Hacker News Reader

Comment by croon | Hacker News Reader

And what will be at the IPFS URI? A copy of keyboardcat.gif?

At some junction in this chain (as far as I know as an NFT skeptic, to put it mildly), you (want to) pay for ownership of something non-fungible, be it meatspace or digital. So sure, that thing at the IPFS URI might never change, but I can still copy it, or it might not have originated there, or it's some representation of a real world item, where the representation of course can be reproduced.

You've added another layer of immutability, but I have yet to see where that's relevant to anyone who understands what they would be buying, as there are always more layers.

View on HN

I was waiting for someone to bring up IPFS. Unfortunately it only serves to obscure the absurdity of NFTs. It makes what the NFT points to immutable, nothing else and it still doesn't guarantee that it's actually available.

I really wish IPFS would stop flirting with NFTs. I rather like the technology and it doesn't really have anything to do with NFTs but I'm afraid there will be a stigma attached to it when this thing finally explodes.

One thing I haven't seen anyone mention is that even the thing referenced by the ipfs url must by bit for bit identical. There's no notion of semantic ownership where you can own an image of the Mona Lisa and we can all agree that slightly different versions are still pictures of the Mona Lisa. I can flip one bit and sell that as another NFT. I can even make those changes in the image meta-data so the actual image is bit for bit identical. Also IPFS does not provide unique id's. An image can have multiple IPFS id's. The uniqueness constraint goes the other way, and IPFS id references one and only one unique resource.

Yea, I agree.

The dark thing about NFTs IMO is that they only seem like they would work in a "world" where everything was locked down and rights-protected to the detriment of the user experience. In other words, all those "layers" where digital ownership could get fuzzy were removed by operating on some aggressive platform or protocol, like a Fortnite style Metaverse without copy + paste, local file storage, or self-hosting.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html - Stallman was right.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com