> That profile pic? Anyone can use that, whether or not they own the NFT or not. Currently yes, but that's a fixable problem. For instance Twitter could start preventing users from having profile pics that look similar to NFTs that were minted earlier.
Except copyright and trademark laws exist. The Washington Redskins lost their trademark. You can create as many NFTs of their logo as you want. But you cannot stop me from putting that logo on my website.
Showing NFTs on your website will not increase your status, because nobody will know if you paid for them or not.
Showing NFTs on your profile on a website that only accepts verified NFTs (see my previous message for what I mean by that) will increase your status.
NFT always felt ridiculous to me, but I though I understood the mechanism: "it's like baseball cards but in the blockchain". This week I learned it's not. NFT are Non Fungible Tokens, which means tokens that can't be divided, unlike crypto currencies like Bitcoin that can be divided in Satoshis. So you exchange the totality of it, or not. Basically it's a unique number in the blockchain you change ownership by applyi…
Non-fungible doesn't mean something can't be divided, it means a specific one just can't be substituted for another one. An example: If I trade oil, one barrel of oil with a certain spec[1] is fungible with another barrel of oil with the same spec. If I sell you some oil you don't care which specific barrel you get as long as it's the same kind of thing. Likewise if you borrow 10 dollars from me you can pay me back w…
So you can split NFT tokens and e.g. resell them separately?
NFTs as they're being used is silly, but to me the fact the article makes a brief mention about "digital ownership" makes me realize why I agree with Proudhon on the absurdity of property rights. Basically, everyone needs some kind of means of subsistence. In Proudhon's day most people lived by subsistence farming, so land was an essential element to that. And thus, the contention was what happens when all the land is owned? Do those born afterward become diminished by the need to purchase or rent land? Or is ownership contingent on the possession of it as in its direct use. Meaning that someone who inherits some title to land has no valid claim if they can only use/consume it? Today, people still need land to subsist but not in the same way that people did in the 19th century. As such, the whole idea of title ownership whether it's an Ethereum smart contract or an old fashioned title from the government it needs state enforcement as without this element it's worthless. Thus, the real problem with NFTs and just title/absentee ownership is the fact that it attempts to deprive people of subsistence rights whether in the physical world with using state violence to prevent people from finding shelter, food, medical care, and so forth. Or whether it's non-physical such as trying to make it illegal to distribute content ranging from images of art to information regarding circuit designs and chemical formulas for essential medicines. So to me, NFTs as certificates of "authentic ownership" seem like another example of the absurdity of title ownership. Your piece of paper or JSON file does not entitle you or others to absentee ownership. Use and possession are the only true means of ownership and absent that you must lean on the state to enforce it and the only means to enforce is through violence of various means (physical, structural, financial, etc).
NFT always felt ridiculous to me, but I though I understood the mechanism: "it's like baseball cards but in the blockchain". This week I learned it's not. NFT are Non Fungible Tokens, which means tokens that can't be divided, unlike crypto currencies like Bitcoin that can be divided in Satoshis. So you exchange the totality of it, or not. Basically it's a unique number in the blockchain you change ownership by applyi…
> I mean, opensea.io does allow you to mint (the term for magically turning a media into an official NFT backed by the blockchain) up to 100MB of content. So where is it? Not in the blockchain, obviously, it's already fat enough with tiny transaction data. Well, it's just stored in the centralized platforms like opensea, rarible, etc. You’re right that this is the way many have been created so far, but that will not…
Don’t those still rely on the gateway for wherever you mint it on IPFS staying up? The NFT link only points to a gateway which can go down then you’re at the mercy of it being replicated across nodes right?
I agree, you can store it on IPFS. But most people don't, they don't even know it's possible. I mean, most people could host their own video, but they upload on youtube, and just youtube. Well, this is the same, only even more niche, so the easy "upload" on open sea is very, very attractive. I'd wager if one the most popular NFT trading plateform disapear, 99% of all NFT would go poof.
