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Comment by larsiusprime | Hacker News Reader

I summed up all my complaints about NFT's in this (short) article:

https://www.fortressofdoors.com/the-degraded-blockchain-prob...

> In short, the minute you connect your blockchain to an app frontend you now have a degraded blockchain, one that cannot even in principle guarantee immutability, trustlessness, and decentralization – at least not for assets that the app's customers actually care about.

Scratch the surface on almost any NFT ecosystem or blockchain application and I find I'm still relying on trust, or a centralized service, or a service that's more mutable than it advertises. So if I don't get the purported benefits of blockchain anyways, what was the point of getting a blockchain involved?

EDIT: Getting a lot of responses that I don’t have time to reply to. My more involved thoughts on the entire space are here:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fZBIYjsXT_s

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This isn't true - sure there are projects that use IPFS to host token assets too big to store on-chain (3d assets, photos, etc.), but those assets can be assured to be perfectly correlated with their hashes. Not to mention many projects are fully on-chain, like CryptoPunks and AutoGlyphs.

Ah, so in some cases you’re able to stuff an entire JPEG into the blockchain itself, I’ll grant that. In which case we move on to all the other problems. But For NFTs that are meant to be used in applications, I think my argument still holds.

For fully disembodied NFTs where you just stuff a jpeg or it’s hash into a blockchain, my other complaint is that you’re just creating a speculative instrument that doesn’t really do anything except hope someone else will pay more for it. And I still have to rely on trust outside the blockchain that the artist approved these NFTs in the first place (there are many done with unauthorized art)

"my other complaint is that you’re just creating a speculative instrument that doesn’t really do anything except hope someone else will pay more for it."

So like bitcoin? - The value is in what someone believes it is worth to be provably in control of a given asset. It also provides a great deal of social currency...certain NFT owners have identity wrapped up in them such that owning it extends social latitudes, as the reputational harm which could be done for being a ingeniousness actor far outweighs making a quick buck.

Yes I think Bitcoin is bad as well. Speculation is not productive, and this particular form of it has negative externalities - costs the rest of society is forced to pay, which is both bad and unfair.

Proof of work is far too expensive and wasteful, and the necessary private key discipline to not lose all your coins puts it out of reach of normies (immutability is a bug not a feature for normies), and it’s deflationary which discourages circulation, and it’s got high transaction costs and slow speed, and just massively inefficient. So it fails as a currency, which it was originally pitched as.

Lightning network papers over this (an admission of failure in many ways) but just trades off with new vulnerabilities and further degradation of the original promises.

Make whatever digital assets you want and attach value however you like but own up to the limitations and costs. And pay for your own negative externalities, don’t force them on others.

In most of these projects I feel like it’s the aura of blockchain that’s being sold and not the substance because the actual promises of blockchain (immutability, trustees, decentralization) are always undermined in some way. I wish people would just be more honest about that.

I agree PoW is bad, and I'm hopeful for the future of Proof of Stake. Just like using coal and oil to fuel our industries is bad, and we are moving more and more towards renewable energy it is a path of progression. You have to start somewhere and grow, but I think it is somewhat disingenuous to discuss them as if they are static states which are not seeking and progressing to more ethical models.

I will, sincerely, believe it when I see it.

Until then criticizing the status quo, which is doing harm right now, is absolutely valid and not disingenuous in the least.

I suppose I see is like noticing that a house is being built, and then criticizing it because no one can live in it, and the builder's tools are loud, and pieces of building material are strewn around. If you don't like houses at all, then it's certainly fair to be critical of them at any state of their development, but if you admit they are useful to exist, albeit in a more developed state than not, it seems like a conflict. - I do appreciate your discussion here, and I hope I'm not coming across as antagonistic by saying your position is disingenuous, I just see it as a process of growth, some of which is not so tenable...like a screaming child vs an adult who creates something that contributes something that is a boon for society in their life. I also admit it remains to be seen, but there is meaningful evidence which supports a net positive outcome.

But in the case of the house, I've seen many completed houses before, so it's a bit of a false equivalence.

Bitcoin has utility, though - it's genuinely useful for money transfer in some situations (and locations).

But NFTs don't appear to have any practical utility whatsoever. They intentionally lack exactly the parts that make Bitcoin useful.

You might enjoy this project that got a lot of excitement behind it.

https://www.lootproject.com/

I don’t see why we need blockchain for this project at all.

There's only a couple reasons why you'd ever "need" a blockchain, the oldest is trustless artificial scarcity. That's why.

Otherwise it's literally just a text file

Serious: is this a joke?

It's not a joke, the prices are insane in large part because this meshes very well with the idea of compsability & permissionlessness that the Ethereum community is very excited about right now.

Yeah this is one of the reasons I love hicetnunc and am suspicious of most of the NFTs hyped on Ethereum, so many that I checked are hosted on some random host, I even saw a very $$$ one hosted on heroku...

This has to be elephant in in room right? There is so much cryptographic potential and none it is realized by most NFTs currently sold. Signing an http link to an existing .jpeg has to be the least imaginative way to implement this concept.

How about: Sign the image and generate a MAC. Then use steganography to include that information in the file. For the NFT sign create a certificate with the same key and include the MAC information. Publish that together with an IPFS link to a blockchain.

Then we can have discussions about IP law, art and what art ownership means.

Complete sidenote, but I loved your "So You Want to Compete With Roblox" article a while back, it was a pleasant surprise to click on this link and end up back at your blog.

Ah thanks! I live to serve.

The benefits of the blockchain are simple. To drive the pyramid scheme to profitability. It helps obfuscate the scam from people who don't know any better.

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