> Did you know that a NFT is just a hyperlink to an image thats usually hosted on Google Drive or another web2.0 webhost? People are dropping millions on instructions on how to download images. That's why you can right click save—as because they are standard images. The image is not stored in the blockchain contract. As web2.0 webhosts are known to go offline (404 errors) this handy torrent contains all of the NFT's so that future generations can study this generations tulip mania and collectively go... "WTF? We destroyed our planet for THIS?!"
I saw that cartoon a couple months back so it’s definitely part of my thinking process. I had also reread the SSC Non-Libertarian FAQ last night.
And I was also reading this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29270444 and started thinking about how many of the technologies we ascribe to human inventors had to have been invented millions of years ago by some alien somewhere.
And then I deleted the bit I wrote about corporations being paperclip optimizers, because it wasn’t funny, but unfocused. Kill your darlings; keep comedy to the point. And of course, I let my mind wander — comedy is found in the gaps between expectation and reality.
I’m not a fan of art NFTs and think this is cool, but NFTs aren’t about art, this is one application of NFTs that’s gotten way overhyped. This is like saying that the internet is a thing you buy to access Facebook - accessing Facebook is one thing you can use the internet for, but it wasn’t designed for that and you’d be better off avoiding that site altogether.
NFTs can basically act as identity tokens that prove community membership. They can optionally have art as part of that (like BAYC), but they can also allow access to systems (like the Urbit network).
This opens up a lot of potential interesting things, if you can have ID ownership that's on a public ledger that you can then rely on for access to different systems that'd be pretty interesting.
I think they're pretty cool and while I was initially skeptical of the art stuff, it's interesting to see artists get money from creating things (even via resale royalties) - the best ones are leveraging that to build communities around their NFTs (events, more art, etc.) - like a club.
Ownership and value are weird things anyway - especially around art. Partly tied to scarcity, partly status, social value etc. People can sneer and dismiss NFT art, but a lot of value outside of NFTs is determined by shared perception and artificial scarcity/status anyway.
Concert/event tickets. Titles/deeds, anything where you need to prove ownership of something. Proving you own a JPEG is a bit silly. Proving you paid for seat 4, row 10, section 8 on November 18, 2021 seems useful.
What makes NFTs better at either of those applications than just a database? Ticketmaster is garbage, but I can't say I've ever had any uncertainty about whether I owned a concert ticket. And titles/deeds are perfect examples of why NFTs are worse than the current solution. I don't want my house getting repossessed because I got hacked.
If I had to guess, it's because they're presumably transferable in a way that would be hard to cheat, making digital reselling easier. It would help create a secondary market for tickets, the primary use case would presumably be scalping. For that same reason, I couldn't imagine why any ticket vendor would be inclined to go down this path.
If I buy something, it would be nice to know it's actually mine and I don't have to ask permission to re-sell it. So no, I don't see Ticket Master doing this any time soon. But ya know, maybe Pearl Jam would like to use NFTs to sell seats some day? Who knows.
As far as deeds to important things; you can lose the title to your house in the current system too. It's why you pay for title insurance.
Would I like my home dependent on me never loosing a 128-bit key? Probably not. I'm fine with Ticketmaster and the paper title to my house. But my examples are at least a million times better than the hosted JPEG stuff, which I think was the only bar I had to cross. :D
I’m fairly positive title insurance has nothing to do with losing the title. It’s dealing with the problem: someone sold you a house, but they weren’t actually allowed to do that.
With possibilities ranging from they didn’t actually own the house, to they were mentally competent to make the decision, to the house was incorrectly registered in the gov systems.
You would still need this in a title-in-NFT world, because an NFT is just supplanting the government title office, which is actually the final source of truth on ownership (not the literal paper title).
And like the government office, which is really acting as a convoluted database (which is all the NFT chain is doing as well), you still have all the problems of dealing with fallible humans.
It’s basically a case of the naive rewrite — the current solution is too complex, so we’ll scrap it and start over… without realizing some of the complexity was accidental, but it was largely essential from dealing with all the edge cases.
