The point of NFTs is to demonstrate that you have 30k to blow on something trivial. How many more articles do we need breathlessly trying to explain how they're technically stupid? I swear half of my Twitter feed is people that don't understand why they're popular and feel like if they can just use enough logic and condescension, then everyone will snap awake and the NFT craze will stop.
It's not true that NFTs are only a status symbol. Firstly they are often pitched as an investment - something that will grow in value. Some folks are going to lose their shirts "investing" in NFTs, and I think that alone is reason enough to highlight issues with NFTs.
Secondly there are other use cases already in use, such as Etherium Name Service, using NFTs as a DNS replacement. (although the criticism of this article apply less to how ENS is using NFTs).
Finally, there are even more significant NFTs use cases pitched such as real estate deeds. This is where the article's points become really important.
ENS sounds like it adds a weird requirement that your IP can only change when gas prices are low. If your IP gets issues and some new crypto dad is going, you've gotta wait to get your DNS working again, or pay through the roof to the folks who run ethereum.
Does needing to change you IP correlate closely with ethereum transactions being cheap that day or something?
"What is stored on the blockchain is most often a link to a web page[6] that itself points to the associated object. Here again, we have lost all idea of decentralization"
No where in the article did the author mention IPFS (https://ipfs.io/). The trend with NFTs is that the digital assets are stored on IPFS, typically through a pinning service like Pinata (https://www.pinata.cloud/). With the asset being content addressable and not location based, and the address being a permanent part of the blockchain, how can the above statement be true?
It is very rare I wouldn't call it a "trend" yet. Also, I agree that using IPFS links addresses the problem of content integrity, but the link can still rot, and having to pay a centralized service to pin your data (even in a decentralized network like IPFS) does not solve the decentralization and disintermediation problems.
Why these platforms don't use hash of a file inside blockchain as bare minimum. Shouldn't be too expensive to store that data? Hash would represent the "original" no matter where is it hosted on the future.
The way I understand it (and I might be totally wrong here) is that ipfs links do contain the hash of the file stored, so by putting an ifps link as the token URI you are both providing the content hash as well as a way to actually locate the content.
The surviving NFT projects that will require no active maintenance in the next 10 years will be the ones who fully dedicated to on-chain only (cryptopunks, chainrunners, etc).
Unless there is an active community that maintains its strength during market cycles (like BAYC), current NFT project death will be 95% over the next 10 years, just like a start-up.
There are also plenty of NFTs with the images embedded directly onchain. Whether base64 binary with an image mimetype or encoded as an SVG.
NFT users and buyers will begin to care as domain names for dead projects expire over the next year.
To me, it is really strange how people see flaws in an implementation and don't even look for the other people that are working on improving those flaws. The market is saying "hey, you perceive flaws, go make hundreds of millions offering improved products, you don't even need outside capital to do so!" but I guess it's always been this way, have fun writing blog posts.
I'm not sure the question? An NFT with no reliance on third party infrastructure, as described above, would have no ability for denial of service. More analogous to a non-digital art piece, where only third party individuals or companies that are digitally presenting an existing piece could be coerced by the arm of the state to stop displaying it via a DMCA request, but the existing piece still exists for anyone physically present to see. The NFT would just transcend geography in this case.
So a marketplace like OpenSea or a digital gallery could potentially receive a DMCA request. Galleries with unknown owners are likely going to become more prevalent.
It's up to the communities and potential purchasers to be discerning about what they interact with or buy, not really a standard to place on the technology thats a higher standard than other media. NFTs aren't here to solve plagiarism and unauthorized distribution. For a previous NFT work being re-released by someone else, consumers should check with the official community first before trying to acquire that contract. For an NFT work that wasn't previously issued (like a famous artist putting their stuff onchain suddenly now), they should do greater due diligence.
so basically we should throw away millennia of history and trial and error to reboot our societies using a technology that doesn't even work without an internet connection and a very fast computing device?
the DMCA is 24 years old and its current use relies on an internet connection more heavily than onchain NFTs do. what stimuli were you replying to exactly, its not clear to me.
the DMCA relies on something called a law and the power of the State to enforce such law, using the force if necessary.
your suggestion is to give up centuries of refinements on law making/enforcement and rely on personally checking every single trnsaction, because if you don't and are scammed, you're screwed and there's nothing you can do to get your money back.
