But then it’s just back to trust based web2, you’re trusting internet archive. That’s his point: this isn’t leading to trust less decentralization in practice. To do that, you’d have to store the NFT data on chain, which is prohibitively expensive
(There's all kinds of problems with it, sure, but they aren't paying for the link.)
More precisely you have a certificate that says you own something (often ambiguous, though this could be precise; ambiguity is a choice in the minting of an NFT rather than a fundamental issue with the technology) relating to the content described by means of a link (the NFT may or may not include additional description of the content via metadata.)
Yes, one of the “all kinds of problems” I mentioned upthread (this one isn't an inherent problem with NFTs, but seems to be a practical one with many current NFTs) is that while NFTs certify ownership of something with regard to the linked content, exactly what that is (beyond the certificate that is the NFT itself) is often not clear, even, AFAICT, to the purchasers.
No a link isn't a description of its content, just like the article demonstrated the content can change to anything, anytime, in many ways. Even if the URL contains the hash of the content like with IPFS URLs it's not a description of the content but one step better because you can check if it's pointing to the content it supposed to be.
With an NFT, you don't get that. It's equivalent to your county clerk's deed registry, including the $100 filing fee, and excluding the legal machinery which gives the deed registry its value.
Then the people with guns now have to expend resources to maintain and enforce those amendments. If they are not somehow just discarding the entire blockchain subsequent to their amendment, they're maintaining an every increasingly complex set of merges. Furthermore their amendment (very probably) isn't a cryptographic blockchain, so it's subject to all the problems that the actual blockchain list are not (forgery for example).
What makes blockchains unique is that they are the first example of these various records (ledgers, titles, etc) that physically cannot be manipulated in certain ways.
Their amendments are theirs. This is like saying that keeping your own accounting is worse for you than putting it on a blockchain, since someone might forge your own accounting books - it just makes no sense.
"They" can do just about anything they want. They can make their amendment. They can declare the blockchain null and void. They can hold a gun to your head and tell you to sell your NFT. They can even pull the trigger, in an attempt to make an example out of you for the next fool that tries to defy their authority. But the one thing they cannot do is seize your NFT without your volition. Not without breaking some of the fundamental mathematical ideas behind encryption.
Is there value in that in present day society? Maybe not. But there is undeniably something special about it.
That’s not true.
I mean, even if the access to the NFT relies solely on material in your head, there are pharmacological approaches, among others, that while not necessary reliable, can cause you to give up information without meaningfully willing it.
Even a pharmacological approach is a side channel attack which no one seems to care to distinguish between attacks on or flaws with the underlying idea. When discussing the merits of blockchain technology we are allowed to take for granted its very obvious underlying assumptions. Namely that there exists private information held by a user of the system.
https://blockzeit.com/opensea-nft-marketplace-stops-hacker-f...
There is another example in the article - his nft was deleted from the marketplace, and nobody buying monkeys cares what is on the blockchain.
If you’re worried about the government forcing you out of your home at gunpoint, what makes you think they can’t seize a private key or force a few keystrokes?
Again, you’re seriously arguing that it’s harder for the government to take your house rather than give up your password?
Sure, I’m not saying an NFT is substantively like a deed, I’m saying the link in an NFT serves a broadly similar purpose to the address in a deed.
An NFT is perhaps more akin to a certificate from one of those star name registry outfits that were popular for a while, but with less specificity as to what you supposedly bought with respect to thing it describes.
So I suppose it is more accurate to say they own that particular citation of the url embedded in the blockchain, for certain values of own.
Nope, you're not missing anything. NFTs are the world's most convoluted and expensive way to store a bookmark.
You are missing something - a huge position in crypto. Like the article points out, your existing investment would benefit from all the hype that a slew of crypto-oriented services and products could give. Irrespective of whether those same services could be implemented "better" using standard centralized tech. And - amusingly - irrespective of whether those services offer products that you would ever in a million years have paid for without the novelty of crypto sprinkled on top - e.g. paying big bucks for receipts for jpgs.
People that earn money on NFT don't have feeling that they miss something.
Correct, because it's clear storing the content in web2 Internet Archive is superior ("you’d have to store the NFT data on chain, which is prohibitively expensive"). They will persist regardless of web3 shenanigans, and hash addressing ensures content integrity. You could even use a torrent to store and serve the content (again, which uses hashes to identify and preserve integrity of content).
Why would one trust a distributed ledger over a centralized archive run by folks whose primary focus is on preservation of the bits they're storing? The economic benefit of running storage nodes of encrypted content is unlikely to ever be sufficient to provide the same economic incentives a corporation or non profit realizes by offering the durability a centralized service provides (due to scale).
EDIT: @Ragnarork It seems like web3 is making some promises it can't keep?
Isn't that the polar opposite of the promise of web3...?
Then when I want to interact with a centralized NFT marketplace, I can upload the preimage to their server. They'd verify the hash and store the image. I'd continue storing it myself though, so if that marketplace goes away, I can follow the same process with another one.
Obviously you'd want to keep a copy yourself, but at least you could then prove to others the file you have really is the one the creator sold, no?
No expert at these crypto things, in either sense, am I missing something?
Its common for image files to be modified, many times even automatically by the hosting service. They might compress it, remove unnecessary metadata, or add metadata for themselves. Any of that would break the hash, so you'd need to make sure any host you use to store the original absolutely never changes the file.
Then what? Well the image exists and you can verify it wasn't changed off-chain since the transaction finalized, so that's good. There's now an image publicly available online BUT a specific block chain says you own it, so that's also cool.