Amusingly, the existence of title insurance demonstrates exactly the problem with NFTs that I was talking about. If somehow I manage to go through the steps of selling a house I'm not authorized to sell (whether by fraud or otherwise), typically the buyer doesn't get to keep the house, because our court system has people in it who can examine a whole situation and unwind it. Buyers get title insurance to protect against that kind of thing, so they can get their money back.
With NFTs you'd need title insurance in the exact opposite direction. You'd need to insure your title to make sure that a fraudulent and irreversible NFT transaction didn't irrevocably transfer ownership of your house and leave you boned.
And also, the bar I set was "better than a database" not "better than a poorly drawn JPEG".
Well, I shouldn't have brought up the title thing, because of course everyone jumped on housing titles (which I didn't explicitly mention) because it's the easiest argument to rip to shreds. And of course I ran down the hole defending it, because I'm really bad at arguing on the internet and just like playing devil's advocate.
I still genuinely think lower value things like concert tickets are better in a shared database rather than a private one, especially since I trust the owner of the private database (Ticketmaster) exactly as far as I can throw them.
My knowledge of NFTs comes down to "they're virtual baseball cards for art." Could you give me an example of a valuable NFT which is not just an image?
NFTs are not an image at all. They are a signed data packet which links to the image because the image itself is too large to fit.
It's like buying the receipt for an expensive purchase except you don't really get anything and it still costs a lot. As far as I can tell, the entire thing is hyped by people making lots of money off it and bought by people looking for attention.
One potential use is consent management healthcare such as consent to participate in a medical trial.[1] "Supply chains" is probably the classic example.[2]
I think the intent is more improving the process of managing records than making creation easier and reduce the potential for loss of data, which such a system could address.
"Approximately 44% of health care and pharmaceutical organizations experienced a data breach caused by a third party within the last year, according to a report from critical access management firm SecureLink and Ponemon Institute.[7] “Despite this threat, just 41% of healthcare and pharmaceutical organizations have a comprehensive inventory of all third parties with access to their network,” the report said. Sixty percent agreed that managing third-party permissions and remote access to their network can be overwhelming and a drain on resources, and only 44% of these organizations know the level of access and permissions that both internal and external users hold, the report said."[1] Storage as NFTs could potentially be used to store records in a more secure and interoperable manner.[2][3]
The simplest example is in-game items. Imagine if Magic the Gathering Online (MTGO) sold you NFT Magic cards instead of cards in their database. You could then use those cards in other games (not the art as that’s owned by Wizards) and continue to use them long after MTGO shuts down.
There used to be a number of free, online places to play Magic with people but because digital Magic cards weren’t owned outside of Wizard’s database, everyone who played got to use any cards they wanted and so they all sued the best decks with the most expensive cards - it made those places terrible to play in.
If the cards were NFTs, we could have those systems know what cards we own even if MTGO shuts down (which it basically has with how few games it supports).
I don’t want to invest time/money into digital assets that are only valid for as long as a company chooses to run their servers. I’d rather have an open economy and open access to these items which other developers can use in their games that either recreate the experience of the original, or are completely new ideas.
Even using MGTO as an example, there are game variants for Magic the Gathering that the official clients don’t support but independent clients can.
Did you know not all NFTs are just a hyperlink to an image?
Did you know that NFTs can give a % of every sale to the original artist in perpetuity? Without relying on a company that can deplatform you or change the rules at any time. Imagine this use case with other things too, like music. On web2 music artists only get 18% of the revenue. Spotify gets 33%. The music industry takes 49%. Web3 flips the script. Artists get 95%, the rest are fees.
Did you know that NFTs have other use cases than art? e.g. https://ens.domains
Did you know that technologies tend to get more efficient over time? Did you know many NFTs are on Solana which is already energy efficient? Ethereum is slated to be there next summer. <insert delay joke here>
There is nothing that stops artists selling music directly and getting close to 100% profit. You don't need blockchains or "web3". The thing is that labels and spotify actually provide a valuable service that artists mostly choose to use.
People constantly devalue the real work that these "middlemen" are doing, pretending that the artist is doing it all. The label provides marketing, mixing, advice, etc which all boost the final profits of the music. Spotify provides technology, marketing, consumers, billing, distribution, etc which all boost the reach of the music.