This thread isn't about NFTs being an improvement over all copyrighted work, this thread is about NFTs being an improvement over other NFTs.
On the consumer side I wasn't suggesting anything, I said what they have to do in response to an already existing market with already existing transactions. This isn't about some future reality we imagine on an internet forum, this is about one you are simply not in.
If you think checking is too hard, then make a service that makes it easier to check and charge people for it, how often do you rule out business models that you personally identify, because thats what the market is saying to do.
It's a spreadsheet that is a list of tokens created by artists, and the corresponding owner in the column to the right. That spreadsheet will survive the bankruptcy of any particular company, which gives the tokens a sense of permanence, and Benjaminian aura if you will, that you don't get from a ledger run by Google.
That is what is is, that is what people find it useful for. It is not supposed to do any other things.
> It's a spreadsheet that is a list of tokens created by artists
or by people that found something slightly interesting and put it on the blockchain for money.
here's no assurance that some artist made it, there's no assurance the author is the one selling it, there's basically no assurance, apart that they are trying to trick people into thinking that it's an investment.
It's, in other words, a scam.
> That spreadsheet will survive the bankruptcy of any particular company
It won't.
Monuments in Rome have survived thousands of years and hundreds of wars.
98% of NFTs will last at max few months
> that you don't get from a ledger run by Google
at least I can sue Google if they publish on their ledger the hash of something I made and someone else sold without my permission...
> That is what is is, that is what people find it useful for
Please, don't try to sell me your snake oil.
That's the opposite of why people want them.
People absolutely don't care about the item, proof is that the majority of items sold as NFTs would never ever have a market outside of the speculative bubble (and in fact they never had one before).
Correct. I do not see how it follows that a NFT minted by the artist who made it is a scam.
> 98% of NFTs will last at max few months
You make this mistake because you think the url matters. It does not. It is the collectors job to ensure the art survives. Agreement on what the token represents, either ad-hoc or through a hash is enough.
> at least I can sue Google if they publish on their ledger the hash of something I made and someone else sold without my permission...
True.
> People absolutely don't care about the item, proof is that the majority of items sold as NFTs would never ever have a market outside of the speculative bubble (and in fact they never had one before).
There is a speculative bubble, but art will remain hard to sell the less it is a short-term speculative investment, but the creation of this previously non-existent market is indeed the contribution here. Without the market, the spreadsheet is not interesting.
People are misunderstanding decentralization. Sure we can talk about decentralized technology like IFPS, but we should also talk about moving away from centralized governments, banks and legal systems. Decentralization in this context means we can form our own social group, say a commune in the desert or a virtual group online that skirts the old school central organizations and sets up our own. We could conduct our buniness on the blockchain and implement our own enforcement methods. An extreme example of this might be a drug cartel conducting it's transactions on a blockchain and if you don't honor what's on the chain then you get killed.
You are kind of proving the point against which you are arguing here.
> If you don't honor what's on chain then you get killed.
This is exactly the kind of necessary third-party that I'm talking about in my blogpost. You ar not building a decentralized system. You just reinvented a worse centralized system and poorly used supposedly decentralized technology to achieve that.
I agree that the current NFT ecosystem is a house of cards, e.g., the susceptibility of NFTs to link rot. That being said, I think the ecosystem will evolve to a having a more robust way of handling these things as it matures.
For example, rather than only storing a URL that points to the content, perhaps the token could also include a cryptographic hash of the original content? In the case of link rot, the owner could still provide evidence of ownership on the original content by proving that it hashes to the stored value.
There are probably better solutions as well (others have mentioned IPFS).
Suppose you own an NFT of your favourite monkey JPEG. At some point however, browsers drop support for the JPEG image format because it is outdated and has long since been replaced by better formats. Of course you could easily convert the ape JPEG into an ape PNG, except the hash would still only be valid for the JPEG. Suddenly, it starts getting unclear what kind of "ownership" the token really represents: Ownership of the bytes of the JPEG file? The pixels on the screen? The "concept" of an ape with that particular outfit (whatever that should mean)? or just an URL?
