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Comment by oh_sigh | Hacker News Reader

I know NFTs are popularized on decentralized blockchains, but is there anything inherent to NFTs that they need to be on a decentralized blockchain?

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Trust. People are more eager to purchase something if it's not tied to a specific company or platform. This is why art NFTs are so popular -- nobody trusts a single company (OpenSea, Foundation, Bitski, et al) to stick around forever, but the NFTs purchased are platform-agnostic. This played out explicitly recently, when "hic et nunc", a Tezos NFT website, shutdown suddenly. No NFTs were lost; everything people had purchased lives on the blockchain, and any other Tezos NFT website can display and sell them.

Weren't a lot of NFTs sold simply JSON blobs of metadata pointing at a web resource from some company? I remember seeing Cloudinary in some of the Beeple NFTs. I think some are pinned to IPFS now, but still that doesn't protect the NFT from link rot.

You are correct. IPFS attempts to address this issue by giving the asset a hash, so if no computer/server connected to the IPFS network has the asset, and you the owner have it, you could re-upload it to an IPFS server or join the network using your computer and the link will work again.

All you need is for the ledger to contain a hash of the file, and one of the people interesting in ownership of the NFT to keep a copy of the file around.

If the NFT is for a resource that is not in some way restricted, say because it is used for access to some asset in a game, then what purpose does it serve? You could claim that "oh, that NFT allows you to use that asset for that game that went under in a hypothetical future game that would recognize it", but I could just as easily say some hypothetical future game could just use that asset without the NFT at all.

If you consider "NFT" to be a unique asset represented digitally, no they don't. A lot of games and software deals with the equivalent of NFTs, in the end it's just tracking ownership of something with an unique ID.

However, for all the NFT features (mainly being able to reliably transfer ownership without relying on any specific company) you do need a blockchain.

> However, for all the NFT features (mainly being able to reliably transfer ownership without relying on any specific company) you do need a blockchain.

But you're going to be relying on a specific company anyway to host your asset. The NFT itself is nothing but a certificate. People who buy fancy guns in Ubisoft's new game might represent them as NFTs but that means nothing unless Ubisoft puts them in the game, keeps them in the game, and keeps the game state updated with the blockchain state, which they can stop doing at any time.

In fact, this has literally happened before. Crypto stooge Calvin Becerra had a bunch of his NFTs stolen, and Bored Ape Yacht Club declared that they will start ignoring the blockchain and unilaterally declared that the images belong to Becerra, even though the blockchain says otherwise.

> is there anything inherent to NFTs that they need to be on a decentralized blockchain?

Technically you absolutely can run a centralized blockchain and mint NFTs on it (EVE Online did this recently in their latest Alliance Tournament, where IIRC the corpses of player characters who were killed during the event became immortalized as NFTs on an isolated branch of Tezos that was created for the event). But at that point congratulations, you've just made a worse database. The only point of blockchain tech is decentralization (if you care about features and not just branding your product with the latest hype).

Only the risk of a centralised service going away, which also exists for decentralised technology but is considered less likely.

No, it is just a set of standardized functions. A class. Can be in any language, any platform.

No.

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