But there is nothing stopping you from making music with no label, and putting it on bandcamp to sell directly.
It's a joke. There has been a recent surge in a meme along the lines of "The elites don't want you to know this, but NFTs are free. You can screenshot them" and other variations of "NFT piracy"
I suppose that my point was that this whole thing is silly, NFTs included. While intended to make a statement, NFT Bay provides a free backup service. NFT Bay does the opposite of its intended goal.
The creator of this site seems to have a fairly nuanced take, but there some critics who earnestly seem to think that right-click saving an NFT is owning the crypto-bros, where the latter simply couldn't care less.
There is also something off about about the "it's a url" obsession, as if the storage location of the bytes makes a conceptual difference. As if storing bytes on the blockchain (as some NFTs do) would suddenly make critics go "oh, one of copies of the JPEG is stored on the blockchain, now owning arbitrary ledger entries makes total sense".
To be fair there is a non-small portion of the crypto-bros I've seen on Twitter who can get quite mad at people right-clicking. It's pretty great trolling to watch when it happens.
The general sentiment of crypto-twitter that I do follow seems to have the opinion that right-click-savers actually help drive up value of the NFTs that they do own, since it's essentially free advertisement. I haven't seen many or even anyone at all who's actually upset, but maybe that's just the group I do follow.
The thing you're buying with an NFT is not the thing to which the URL points. Buying an NFT is not a proxy for buying the data at the target of the URL. Buying an NFT is just buying the NFT. It does not confer any rights or ownership over anything other than the NFT.
NFTs are about status and belonging. I doubt many NFT owners ever follow the URL to check that their Ape is still there, it doesn't matter. As long as they can claim to be the sole owner.
As someone who likes NFTs in theory, the "it's just a url" problem is a real stumbling block for me, because it's a point of fragility for the asset.
If the NFT is just a URL, and there's nothing within the NFT itself that provably links it to a specific work of media, and ideally a signature from the original artist, then there's no way to be absolutely certain that the piece of media currently vended by the URL is in fact the same piece of media vended 10 years ago when it was minted. You could have a situation where people mint NFTs as "shell art" that they trade back and forth to create some kind of established history of value, and then stick in some new piece of art at a later date with a false history of value. Or the URL host could go under or get corrupted by bad actors and start vending the wrong data, and still, you'd have no way to prove what the original digital media was.
That's honestly a blocker for me.
Now, if the NFT actually included a hash of the media AND a digital signature of the artist that could be externally verified, then I might be interested.
The thing is, the whole thing depends on people actually giving a shit about verifying any of it.
If you see someone with a monkey profile picture, you aren't going to download some specialized software and finding it in the blockchain, verifying that the twitter user is in control of the wallet holding the token and finding the artists keys to check the signature is valid and then auditing other chains and other tokens to check that the same picture was not sold multiple times which would involve scraping the URLs and doing image comparisons.
All to verify that this twitter user actually did spend this money for a monkey picture.
There are only a very limited number of paintings that people actually care about being genuine. And mostly they have long histories. The vast vast majority of paintings are only worth their effort for someone to create again today. NFTs will almost all be entirely worthless in a years time. Almost anything sold as a collectors item becomes worthless after the first sale.
Just like physical art, the vast majority that ever gets produced is garbage that won't be preserved.
It takes decades and centuries to really weed out the truly valuable gems from the chaff. That's why "investing" in NFTs (or any art for that matter) is a sucker's game or a game for rich people who have the time and resources to promote their favorite patronized artist and keep their work elevated in our collective consciousness.
No, but these people will participate on social sites which run software to do all that for you, so they get to see a little 'Authentic!' badge on their monkey picture, and everyone else sees it too. They will also try desperately to get everyone else to use these sites, so they will have people around to be impressed by their Authentic! monkey picture. I suppose in the worst-of-all-possible-futures, Twitter and Facebook adopt this scheme and verify your monkey pictures for your adoring fans too.
What I can't understand is why anyone with a soul thinks this is a world we should move toward.
And what stops the social site from sell Authentic badges for a fee smaller that the NFT price? Or letting people upload an avatar that is visually indistinguishable from the authenticated one?