Maybe you could solve this partially by defining some sort of "transform" operation which is documented on-chain? Something like "If I own token X then I can call external service Y to transform the token - after which, X will be destroyed and I'll own a new, different token Z instead" (i.e. one with the hash of the PNG instead of the JPEG)
That still wouldn't solve OP's problem though as that transformation would have to happen off-chain.
There are upgradeable contracts (All NFTs are the self-executing code called smart contracts) and the admin key to cause an upgrade can be community governed, even more nuanced approaches such as some variables available to be governed.
So upgrading the image data and format could be possible. They typically use a getImage() method, as part of the NFT standards, a setImage() method could be added with the method being set to OnlyOwner, which is just a member level designation seen in other programming languages like JVMs.
In EVMs, OnlyOwner can be a collective or its own smart contract controlled by a collective.
Depending on the format and size of the image or transformation operation, the transformation could occur onchain. Nodes in a blockchain are just compute instances. I don't see how it matters if such thing occurred onchain or offchain though, as long as the output was written to the setImage method and that fixes the NFT.
This is the kind of stuff developers do everyday in other stacks, I get a feeling many developers (who are a big audience on this forum) just haven't looked at the crypto space on the development side because these conversations make little sense.
As I mentioned in other threads, it is up to the consumer to be discerning, no different than anything else a consumer has to do. If they want to be part of a community to upgrade the artwork in their possession, then find those kinds of NFTs. If they don't want any ability for their art work to be upgraded, then find those kinds of NFTs.
Some people buy things based on hype.
Some people buy things based on their ability to resell it.
Some people won't be able to.
Thats how market work. Whose problem is that? Its not mine, its probably not yours, so who cares just because NFTs are involved.
> no different than anything else a consumer has to do
false.
if I buy a coffee machine and inside the box there's a brick there are a number of ways I can use to have my money back.
what you suggest is like buying the coffee machine from an unknown person who's also wearing a mask, altering their voice and doing their business in a shady parking lot picking up the box from the back of a van with no plate.
whose problem is that? its not the seller's problem. be a seller then. if you don't want to sell plagiarized goods then don't sell plagiarized goods. there's plenty of buyers.
I don't really understand this buyer centric side of things on behalf of ...all buyers... ? are you debating a big purchase?
if you can't tell what's good and what's plagiarized, the only safe assumption is that everything's plagiarized and stay away from it, both as seller and buyer.
black markets are illegal for a good number of reasons.
can you elaborate? If you have things to sell and you have the copyright or license to sell these things, how would that be scamming people or moving the goal post of this conversation? who cares if the consumer can't tell the difference, if you personally don't want to scam people with plagiarized work (or scam in the sense of simply making money in that fraudulent way) then you still wouldn't have done that.
do you have a different foundational belief than even that? are you of the belief that anything in the NFT format (a set of software methods with a getImage() method) is a scam?
> If you have things to sell and you have the copyright or license to sell these things
then you don't need to sell NFTs, you need a government that issues those licenses and protects your copyright by maintaining a (very expensive) judicial system and a PayPal account
> are you of the belief that anything in the NFT format (a set of software methods with a getImage() method) is a scam?
since there is no way yo verify in the chain the validity of the proposal, you have to assume that it is not valid.
it's simply logic
if someone says to you "see? I'm the author because I have this document that certifies I made it" then you can simply give the guy your money and buy the item
he will give to you a signed piece of paper that says 'this is copy #N of the series XXX made by AUTHOR'S NAME' in exchange
done
what does the NFT add to the process, except the (scammy) prospect of being a remunerative investment?
would you buy the same item if there was no 'get rich quick' label attached to it?
> would you buy the same item if there was no 'get rich quick' label attached to it?
I participate in with NFTs no different than I participate with badges on gamified applications, so yes I would continue to interact with them. I would not rule out buying one either, no different than I wouldn't rule out buying a ticket, or rule out buying an in-game trinket for access. If an artist was releasing a work digitally that I liked, I would consider purchasing the NFT version as well. so of those categories the answer is yes.
