Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmulard | Hacker News Reader

I was really hoping they were going to dunk on the technology itself, like how the media of the NFT is lost if the platform hosting it is ever compromised - only the meta data is stored on the blockchain.

Instead, they just attacked the contents of the NFTs, akin to my mom telling me my pokemon cards are a waste of money all those years ago. Value is only whatever someone is willing to pay.

View on HN

The metadata is an IPFS hash in most cases that you can use to validate against the file regardless of where the file is stored. At any rate NFT market places are working on surfacing quality data to users to show them this information. Some NFTs are small enough to be embedded on-chain. Some use IPFS + Filecoin or other decentralized archive service like Arweave. Some don't. Surfacing that to users will become more important as the space evolves.

The metadata only contains an URI to where the actual information lies (says ERC-721). So as long the URI stays, the hash stays. And then you go and modify the contents of the pointed file and lo, instead of a Picasso you own now a lolcat. Or the file gets simply removed because the hoster went bankrupt or lost the backups after a crash and you're left owning... yeah.

The contents seem much more stupid than the metadata issue. If you're going to claim "ownership" over an arbitrary "thing" pointing to it with metadata is a reasonable method. Its the claiming "ownership" over arbitrary crap that's stupid.

Arbitrary crap like property? I'm down for some anarchy in the traditional sense.

Which nfts give you property rights to the underlying asset?

It gives you whatever the seller decided to package: physical items, meet and greet, handwritten notes. Of course it's all in that volatile metadata, though.

It's important to remember that these people are also the kind of industry personalities that would speak at and participate in a conference run by an organization in 2004 that backdoored their crypto products for government bribes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG

I'm of the belief now that those associated with the RSA conference are more interested in the publicity/reach of the conference than anything technical. They've pretty firmly positioned themselves outside of technology and far up the orifice of "industry" now. Maybe it's worth watching for policy wonks, but I skip the whole thing.

Well, the conference essentially just borrows the name, in effect. The conference is highly vendor oriented, unlike Blackhat or Defcon. The speakers, however are RSA themselves. Keep in mind that they are no longer associated with the company.

And the theme "crypto means cryptography" is a losing battle, I think.

The eponymous RSA conference is run by RSA Security LLC, the same people who backdoored their products for the NSA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_Security

κρυπτός means hidden or concealed, and I intend to die on this hill.

My point is that Rivest Shamir Adleman are no longer with RSA.

Either defcon or blackhat had as their keynote speaker the head of the NSA. Wtf.

Try that at the CCC conference . Never going to happen.

I never anticipated that NSA would speak at either of those two . . .

Defcon, being in Nevada (a state owned 95%+ by the US federal government and the home of the Nevada Test Site and Area 51) has always been super friendly to the US military (including its spying apparatus) and adjacent industries.

It's super gross.

Well now that you put it like that…

…I guess NFTs are awesome after all. Where’s my credit card at…

Art Blocks has everything on chain. A few other projects do as well.

The ArtBlocks webpage says they use the (same usual) ERC721 standard - which only stores the URI on chain. Can you please point to your information source?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com