Now I like to make fun of cryptobros like anyone else, but...
Isn't it ironic that this one joke site actually helps solve one of the most commonly quoted issues people have with NFTs, i.e. that "you only own an URL which can be taken down at any time", by providing means of wide-scale decentralized P2P storage?
59 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 61.1 ms ] threadAnd I was also reading this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29270444 and started thinking about how many of the technologies we ascribe to human inventors had to have been invented millions of years ago by some alien somewhere.
And then I deleted the bit I wrote about corporations being paperclip optimizers, because it wasn’t funny, but unfocused. Kill your darlings; keep comedy to the point. And of course, I let my mind wander — comedy is found in the gaps between expectation and reality.
NFTs can basically act as identity tokens that prove community membership. They can optionally have art as part of that (like BAYC), but they can also allow access to systems (like the Urbit network).
This opens up a lot of potential interesting things, if you can have ID ownership that's on a public ledger that you can then rely on for access to different systems that'd be pretty interesting.
I think they're pretty cool and while I was initially skeptical of the art stuff, it's interesting to see artists get money from creating things (even via resale royalties) - the best ones are leveraging that to build communities around their NFTs (events, more art, etc.) - like a club.
Ownership and value are weird things anyway - especially around art. Partly tied to scarcity, partly status, social value etc. People can sneer and dismiss NFT art, but a lot of value outside of NFTs is determined by shared perception and artificial scarcity/status anyway.
As far as deeds to important things; you can lose the title to your house in the current system too. It's why you pay for title insurance.
Would I like my home dependent on me never loosing a 128-bit key? Probably not. I'm fine with Ticketmaster and the paper title to my house. But my examples are at least a million times better than the hosted JPEG stuff, which I think was the only bar I had to cross. :D
With possibilities ranging from they didn’t actually own the house, to they were mentally competent to make the decision, to the house was incorrectly registered in the gov systems.
You would still need this in a title-in-NFT world, because an NFT is just supplanting the government title office, which is actually the final source of truth on ownership (not the literal paper title).
And like the government office, which is really acting as a convoluted database (which is all the NFT chain is doing as well), you still have all the problems of dealing with fallible humans.
It’s basically a case of the naive rewrite — the current solution is too complex, so we’ll scrap it and start over… without realizing some of the complexity was accidental, but it was largely essential from dealing with all the edge cases.
With NFTs you'd need title insurance in the exact opposite direction. You'd need to insure your title to make sure that a fraudulent and irreversible NFT transaction didn't irrevocably transfer ownership of your house and leave you boned.
And also, the bar I set was "better than a database" not "better than a poorly drawn JPEG".
I still genuinely think lower value things like concert tickets are better in a shared database rather than a private one, especially since I trust the owner of the private database (Ticketmaster) exactly as far as I can throw them.
It's like buying the receipt for an expensive purchase except you don't really get anything and it still costs a lot. As far as I can tell, the entire thing is hyped by people making lots of money off it and bought by people looking for attention.
[1]https://hedera.com/users/acoer
[2]https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/09/if-data-is-the-new-oi...
"Approximately 44% of health care and pharmaceutical organizations experienced a data breach caused by a third party within the last year, according to a report from critical access management firm SecureLink and Ponemon Institute.[7] “Despite this threat, just 41% of healthcare and pharmaceutical organizations have a comprehensive inventory of all third parties with access to their network,” the report said. Sixty percent agreed that managing third-party permissions and remote access to their network can be overwhelming and a drain on resources, and only 44% of these organizations know the level of access and permissions that both internal and external users hold, the report said."[1] Storage as NFTs could potentially be used to store records in a more secure and interoperable manner.[2][3]
[1]https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/report-on-patient-privacy-...
[2]https://fortune.com/2021/01/19/hospital-uk-blockchain-vaccin...
[3]https://hedera.com/learning/what-is-a-non-fungible-token-nft
https://twitter.com/beijingdou/status/1456311471613349896?re...
There used to be a number of free, online places to play Magic with people but because digital Magic cards weren’t owned outside of Wizard’s database, everyone who played got to use any cards they wanted and so they all sued the best decks with the most expensive cards - it made those places terrible to play in.
