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NFTs do not enforce exclusive access in any way or form; they don't even necessarily convey specific rights of ownership.

When you buy an NFT you purchase a receipt for an entry in a Blockchain that is validated by some distributed code. That receipt may reference a URL, or any other arbitrary text, within some limits. Anything beyond that isn't assured, you'll have to check the license that's conveyed.

All NFTs contain a public URL inside them, as the thing the sellable token points at. You can go look at other peoples NFTs all you like, at any time.. they can’t stop you.

NFTs aren’t contracts for the rights, so this is as real an NFT as any other. An NFT is essentially a text file, that only one person can prove they own via the blockchain, where the file has a URL written inside. Nothing more, nothing less.

> NFTs aren’t contracts for the rights, so this is as real an NFT as any other. An NFT is essentially a text file, that only one person can prove they own via the blockchain, where the file has a URL written inside. Nothing more, nothing less.

This is the most succinct explanation I have across. Thank you. Now, this amazes me more that people are willing to invest & trade on text files with some URL in a Blockchain. The naive me now thinks this is bonkers. No wonder so many people are critical of its worth.

How does one view list(s) of NFTs?

> How does one view list(s) of NFTs?

A better question is "why" anyone would want to look at lists of URLs pointing to things that someone is pretending that they own by having an entry of their ownership in some arbitrary public ledger.

I had an idea to make a physical NFT picture frame that would only show things other people own, to contrast with the ones that only show ones you own, but I decided it was too absurd.

There's something subversive about that... a display of things that other people are pretending they have ownership over.

I'm wondering, what entity enforces a uniqueness constraint on the URLs? Presumably it wouldn't be hard to copy the content & host & create a whole new URL, but what prevents you from just minting using the original URL?

There’s no uniqueness enforcement on the URL as far as I know. It’s the provenence of the NFT that makes it valuable.

It's actually an NFT of a screenshot of the first tweet.

Note that for space reasons, NFTs do not generally "contain" their payload. The actual contents of the blockchain is just a URL of the screenshot. The URL points to a centralized server, and the screenshot is publicly accessible.

But yes, the Tweet itself remains under Twitter's purview, i.e. centralized. An NFT can only contain authority or ownership recognized in the context of the blockchain itself.

SO it's totally possible for the server hosting the image URL to be gone after many years?

The server will be gone some day, but it doesn't matter, because the image hosted there is easily copied and freely available many other places. Nothing was ever gained in the first place by having it hosted on the server mentioned by the NFT, and nothing is lost if it's not there anymore. The NFT never contained any value or rights.

yes.

it is also possible to change the contents of what the URL points to without changing what the NFT is.

Almost all NFT's are an index. No one seems to understand that they are not owning a digital item, they are owning a reference address. Nothing about the NFT substantiates the contents of the address. that is OpenSea in a nutshell

However, some NFT's like the bored apes use a multi-variable reference and then those variables act as parameters on an open-source protocol for generating the NFT. In other words, the NFT is not a URL, but a key-value dictionary like {eyes:blue, hair:brown, hat:cap, hatcolor:blue} (i dont know off hand the actual attributes used for bored apes).

This second method is closer to what people think NFT's are in the first place, and is leagues better than the URL to a centralized server but it is still ultimately an index of some kind that relies on being substantiated by something not on the block chain.

In this particular case its actually both, I went through the trouble of actually checking whats going on, the actual NFT points to a link of a JSON payload that contains both a „link“ key (which points to the twitter link of the tweet) and an „image“ key (which points to a jpg hosted on the same server the json payload is hosted).

In this case (as with many NFTs for things like digital paintings or famous old memes) the thing that make the NFT an NFT is the public proclamation by the person of interest (the author, creator, subject, etc.). No one is claiming that only the owner of the NFT can view the tweet or digital image.

I thought the NFT was on the screenshot, rather than the tweet itself. Given Dorsey created that screenshot, it has intrinsic value over an arbitrary person’s screenshot - there’s a supply of exactly 1 of them.

I don’t think exclusivity applies to much art — art is often photographed or video recorded for others to see. It’s easy to find photos of the Mona Lisa, and it’s even feasible to get quite perfect recreations on a canvas. But there’s only one original.

According to my server, I am the owner of that image, not that other guy.

That's all there is to it.

Someone set up a server which allowed people to upload images and "claim property", then they put some high-level fake purchases, and played on a lot of guys' gullygreedity. If the server is gone tomorrow, then the blockchain will "remember" that there was something there, but when you try to see it you will just get a 404.

>> The tweet is publicly available so there is no exclusivity. Anyone can look far enough & find it.

This is true of all NFT's. The data is (should) be on the public blockchain.

Jack Dorsey sold it; it's not like some random made a jpeg and tried to sell it.

> Jack Dorsey sold it

So what? If Jack Dorsey took a dump, preserved in resin and sold it as an abstract representation of his first tweet, how would that be different, more genuine or less genuine than this NFT?

well for one, you could have exclusive access to that specific dump. Ironically there's more scarcity in what you described than an entirely publicly accessible NFT Pointer to a file with unrestricted access on the open internet.

Everything old is new again https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist%27s_Shit

I think he's asking what the "it" is.

Usually when you sell something, there are a bunch of legal rights that go along with the sale. What exactly did this guy buy? The right to look at the tweet? The right to restrict others from looking at it? The copyright? Any advertising dollars which flow because of that tweet? What?

Nope, nope, nope, and nope.

He bought the bragging rights to say "that URL of that image of that tweet, if you look at this particular public ledger, you'll see that the ledger says that I own it!"

It is a compelling proposition.....

If the NFT craze has shown anything, it's that too many people don't have any understanding of the law. They don't seem to know what "own a thing" means - neither the "own" part or the "thing" part...

Jack Dorsey sold a token with a link to a jpeg, the point being, that token with a link to a jpeg (we all know what a token is, we generate tokens all the time) is worthless. There is no jpeg in the token itself, just the link to the gallery that hosts the jpeg.

By the way, the token could contain any sort of short information, the address to a C++ pointer in the memory of my computer for instance.