Hacker News Reader

Comment by acejam | Hacker News Reader

Sure - but you (or a pinning provider) need the actual file first before you can re-pin it. The data has to live somewhere.

View on HN

I just find it strange that someone might decide to buy an NFT and then not keep an offline copy of the file themselves, and that people do this often enough that it's a selling point. It's not like the files are large. If the Sia network breaks down, you'd want to have done that, same as if S3 somehow exploded.

What's even strange is the NFTs don't keep a checksum in the blockchain, so anyone hosting the content could change it whenever they want and the NFT is none the wiser. Moxie even wrote an example that would show different images depending who asked. See https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

If the NFT does actually reference an IPFS CID, that amounts to a hash of the image, so that particular issue isn't there.

It's just kind of nuts to talk about "everyone stopped pinning my NFT" as being a "rugpull"- anyone can pin a piece of content in IPFS, including anyone with an interest in the NFT existing, such as the owner. So the only thing you have to do if an NFT falls off the IPFS network is just to take your copy and pay someone else to pin it. It's only a "rugpull" if you, you know, forgot to keep a copy of it anywhere.

Right, but is it true that most NFTs just post the URL and not a IPFS CID (or any other form of checksum)?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com