But wait, that hash isn't guaranteed to be unique so really anyone could make another NFT pointing to the same URL and file hash, now they also own it? And anyone could just download the file, so they own it to? And there are no legal protections for NFTs, so what was the benefit of paying to have one block chain transaction say you own it in the first place?
Not really. The hash would prevent someone to pull the rug unnoticed, but it wouldn't prevent rug pulling in the first place.
With a hash, you would be able to prove that what's currently at that url isn't what you bought, but (since hashes are by definition non-reversible) you wouldn't be able to show or see what it was you bought (unless you stored it somewhere else yourself).
Which is usually trivial.
And what does it mean for the transaction on the block chain if both the URL and the hash no longer match? Is it worthless now and unsellable? Or do you sell it with a note that says ignore the URL, ignore the hash, or both?
I did point out other issues and that may have been unnecessary, but a hash doesn't solve the rug pull problem if the art isn't part of the encrypted and (mostly) immutable transaction block.
Which is trivial, just download the file. The place where you bought the NFT would ideally have some facility where they guarantee you can download the correct file, otherwise why buy from them?
> But wait, that hash isn't guaranteed to be unique so really anyone could make another NFT pointing to the same URL and file hash, now they also own it? And anyone could just download the file, so they own it to?
Preimage attacks are quite hard to accomplish from what I understand against modern, secure hashes. If the hash used is later broken and a preimage attack is possible then yeah you're screwed. That's a risk you take.
As for exclusive ownership, I forgot in my initial reply to add another aspect I thought about which was the license. That is, some well-defined licenses should be specified, similar to the Creative Commons stuff, and the NFS should specify one of them. Then you know if you get copyright or not etc.
Enforcement of the license would of course be similar to other digital assets, ie hard to do unless you're big, that's just the nature of digital things.
Now, just to be clear, please don't take this to mean I'm advocating NFTs. I just think the way they're currently used seems to make them completely worthless, while in theory it might be possible to make them not quite worthless.
And then what am I spelling later? A transaction immortalized in a block chain with nothing more than a broken URL and, at best, a hash of the original file?
Edit: I realize I sound a bit dickish in how I'm replying. Don't take it that way, I'm really confused at how NFTs solve anything but really appreciate the conversations here and am glad to hear differing opinions!
Not much as far as I can tell. I mean it would kinda be like a signature on a painting, in that it's a visual indication of who made it. But the proof would be in the digital, cryptographic signature.
> I'm really confused at how NFTs solve anything
I'm in the same boat. I'm just trying to figure out how they might be useful if they implemented them differently.
Anything in them can be copied trivially, so on their own they are per definition not unique hence fairly worthless.
If they're only useful when two parties agree they are worth something during an exchange, how are they different from plain cryptocoins?
I mean this is a bit similar to the GPL, it would be useless if courts declared it can't be enforced.
Though, I'm not sure how this will "scale".
It fundamentally can't - you need X amounts of storage * replication factor to store X amounts of data * replication factor.
It could be cheaper if someone can finally make a P2P network which becomes and stays popular[1] but it’ll always require more than a one-time payment. That could be donor funded (Internet Archive) but I’d be leery of assuming anything long-term unless you’re paying for it.
1. Abuse is the hard problem here: if I host a node, when the police download something illicit my IP is the one they see and I have to prove that it was done without my knowledge. This is why nobody does this except for known sources.
That's what they are trying to solve with their tokenomics model.
The value of token will appreciate over time whereas the price of storage will keep getting cheaper.
It's simpler than s3 in many aspects so I'm not sure you would need a system administrator. Everyone can run a node and things are replicated many times over. The failover model is to look for the next node. There are no API, security, access, etc consideration to be maintained at the node level.
Data itself is public by default.
> Abuse is the hard problem here: if I host a node, when the police download something illicit my IP is the one they see and I have to prove that it was done without my knowledge. This is why nobody does this except for known sources
Yeah, that's important.
That's not a given, however, and it's not just raw storage but also network bandwidth and operator time which all require regular ongoing payments. Expecting newcomers to pay for the early adopters' storage in perpetuity is tricky because you need high demand for an otherwise useless token but there's a limit on the price for most users in the form of all of the competing options, which are currently faster and more reliable.
> It's simpler than s3 in many aspects so I'm not sure you would need a system administrator. Everyone can run a node and things are replicated many times over. The failover model is to look for the next node. There are no API, security, access, etc consideration to be maintained at the node level.
It's not that simple: anyone running much storage will need to spend time replacing failed drives, managing their bandwidth relative to demand, etc. That time needs to be paid for. Massive replication is necessary to deal with the reduced node reliability but that means the network needs to pay for considerably more storage in total than, say, Amazon does and adds significant scaling issues managing all of those extra nodes with more frequent status changes.
This has been tried a number of times before and it always founders due to being slower and less reliable, with considerably more complicated software required to deal with all of those issues which the competitors don't have. It's possible that this will be more successful but I think it's really important to look at how the market pressures have consistently gone in the other direction. Amazon didn't end up with exabytes of storage in S3 because it started there — people migrated their data there because it was faster, cheaper, and easier to have it there — and that is a competitive challenge for a replacement trying to build on nodes which aren't maintained with comparable levels of service.
Sure you can back up an image, but the backup is worth the same as a copy of the NFT: zip. You now own a pointer on the blockchain to nothing and a jpeg on your disk. I’ve got a lot of that going on already with zero expenditure.
Similarly, you can prove to others that the version on your disk the version pointed to by the blockchain by having people check the hash.