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Comment by iamwil | Hacker News Reader

It's best to think of NFTs as deeds to the art (or certificate of authenticity), rather than the art itself.

I wrote this a little while back, and it might help you. https://interjectedfuture.com/nfts-unbundle-ownership-from-e...

If NFTs as deed to art isn't convincing for you, check out ENS. https://ens.domains/ It's a name registrar that's a smart contract. Each ENS domain name is an NFT.

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May be a dumb question but how can we certify that the same asset doesn’t exist as two or more NFTs on different block chains. There are tons of them and each can have its own monalisa.

> how can we certify that the same asset doesn’t exist as two or more NFTs on different block chains

You can't. But surely some wise guy is pitching a blockchain for that right now.

It's actually worse, the same certificate could exist on multiple blockchains, and none of them guarantee approval by the original artist; all could be legally void certificates of nothing.

You can’t even stop copies on the same chain AFAIK. It’s decentralised after all.

I wonder if you could somehow flood the site with copies of the high value NFT images to drop the value?

The markets right now are centralized platforms so you'll probably just get banned instead.

It's a good question. In practice, a project will publish the official contract address and the chain on their web page.

Hence, it becomes a schelling point for users. It assumes that the project owners are in control of their servers and DNS. For users, there is then just one official contract, regardless of how many others are published and on different chains.

As an aside, there is ENS, which people are starting to use to say they own a DNS domain https://docs.ens.domains/dns-registrar-guide. ENS itself is an NFT, so it's turtles all the way down.

On a practical level it is the attempt to bait rich people into believing into ownership and scarcity in a place where it doesn't exist: The internet.

Ownership of digital goods does exist since blockchain technology. You can now proof that things existed at a given time and that you are the rightful owner. That was not possible before without a middleman. Incoperate that to YouTube. At the moment millions of channels steal video revenue from their creators. If it would be accepted as proof that you where the first uploading this video, ownership can be proofen in an instant without lawyers.

Videos already have timestamps.

Plus, all you gotta do is change one imperceptible bit in the video to get a different hash. Now your "proof" method is useless again.

Well, actually, that's incorrect. It was always useless, it's not useless "again."

No its not. What you miss is that the creation of the signature is stored in the blockchain. So the creator can proof, that the signature existed before the other signatures. If you modify a video, your signature would have a timestamp AFTER the first signature. Proofing that this is a modified version of the original content.

Going a little bit further, modified versions of videos could be signed by the private key of the creator, proofing that the modified version was published with the consent of the creator.

This doesn't require a middleman, even pre-blockchain.

Proof of Ownership of digital content has existed for at least 30 years; digital signatures were a feature of PGP.

I could host the original video (original quality before upload) on my own website, link to / host my PGP public key, host the content digital signature on my website, then post these links in the YouTube description after I upload it there.

NFTs don't always identify the owner publicly by their real world identity; typically the blockchain only proves that a particular wallet id owns the content. Hence, there is another link in the chain to be proven for your use case. PGP doesn't necessarily fix this either; it only proves that the digital key pair own the content, not an IRL identity.

Sure but you miss a point. The blockchain proofs the creation date which pgp can not. So when you have the first signature of something, you can proof that you are the original creator. This ofc implies that everybody would use this method as proof of ownership.

> Each ENS domain name is an NFT.

Wasn't Namecoin solving the same problem years before Ethereum existed? What makes ENS/NFTs novel?

I only know a cursory amount about Namecoin. That it was built on Bitcoin, but somehow failed. ENS is actually working, and recently launched their DAO for governance.

What do you mean by "failed"? It is an active project: usable and still in development.

That I take it back. I know nothing about the project.

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