If the cards were NFTs, we could have those systems know what cards we own even if MTGO shuts down (which it basically has with how few games it supports).
I don’t want to invest time/money into digital assets that are only valid for as long as a company chooses to run their servers. I’d rather have an open economy and open access to these items which other developers can use in their games that either recreate the experience of the original, or are completely new ideas.
Even using MGTO as an example, there are game variants for Magic the Gathering that the official clients don’t support but independent clients can.
> IF YOU LIKE THESE NFTS, PLEASE BUY IT.
> THE ARTISTS PARTICIPATING IN FRAUD DESERVE SUPPORT! (c)
https://github.com/ghuntley/thenftbay.org
Did you know not all NFTs are just a hyperlink to an image?
Did you know that NFTs can give a % of every sale to the original artist in perpetuity? Without relying on a company that can deplatform you or change the rules at any time. Imagine this use case with other things too, like music. On web2 music artists only get 18% of the revenue. Spotify gets 33%. The music industry takes 49%. Web3 flips the script. Artists get 95%, the rest are fees.
Did you know that NFTs have other use cases than art? e.g. https://ens.domains
Did you know that technologies tend to get more efficient over time? Did you know many NFTs are on Solana which is already energy efficient? Ethereum is slated to be there next summer. <insert delay joke here>
People constantly devalue the real work that these "middlemen" are doing, pretending that the artist is doing it all. The label provides marketing, mixing, advice, etc which all boost the final profits of the music. Spotify provides technology, marketing, consumers, billing, distribution, etc which all boost the reach of the music.
But there is nothing stopping you from making music with no label, and putting it on bandcamp to sell directly.
Is there something more to it that I'm not seeing?
There is also something off about about the "it's a url" obsession, as if the storage location of the bytes makes a conceptual difference. As if storing bytes on the blockchain (as some NFTs do) would suddenly make critics go "oh, one of copies of the JPEG is stored on the blockchain, now owning arbitrary ledger entries makes total sense".
And has produced some lovely art, too!
https://twitter.com/nicodotgay/status/1458891554026930181
It would be silly to say otherwise.
Disappearing URLs is a real problem with NFTs today, regardless of how much of the concept makes sense. https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/25/22349242/nft-metadata-exp...
If NFT is stupid, it's way stupider in its current state.
If the NFT is just a URL, and there's nothing within the NFT itself that provably links it to a specific work of media, and ideally a signature from the original artist, then there's no way to be absolutely certain that the piece of media currently vended by the URL is in fact the same piece of media vended 10 years ago when it was minted. You could have a situation where people mint NFTs as "shell art" that they trade back and forth to create some kind of established history of value, and then stick in some new piece of art at a later date with a false history of value. Or the URL host could go under or get corrupted by bad actors and start vending the wrong data, and still, you'd have no way to prove what the original digital media was.
That's honestly a blocker for me.
Now, if the NFT actually included a hash of the media AND a digital signature of the artist that could be externally verified, then I might be interested.
If you see someone with a monkey profile picture, you aren't going to download some specialized software and finding it in the blockchain, verifying that the twitter user is in control of the wallet holding the token and finding the artists keys to check the signature is valid and then auditing other chains and other tokens to check that the same picture was not sold multiple times which would involve scraping the URLs and doing image comparisons.
All to verify that this twitter user actually did spend this money for a monkey picture.
Most arguments against NFTs could be levied just as effectively against the premium value of original physical art.
Or do you hold the view that art as an asset in general is a scam?
Just like physical art, the vast majority that ever gets produced is garbage that won't be preserved.
It takes decades and centuries to really weed out the truly valuable gems from the chaff. That's why "investing" in NFTs (or any art for that matter) is a sucker's game or a game for rich people who have the time and resources to promote their favorite patronized artist and keep their work elevated in our collective consciousness.
What I can't understand is why anyone with a soul thinks this is a world we should move toward.
Isn't it ironic that this one joke site actually helps solve one of the most commonly quoted issues people have with NFTs, i.e. that "you only own an URL which can be taken down at any time", by providing means of wide-scale decentralized P2P storage?