Hacker News Reader

Comment by axg11 | Hacker News Reader

There’s a fixation on this “pointer” problem with NFTs. Most projects use IPFS, making this a non-issue.

There are plenty of other critiques of NFTs - this is not one of them.

Unless people on IPFS decide to stop storing your item. IPFS does not address incentives to store objects. It’s a protocol like HTTP - but that doesn’t mean you have any incentive to store people’s NFTs yet, just like how having HTTP doesn’t mean you have an incentive to host a website yet.

Sure, but you can always maintain (and/or pay others to maintain) the things you care about on IPFS, and if the implementation points there directly (afaik not all do...) the pointer remains useful. Whereas if it points to a random HTTP url, you cant maintain that without the domain holder cooperating.

My main concern with this is that files hosted in IPFS aren't necessarily immutable, so what you own according to the NFT isn't immutable either.

The "default" way of using IPFS is content-based addressing == immutable.

IPFS uses file hashes. You're thinking of IPNS.

If you own the NFT, you do.

The way I understand IPFS, the address is based on the sha-256 hash of the content. If no one wants to host your object, or even if the object disappears from the network, you can put it back. Because it is based on a cryptographic hash of the content, no one can reuse the address for anything else, and putting it back won't change the address. This is unlike HTTP where you can lose your domain name, provider or change the referenced content.

So as long as a single person has your object it will not disappear, and as long as a single person is willing to host it, it will stay available, that person can be the owner of the NFT.

Thanks, I'll look into IPFS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com