An analysis of 7,020,950 NFT transactions on the Ethereum blockchain | Hacker News Reader

An analysis of 7,020,950 NFT transactions on the Ethereum blockchain

old.reddit.com

22 pointskathylenk15 comments

I’m so torn regarding Ethereum. On the one hand, there’s so little actual usefulness - it’s all novelty and wild experimentation. But on the other hand, isn’t this similar to when people first got PCs, with 4K RAM and cassette drives, and nobody knew what practical use they could ever have? The most popular and valuable use for Ethereum probably hasn’t yet been discovered.

It's not very useful right now because the Ethereum Virtual Machine has no I/O. It only works with data from its own blockchain. There's some projects trying to bridge that gap and bring real world data to the virtual machine but so far nothing's materialized yet.

I remain hopeful it will turn into something amazing in the future. It's much better technology compared to BTC which does pretty much nothing right.

Apologies if I'm mistaken, but isn't chainlink a solution to the input part of I/O? Or is that what you meant by projects trying to solve the problem?

Yes, that's what I meant. Their aim is to bring real world data to smart contracts such as "package has arrived". Not sure if chainlink has actually achieved anything concrete though.

The analysis (pdf): https://github.com/bugout-dev/moonstream/blob/main/datasets/...

Do non-celebrities sell nfts? I can imagine someone buying nft from celebrity but from a random joe? Aren't nft like diamonds that you can buy them expensive but nobody will give you more than 10% for them?

Yes, they do. Some of my friends have purchased NFTs from no-namers for a few hundred dollars. I have no clue how good/bad they are as investments - I got the impression these guys were buying it just to get into the game.

NFT is more like art. Some living artists are really good at marketing themselves and make a bucketload, most art is worth barely more than the raw materials, sometimes less.

When tokens of identical or nearly identical ugly avatars sell, it really can't be about the art.

It's merely another pyramid. Art is just a new theme for the same old scheme: people rush grab tokens early, hype them up as the next big thing, wait for prices to increase, and unload them before the bubble bursts.

Yes but those are the celebrities, you are buying directly from celebrity. Let's say I buy statue of liberty from Richard Stallman. Will somebody but this nft from me? Why if they can buy from him? I can only sell cheaper.

Because the artist will only sell a limited amount; like a single NFT of their artwork. Therefore, anyone who wants to own it afterwards will need to buy it from you.

It really is very much like the traditional artmarket.

There is no limit how many NFTs the artists, or anyone else, can make for the same artwork.

NFTs don't contain the artwork, only a URL, and it isn't even enforcing content at the URL to be immutable! https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1448066579611234305

This tech is so dodgy through and through that even the name is a big stretch.

Yes, it is a gentlemen's agreement, exactly like the traditional art market.

Criticizing NFTs for mutable URLs (a good thing: https://twitter.com/elsdoerfer/status/1449136800505683970) or that it does not enforce multiple people minting a reference to an artwork (how would it possibly do that!?), is akin to saying "Bitcoin isn't backed by anything". Or maybe even, "Bitcoin doesn't make me coffee".

None of these things are solvable, and therefore are not in scope. It is what it is - an entry in a ledger that we assign value to.

The tokens have "non-fungible" in the name and there's a whole blockchain woo around them that implies there's some security that enforces their uniqueness and scarcity.

But unchecked ability to mint any number of tokens by anyone for any artwork makes them pretty fungible to me. They aren't any more non-fungible than artwork replicas in a gift shop (sure, there's a warehouse full of replicas, but your copy is yours only!)

Immutability shouldn't depend on the use of IPFS. It could be enforced by including a hash of the image file on the blockchain. Why is this not required and enforced is baffling to me. Inclusion of a perceptual hash would also help with production of duplicates. I guess smart contracts aren't smart enough to implement any of this?

Even ignoring all of the usual problems with blockchains, the way NFTs are implemented is incredibly weak. A PGP-signed JPEG has stronger integrity and authenticity proof than NFTs.

> But unchecked ability to mint any number of tokens by anyone for any artwork makes them pretty fungible to me. They aren't any more non-fungible than artwork replicas in a gift shop (sure, there's a warehouse full of replicas, but your copy is yours only!)

A couple of notes:

- 'by anyone for any artwork' is a source of confusion. The only that matters is legitimacy. There is only one Cryptopunk #1234, and only one XCOPY NGMI. Anyone else can "mint" a token claiming to represent that XCOPY work, but short of fraud, people will not treat it as the original one.

- Some artists do mint multi-edition pieces, i.e. an "edition of 30". These are then basically 30 fungible pieces, because for the most part people do not care which one you have; there may be a premium paid for edition 1, or something that a celebrity owned before, but then the same thing might be true for a giftshop replica that used to be in the Oval Office.

- It's not super helpful to think about fungible/non-fungible as a binary. "Floor" Cryptopunks are sometimes treated as fungible-like, when people for example put them into pools where you can get price exposure by owning a share of the pool.

> Immutability shouldn't depend on the use of IPFS. It could be enforced by including a hash of the image file on the blockchain.

Again, some notes:

- An IPFS url essentially is the hash of the file contents; ergo, an NFT using ipfs urls does contain the hash of the file. Some NFTs link to a metadata JSON file first, but that just makes it a chain of hashes. Blockchain contains hash of JSON -> JSON contains hash of file.

- The Cryptopunks, one of the original NFT experiments, did exactly what you said: It added a hash of the image files into the contract. It's an excellent method and more was never required. Or corollary here is that NFT critics being concerned about the image files disappearing, because it's just a URL, is somewhat misguided; sure, someone will have to host the image somewhere, but think of the URL has a helpful tool to make it easier to build generic display clients; not something essential to the NFT.

> Why is this not required and enforced is baffling to me. Inclusion of a perceptual hash would also help with production of duplicates. I guess smart contracts aren't smart enough to implement any of this?

What if an artist wants to produce duplicates? What about that whole world of dynamic NFTs, where the visual representation is supposed to change? What if two artists both want to mint a conceptual art project that is represented by very similar empty squares? What about artworks that are HTML files, or include audio? What about Mitchell F. Chan's Immaterial Zones, which have no representation? What if I steal an image from an artists Instagram and then "mint" it, as a griefer? What would be the point of any of this if there are multiple blockchains?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com