Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

No, they are paying huge sums for a digital certificate of ownership of the content on some else’s server; the link is just the description of what they are certified to own, like the address on a deed.

(There's all kinds of problems with it, sure, but they aren't paying for the link.)

View on HN

The value of a deed is that it's recognized by a legal system, which is backed by a police force, who you can call if some guy shows up claiming that your house actually belongs to him.

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.

On the other hand that same legal system can decide you are no longer entitled to said property and that same police force can come and drag you out of it. That physically (as far as we know) can't happen on a cryptographic blockchain. They can some how convince you that giving up ownership of your NFT is a good idea, but it still has to be of your own volition.

Why not? If NFT ownership ever became meaningful, the people with the guns can simply keep a list of ownership amendments separate from the blockchain.

It kind of sounds like you're arguing that since the blockchain can just be ignored it's somehow less meaningful. But I'll bite:

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.

> 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).

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.

I don't follow.

"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.

> But the one thing they cannot do is seize your NFT without your volition

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.

And private information will probably one day no longer exist. Imagine some kind of device that can scan the neurons in your brain along with the electrical/chemical state and somehow extract information from that (such as a memorized cryptographic private key). Let's just throw our hands up and give up on cryptography altogether.

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.

His example of his NFT that gets shut down is showing that because of this layer of centralization, anything that can happen to normal assets can happen to blockchain. Governments can force OpenSea to take your NFTs, OpenSea can delete your ownership at their discretion, etc. All he is left with is a meaningless string of data on chain, while the NFT visual is gone. It’s not immune and protected like people think

No, the centralised url selling service decides who owns which monkey url and they have already used that power.

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.

Not true. The legal authority can compel you with force to transfer your nft in exactly the same way they’d drag you out of the house.

There's a difference. You can drag someone out of their house without consent, but forcing a transfer requires consent. Does this difference matter?

Forcing a transfer does not require consent. They’ll seize the hardware that holds your private key.

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?

Hardware wallets usually have a password enabled, in addition to other security mechanisms. Like I said, not sure the difference matters, but there is a difference.

But what's the difference of just authority making your NFT URL invalid and moving the item under a different URL? That would be equivalent of forcing you out of your home, they cannot force you to give them keys, but they can change the lock.

This whole "files stored on Google Drive" is growing pains. NFTs must all be hosted on IPFS.

If they really want they can analyze the memory on your desktop or install a keylogger. There’s so many ways to extract a private key barring a deadman switch and a cyanide tooth capsule.

Again, you’re seriously arguing that it’s harder for the government to take your house rather than give up your password?

Houses also have locks and yet presumably the police can and will bypass that security measure in this scenario. The point is that nothing will protect you in the face of overwhelming force.

Obligatory XKCD reference: https://xkcd.com/538/

That probably would not happen in a first world country.

Depends on who you are — Gitmo comes to mind – but at least in the United States you can substitute being beaten by agents of the government with being imprisoned where the other prisoners and possibly agents of the government will beat you until you give up the password.

> The value of a deed is that it's recognized by a legal system

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.

"the link is just the description of what they are certified to own"

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.

More importantly, they don't own the original item. An unofficial version of a deed registry says they own the link to the item. That's not the same as actually transferring the copyright or anything.

As I understand, most NFTs don't confer any copyrights. So unlike a deed, it's not a certificate of ownership of the content at all. Some other entity still owns the content in the legal sense.

> As I understand, most NFTs don't confer any copyrights.

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.

But they don't even get the ownership of the content. The original creator still owns the copyright, and as a the buyer you don't even get a license to use the work in the NFT. The copyright is the only meaningful way you can own digital art.

ok so you own a certificate that describes the content of a link

I think it's worse than that since, as described in the article, NFTs don't include a hash of what the link points to. So you own a certificate that describes the content of a link in the very literal sense of describing the characters in the link URL and not really anything more.

> ok so you own a certificate that describes the content of a 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.)

They don’t own anything in a meaningful sense except the url, and even that is controlled by someone else.

Do they even own the URL? Is no one else allowed to post the same URL (even disregarding how/by whom this would be enforced)?

Well I imagine opensea at least prevents url collisions on their own service, but yes as the article demonstrates someone could sell the same url on several services while changing what that url points to whenever they like. I think most of the time the url points to the marketplace itself though?

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com