I also don't mind selling, or reselling, in that form.
For things I wanted the option to resell, I don't mind if the market dries up. I'm fine waiting, or never getting a bid. Far easier to notice when a bid is available than with some consumer electronics or art pieces I have.
It is not possible for me to put a different higher standard on NFTs, as the similarities are too great to other consumptive goods. Anything NFT specific is either the same experience as something else, or better. Including with the authenticity aspect, I gain consensus over any specific NFT very quickly by checking with the artist or their community and double check the published contract addresses with the one I'm considering to interact with. And there are indeed times when I don't care. Its like if someone made a record of all the volume of prada knockoffs sold on the side of the street, all you see is the number of times people - the buyers - don't care. The NFT is just showing that record of consumer sentiment that has existed for a very long time.
> I participate in with NFTs no different than I participate with badges on gamified applications
badges on apps are released by the app itself, they have value because a central authority emits them.
> If an artist was releasing a work digitally that I liked, I would consider purchasing the NFT version as well. so of those categories the answer is yes.
give the money yo the artisti directly, so they don't have to pay a fee to the (useless) platform minting the (useless) NFT
pay them to send you an email if you need proof of ownership
I would prefer the NFT version in both circumstances. They inherit current possession and I like the standardized interface. In app badges are not valuable and have no standardized interface whether for vanity or transferring to another account, an NFT may be valuable but I care more about the standardized interface. Most of your discussion has been an assumption of purchasing, not all NFTs need to be purchased or require me to bear the gas fee to obtain current possession. A centralized issuer on their platform is not a feature, to me. Given the choice I would take centralized issuer on the NFT version as I would be relying less on their platform, and even less if they can be inspired to use onchain imagery. There is a thread every day here about a user or their content being deplatformed on some web 2.0 service, now the option for the user is there.
Every circumstance involving an NFT is case by case, one very specific case that I don't actually know bothers you much more than other cases and you are applying it to the entire concept of NFTs. To me, an artist emailing me a proof of ownership is the exact same as an artist messaging me a NFT contract address, to you, the latter suddenly does not satisfy your proof that were you messaging the correct artist, which is an absurdity just because the medium received was an NFT? I personally don't care about the difference. This is going to be a fun conversation to look back at.
> In app badges are not valuable and have no standardized interface whether for vanity or transferring to another account
not valuable in monetary sense, but valuable as "recognized as having a meaning"
they can be assumed to be valid exactly because they are emitted with a non standard interface by some centralized entity who's the solely authoritative source allowed to do that.
on the other hand NFT standard interface is meaningless, because the source cannot be verified.
What value have an NFT emitted by opensee identical to one emitted by opensea?
None.
They both signed through a very complex and superfluous mechanism the same bytes, but that means absolutely nothing.
Everybody can do that and when everybody can emit something, its value as unique item is NULL.
Standard interfaces around say app badges could easily be solved by a wrapper api, assuming someone would want to do that. I assume nobody would want to, because the value is not in the interface, it's in the assurance that the "1 million karma points" can be assumed to be factually true, not just an arbitrary hash in an arbitrary list of meaningless transactions.
> one very specific case that I don't actually know bothers you much more than other cases and you are applying it to the entire concept of NFTs
NFTs solve no problem, but they create a lot of them.
The only problem they solve is money laundering (crypto killer App!)
You might not know it, but if you take a picture of Paris and publish it in a book, yo should pay the city of Paris.
You might not know that it's illegal to take pictures of the tour Eiffel at night (I swear it is).
If I publish those items as NFTs I can potentially make a lot of money and nobody can stop me.
What do you think the incentive of such a black market would be?
Find a cure for cancer or scam people?
they are only another way for scammers and market abusers to transfer money from consumer pockets into their own, with the false promise that they will keep growing in value, while the infrastructure they rely on could easily die tomorrow and reach zero value overnight.
