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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Me either. I had no idea that accessing a link to NFT-described content went through OpenSea for content that isn't even hosted by OpenSea. That's apparently a MetaMask thing. Supposedly a MetaMask wallet can connect to any willing node, but in practice they use the Infuria->OpenSea server.

Yes, you can run your own Etherium node and server, and connect a MetaMask wallet to it.[1] As Moxie points out, nobody wants to do that.

Worse, the blockchain does not, apparently, contain the hash of the data. You can't even prove you even have access rights to the data if the hosting service goes down. All you own is a link to a URL.

There are more Ethereum full nodes than two, but how many will accept web queries? That's a service.

[1] https://media.consensys.net/how-to-install-and-synchronize-y...

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> Worse, the blockchain does not, apparently, contain the hash of the data.

It very often does, and it is certainly the case for most high-value NFTs. It is indeed not the case if you create your NFT on OpenSea and do not take the additional step of freezing the metadata.

Also, there are many artworks that change, so a hash to a single file is not necessarily the right solution.

So if you purchase an NFT, you need to make a local copy of the actual data? Since the blockchain only has the hash? And if whatever server you originally got the data from the NFT for went down, you'd lose it if you didn't make a backup?

In those cases does the blockchain still have the URL as well? And you might end up with a collection of bits that matched the hash in the blockchain but was no longer at the original URL? What's the next step then?

(The "artwork may change" bit seems like it becomes even more weird and potentially nightmarish edge-case/potentially-losing-your-purchase-wise.)

> So if you purchase an NFT, you need to make a local copy of the actual data?

If you purchase one that’s worth say >4 figures then, yes, yes you should! Also at that point, you’re either part of the 1% or at the very least owe some due diligence to your investments.

In reality, the internet is a big copy machine and you’re probably safe. But you should still back it up.

the data has no value. anyone can right click copy an image. the value is that you own the blockchain address that points to a url. picture of a house = no value. deed to the house = value. even if the house is destroyed (data changed), the deed still has some kind of value

A URL pointing to nothing with no way to view the art that supposedly lives there anymore? I don't think that "deed" is gonna be worth much for long.

Sounds like it has the same value as saying "I used to own this one famous painting before it burned down in a fire."

A hash corresponding to the bits in your file? Sure, that works, you can say "yep, this is the image, I own it." A URL plus a hash + the bits. Sure, that makes sense, even if the URL goes away, you can prove that those particular bits belong to you. A URL that's now dead and nothing else? Nah.

You're not getting it. This is a game where the point is to collect deeds to houses, not the houses themselves. What's valuable to NFT enthusiasts is owning the deed to a famous home, even if the home is destroyed. Like saying you have the deed to Lincoln's first cabin

You can say that this is a stupid game and people shouldn't be playing it. I didn't make it up and I don't take part in it. I'm just trying to tell you what they're doing

This is leaving out the real reason: they hold lots of Ethereum and were concerned that not enough people wanted to buy their tokens. So many NFTs have been made under suspicious circumstances that I wouldn’t take the stated goals at face value.

Many NFTs are hosted on IPFS. If someone hosting it pulls the image, you can just start hosting it yourself instead, and since IPFS urls are based on the hash, it will never be "lost" so long as at least 1 person still has the content pointed to by the NFT.

IPFS isn't magic. Someone has to store it.

IPFS is basically Bittorrent plus a financing system. Arweave charges US$5/gigabyte for permanent storage on IPFS. This is supposed to be forever, funded by investing the money and speculating in the declining future price of storage.

You can supposedly put academic papers on Arweave's version of IPFS.[1] But if you try "Browse", nothing appears. This acts like another one of those distributed systems that isn't.

[1] https://ss6puabcq3ch.arweave.net/5Yeg3wT4COQL6Bz-tdp9xlmeiwg...

`IPFS is basically Bittorrent plus a financing system.`

That doesn't match my definition of IPFS at all which is simply "P2P immutable content hosting". How is it a "financing system"?

I haven't heard of Arweave before, but yes, the [1] link above doesn't show any results either in the "Browse" or "Search" mode. The premise sounds interesting though. Is this a bug of some sort or does someone with more info know what's up?

Dunno. Their Twitter feed has nothing about downtime.[1] It's all about another funding round and their token being listed on some crypto exchange.

[1] https://twitter.com/ArweaveTeam

Strange! An aside, their press release introduced me to the handy term "permaweb". I wonder when the Internet Archive will move to IPFS.

https://arweave.medium.com/arweave-announces-new-funding-fro...

A deed is to land, the land still exists if the house is gone. Your example is more like owning a title to a car that's been shot into the sun. It has 0 value.

The land is still there - that's the value. With an NFT, the image is gone and what's left? Some bits on the blockchain.

So if I own an NFT and make sure to store the hash, does that mean I also own all collisions?

You don't even own the hash. You just own a database entry pointing at the hash.

There is no mechanism on the Blockchain preventing someone else creating a new NFT with the exact same hash.

I'd argue you don't even own the database entry. You own _a private key for a wallet that appears in_ the database entry for the hash of the image.

But to truly _own_ something, all the cryptographic guarantees in the world won't change the fact that true ownership can only be enforced through violence. And if your private key can be stolen by hackers in countries without extradition treaties, one could argue that anything digital is only "owned" in the absolute weakest sense of the word: no one has tried disputing it yet.

What about the same url? Or one with query parameter adds?

What's to prevent another NFT from pointing to the same data and copying the hash?

The centralised marketplaces themselves (like OpenSea) are able to and might try to police duplicate NFTs, or other counterfeit near-matches. I'm not actually sure if they actually do.

But on the blockchain itself, the NFT is just a smart contract (bit of code, bit of data) that knows it's current owner, it's name and a URI pointing at the image. There zero mechanism preventing duplicates.

Hell, it's such an unregulated market that the NFT might be based on a custom smart contract with a backdoor that allows the creator to steal it back at any time.

Ok, yeah, that's what I thought. So someone could sell a multimillion-dollar NFT, then someone else could duplicate it manually and "re-sell" it, and if they didn't do proper due diligence...

This is was enables art to happen: https://smart-contracts.host/

I don't think any sha256 collision has ever been found. That seems kind of the smallest problem.

> There are more Ethereum full nodes than two, but how many will accept web queries? That's a service.

https://thegraph.com/en/

You need to know what NFT you have, it's all about the contract.

e.g. the EtherFreakers contract is immutable and contains a git commit hash (line 83: https://etherscan.io/address/0x3a275655586a049fe860be867d10c...), so you can prove you have the code which generates your freaker.

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