Hacker News Reader

Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

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.)

View on HN

> 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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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...

`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"?

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com