The majority of all NFTs are stored in IPFS; source: I run a platform indexing NFT media files. Also, the art is the token. Data storage is a orthogonal problem entirely.
> the art is the token
The art is people believing they own more than that.
They have value because people agree they have value. Trusted third parties (like courts) help people come to that agreement, by providing transparent, objective processes to settle legitimacy and ownership disputes (in the happy case, in the not-happy case they use physical force to reach agreement). Personally I don't understand the controversy, blockchains are a different kind of trusted third party that also help…
The problem with using NFTs to verify ownership is that they actually make it much harder to resolve any disputes. An NFT can't be transferred or modified without explicit permission from the owner of the NFT, which means that any dispute is impossible to resolve without bypassing the NFTs entirely. For example, let's say you have an NFT that represents something tangible (and not just some link to an image download)…
I think you're misunderstanding my stance here, I'm not arguing that NFTs are always better than other trusted third parties. I don't know enough about their details to make a claim like that.
In the terms of what you're saying, I'm arguing that the space of scenarios in which people can't come to an agreement is different for NFTs vs. legal systems, because NFTs provide some self-service mechanisms for proving ownership and legitimacy. I'm sure those come with tradeoffs, as you've mentioned. I'm not in a position to weigh those tradeoffs yet, nor claim that one is always better than the other. I think it's too early for that.
More concretely, courts, NFTs, et al are tools for reaching agreements. There's no reason to dogmatically cling to "on-chain" if it's not helping reach an agreement, and there's no inherent reason things can't be mixed between on-chain and off-chain, just as agreements can be made in court vs. out-of-court.
NFT always felt ridiculous to me, but I though I understood the mechanism: "it's like baseball cards but in the blockchain". This week I learned it's not. NFT are Non Fungible Tokens, which means tokens that can't be divided, unlike crypto currencies like Bitcoin that can be divided in Satoshis. So you exchange the totality of it, or not. Basically it's a unique number in the blockchain you change ownership by applyi…
My favorite description, heard just this week: “Here’s a receipt for the Mona Lisa that says that you own this receipt of the Mona Lisa”.
"This is a picture of four dogs playing poker, with the words 'Mona Lisa' written on the back in crayon."
The difference between most[1] NFTs and Netflix/Steam/Apps is with the latter, you are buying access to something. With most of these NFTs that are just a picture, owning the NFT doesn't confer any special right to you. We can all enjoy the Disaster Girl meme, you don't have to have bought the NFT. The owner of the first ever tweet cannot actually do anything with it, edit it, destroy it, put it in a private collecti…
Yes, that's definitely the case for a lot of NFTs being minted and sold. And if an NFT did represent the right to download and play a particular game from Steam (like, you had to present proof of ownership of an NFT to Steam to be allowed to play the game), such that I could sell that NFT outside of Steam to someone else... well, the value of that NFT is only as good as Steam's willingness to abide by the agreement i…
It really shows the dishonesty in crypto "innovation:" they claim "security" and "trustlessness," but it all reduces to simple human/institutional/contractual trust relationships as soon as you need to deal with anything with real-world practical value, whether that be access to games on Steam or tracking a package or whatever.
With all this fancy software and energy spent on mining, what then is the point of all that effort?
But that’s exactly what the scarcity value of a Vermeer is (which is 99% of the value). People can make infinite numbers of copies. NFTs just kind of lay that bare. It’s almost like the concept itself a performance art. “Can we cleave off the scarcity from the art/history/je ne sais quoi that fuels the hoarding of other scarce artifacts, and just sell that disembodied scarcity in a marketplace?”
You seem to have missed the fundamental truth that NFTs are not scarce. With the example of a Vermeer, you create one original thing, and then imitations of that thing. Minting multiple NFTs of the same thing is creating more originals, but of the same thing. One is not somehow "more original" than the others. This is a difficult concept for people to get their heads around because of the obvious but incorrect parall…
My understanding is the NFT is essentially a signed object like a URL. So I think the analogy would be Vermeer signing photos of his painting. A nice thing to own sure but as the number of copies increases the market value tends towards 0.