With the current rise of energy prices and winds of war in Russia, crypto mining is exactly the first thing that's going to disappear, it's natural selection baby.
any economist will say those are valuable things. a market is a market. I am the market, you are the market, I say it is recognized as having meaning to me, as well as recognizing the monetary sense, and that's all that's necessary. It fits my risk profile to take the risk of ongoing possession using a blockchain medium, and it fits my risk profile on a case by case basis to spend money on one whether there is an assurance of a future buyer or not.
Every "issue" you have with an artist or issuer making money simply says it is a functioning market. Which is the only standard of markets possible. I don't push potential external behaviors of the participants onto the concept of whether there are transactions happen ("curing cancer or scamming people" as if mutually exclusive), it is completely boolean to me:
if(isTransaction() == true) isMarket(true);
the consumers should check if it fits their risk profile.
Correct. But this specifically solves the problem at hand. Rather than storing an entire image, video, etc. on the blockchain, you store a concise representation of that content. The collision-resistance property of a cryptographic hash ensures that the probability of finding two differing NFTs which hash to the same value is negligible. You would include the link in the token as well, but if the link ever rots, you have some way of proving what the original link pointed to.
> you store a concise representation of that content
which is meaningless.
because cosmic rays could flip a bit during the transfer and the content would be different, hence not yours anymore.
it's this the kind of ownership you want for the future?
I surely don't.
imagine if your car was considered another car after a scratch makes it non-identical to the one you bought and you had go through the process of establishing that it's your again and again.
> The collision-resistance property of a cryptographic hash ensures that the probability of finding two differing NFTs which hash to the same value is negligible.
that's a bug in this situation.
collision resistance is good fro cryptographic hashing of content that MUST STAY identical.
ownership means I can do whatever I want to my property and still be the owner.
If I buy a painting I can spray paint the world "OK" over it and it would still be my painting.
If I am a popular author maybe now it's worth more money than before.
NFT would make something like "Fountain" of Duchamp impossible.
> you have some way of proving what the original link pointed to.
You are moving the goalposts. I described a mechanism that addresses link rot in the current NFT ecosystem. The hash-based method allows an owner to efficiently prove what content was associated with a rotted link with overwhelming probability. Using this basic building block, one could construct a process that allows an NFT owner to update the link stored on the blockchain.
If you are concerned with changing an NFT's content or debating philosophically about whether that should be allowed, I don't have an opinion. I don't own NFTs, nor am I convinced they will stick around. My point is that the NFT ecosystem will likely evolve to create technical solutions solving many of the problems mentioned in the article.
> You are moving the goalposts. I described a mechanism that addresses link rot in the current NFT ecosystem
it doesn't.
IPFS is already content addressable, knowing the hash doesn't solve the fact that the link is dead.
It's like having the address of a building destroyed by an hurricane.
> The hash-based method allows an owner to efficiently prove what content was associated with a rotted link with overwhelming probability
It only proves that a stream of bytes resolve to some hash using some hashing algorithm.
Whoever has on their devices the same stream of bytes can republish the same item on the chain creating a new link that is alive and sell it.
The old one is dead and the money spent to buy the content the link pointed at have been lost forever.
It's like the "All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt" trope
I spent money to buy a digital assets and "all I got was this lousy hash string"
> will likely evolve to create technical solutions solving many of the problems mentioned in the article.
or not.
as proved by the many problems in the cryptocurrencies space that people predicted would "likely evolve to create technical solutions" but didn't after more than 10 years and billions of dollars poured to the problem.
so why invest in something that fails to accomplish anything and will fail to do so at least for another 20-30 years?
I agree with everything in this article. I do think is a solution though. It's a framing problem and a control problem, but I think there a way to solve a lot of these criticisms.
The global warming argument is pretty tired. I don't see the same commentators applying their concern for global warming over wasteful pointless """""AI"""" or virtually any other kind of computer work. This essay also reeks of producing a surface level argument without diving in further to actual use cases. Many criticized the early internet for its original uses without seeing the bigger picture. You can sit back on twitter and laugh at people who by all means seem to be having a lot of fun and call them stupid for investing in NFTs but part of the price they are paying is inclusion. Similar to people that blow large amounts of money no beanie babies, magic cards, hello kitty goods and whatever else.
