. NFT's... do not.
Regarding contractual language vs code -- Ricardian contracts were invented for this purpose. As yet, we are not seeing Ricardian clauses appearing in smart contracts.
Personally, I think that folks buying NFT's are crazy. (and I am a bitcoin advocate). This doesn't stop me from wanting to sell them (for bitcoin) ;-)
> If you saved the image to your phone before it was removed, you could gaze at it while absorbing the aura of a cryptographic signature displayed on a second screen, but that could lessen the already-tenuous connection between NFT and artwork.
A valid VIN allows you to buy buy all new sheet metal, drive line, interior and still register it as the original year and make.
How does an NTF allow you to recreate the art?
They bought a jpg wrapped in a fancy package.
Literally taken from wikipedia:
> A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unit of data on a digital ledger called a blockchain, where each NFT can represent a unique digital item, and thus they are not interchangeable. NFTs can represent digital files such as art, audio, videos, items in video games and other forms of creative work.
Lol
As with everything, the rule still stands: don't spend money you're not willing to lose. Crypto and NFTs are NOT an investment: they are a gamble… just like most of the stock market "game". :X
https://rarible.com/token/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c2484200...
See? There it is! Issue closed!
Could have paid to put the data on chain for less than the cost to settle the purchase of this luxurious immutable broken link. BSV is much better low level technology for this kind of thing. Now shower me with your hatred before I give you more sound reasons it is clearly superior.
Suppose I mint an NFT which contains a YouTube link to an official music video. Am I infringing if I sell this NFT? I know about rulings saying that sharing links is not infringement. But if I neither upload nor host the material, then where’s the infringement?
If you claim that selling a publicly available link is infringing, then what if I sell access to a weekly newsletter which is just a YouTube link to my favorite song of the week?
But NFTs for simple trading games where assets are tracked by the trading game company as well as the blockchain (e.g., affordable cryptokitties) is much more reasonable.
But, then it just becomes part of the games industry. And those games simply utilize the blockchain.
But if I would buy one I would make very sure that it was hosted on IPFS and immedietly downloaded a version to selfhost and store. People rush into this way to blind I really think. But that is a problem with blockchains in general I guess.
Yes, the impermanence of many (most) NFTs right now is a big problem, but that is a problem that many are working on and I expect to largely be solved within a year.
A few things of note:
ArtBlock allows generative artists to create a script, which a user can then mint an artwork whereby a unique hash passed to that script creates an output. This leads to the creation of a cohesive set of visual works, but with each piece having a unique feel that still feels part of the set. See Archetypes or Ringers for two well known collections on ArtBlocks. The script and hash is all stored on chain.
This artist has created C-code that lives on chain which can re-create the audio and visual components of the media you are buying. So you can always re-create the media with what is stored on chain.
There are numerous other projects that are storing the media "on chain".
Other projects store a hash of the file you are purchasing in the NFT, and then point the URL to an IPFS gateway. As long as someone on the IPFS network is hosting the media, the hash will find it. Their are platforms being created to assist with this (e.g https://infinft.com/#about)
See also Arweave and Filecoin, which are decentralized networks that can be used to incentivize others to store the media (in Arweave's case, potentially "forever").
This space will continue to evolve and new standards will be developed to address these issues.
In the meantime though, it is definitively caveat emptor and I would urge diligence as to how any NFT you might purchase handles these types of issues.
What I see as a problem, is creating a process to identify ownership of the NFTs. I wonder how auctions do that. Technically must quite expensive to prove ownership of a digital asset.
This seems like a challenge for artwork since blockchains are so inefficient compared to the alternatives and for any one person it's both cheaper and more reliable to store their collection on a regular storage service which has SLAs. Why pay more to take on other people's problems?
So like a reciprocal network? An internetwork... we could call it:
The Internet
https://api.artblocks.io/token/7
And all you get to say is you paid for that. Because anyone can go see https://api.artblocks.io/generator/7 in all its glory, but only one person (presumably) can say they were the last one to pay for the pointer.
This isn't "a thing of note". This is not even bullshit, because art might actually be bullshit. This is bullshit dropping its own shit, blindly, on a spreadsheet.