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Comment by root_axis | Hacker News Reader

What's to stop someone from finding a random artist on instagram that produces amazing work and selling it as their own on a website like that?

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If the community cares they'll try and find out people that do that and blacklist them. hicetnunc does that, it's the only one I could speak to.

That's generally referred to as copy-minting.

EDIT: here's the hicetnunc community write up for basic steps to minimize the change you buy a copy-mint: https://github.com/hicetnunc2000/hicetnunc/wiki/Beware-copym...!

This is a lot of words to say "there is by design no way to do that".

DeFi systems are all designed around the unspoken (although sometimes spoken, honestly) assumption that rules are bad and that the system should make enforcing them difficult-to-impossible. A fun exercise is to consider, if all businesses went to using *coin overnight and one accidentally overcharged your wallet, how would you get your coins back?

You do realize that replicas are a problem in the real world art world as well right?

In real world art this is resolved by proving providence, in crypto providence from minting is trivial, but you still need to prove providence that the minting was honest.

None of which in any way responds to what I said. NFTs, by design, have no fraud prevention mechanism and no mechanism for getting your money back if you were scammed. They allow for arbitrarily many tokens to be minted of the same thing, with no obvious mechanism for people to realize that's what's happening.

Smart contracts can and do limit the amount which can be minted. And fraud exists everywhere, regardless of institutional controls - this is where community matters.

Funny how community came up in the article as one of the ways NFT is really just MLM...

Community comes up in every facet of life...what's your point here?

But you can just make a new smart contract that does the same thing, no? Smart contracts themselves can just be copied.

And saying that the "community" will take care of the fraud issue - isn't this a step backwards?

Sure, but it has a different address...there is no possibility of confusion. Something from the 1950s is not going to be confused with something from the 1980s, especially with a blockchain timestamp.

I think you are confusing providence for provenance here

Ah yeah edited, thanks!

EDIT: oh the window has passed.

In the real art world replicas are... well replicas. Regardless of how good they are, they're not exactly the same, a trained eye can tell them apart.

That's not the case when making a copy of the file. You get a perfect one-to-one replica that nobody can tell apart in any way.

On the other hand, it's trivial to show that an NFT is authentic and not a replica. The difficult part, as always with cryptography, is linking a public key to a know identity.

If you have a trusted channel from the artist (e.g. their twitter feed) it's trivial for them to indicate that a given public key/wallet address is theirs and therefore anything minted on there is authentic and anything minted elsewhere is not.

Determining if a real world piece of art is a replica or authentic can be fairly expensive. Determining if an NFT is authentic is much much cheaper.

I can see exactly how much I'm being charged when making a tx and I can ask them for a refund the way I would if they overcharge my card..

And when they decide that you were charged correctly and tell you to pound sand? Or when you can't contact them because they closed your account but are still charging you? Sometimes, businesses aren't nice or reasonable.

I'm now genuinely curious, have you never heard of a credit card chargeback? What about a stop payment order for a check?

>And when they decide that you were charged correctly and tell you to pound sand? Or when you can't contact them because they closed your account but are still charging you?

Same as when they won't refund my card I take the loss.

>I'm now genuinely curious, have you never heard of a credit card chargeback?

Last 2 times I tried it (debit card refund) it didn't work and I got no money back. The majority of cases it's the business that issues my refund.

At any rate there's nothing stopping you from having a refund functionality or escrow built into a dapp if that's what users want.

> and one accidentally overcharged your wallet, how would you get your coins back?

Wallets are not “charged” like credit cards. I fail to see how this is possible.

Like anything in life, the value and integrity of something is maintained by the community who uses it, a platform is just a tool for people to use.

I don't think that's an example of something unenforceable, though. So long as you still have courts and bailiffs, they can basically just force someone to make a transfer by threatening or employing violence.

As far as I can see that is the valuable part of the work. But blockchains doesn't help with it at all.

So since it all works by the honour system anyway, why would you need a blockchain? You could just store everything in a regular database.

If they weren't on the blockchain they would just be jpgs. Nobody would pay 100 k for a jpeg of an ape.

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