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Comment by hanklazard | Hacker News Reader

> 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 be the case for long. Already people have pointed NFTs to IPFS/Filecoin which will give them much more staying power. And this can be done without using a centralized platform like opensea, check out nft.storage and metaplex (1) as starting points.

1. https://github.com/metaplex-foundation/metaplex

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Agreed, and I hope it will become more popular. But right now, since you can't browse IFPS with firefox or chrome, and manual minting is harder than clicking a button on open sea, I wager private platforms will keep their appeal.

Maybe when decentralized service will do all the decentralized hard work for you, take your metamask, upload your content on IFPS, mint it, then let you sell it, it will take on.

I think the key here is that we've already as a society given up a lot of our ownership for the sake of convenience. Most people buy their phones through a mobile carrier, locking them in through the life of their contract. I'm not totally sure about how Google accounts work, but I'd wager that getting your Google drive data back if you're banned is difficult. Kids these days are even purchasing skins for video games with the full knowledge that if they get banned, all of those skins will be gone.

A lot of what we own these days is not "owned" in the traditional sense. Opensea is no different from purchasing a video game that you could be banned from in that both purchase prices aren't ownership, but rather a price to access a product.

Actually this is quickly becoming the standard. Once you mint an NFT on opensea, you have the option to "freeze" the metadata, which transfers the image and everything else to IPFS storage.

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?

Correct, it still only exists as long as someone on the IPFS network wants to keep it up. Similar to bittorrent in that way. Still, in the long-term, it seems that having the actual image/video/audio/other data replicated on a decentralized network rather than hosted on a single domain makes more sense to me (but then again, I'm very bullish on the future of IPFS/Filecoin).

It'll be interesting to see because if someone is the only one to pin/replicate the IPFS object an NFT points to it seems like they have some leverage over NFT owners. Is there any way to validate the file without the ipfs object? That's one weakness I've seen pointed out in the NFT idea (beyond the obvious objections about the energy use for what looks a lot like tulips and speculation).

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