Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

The author mentions that currently all NFTs are just URLs, but it is possible to store data directly in the blockchain, even if it would be prohibitively expensive.

An issue with general-purpose immutable storage is that it can be permanently polluted with illegal data. Everything from child pornography, instructions for making drugs or explosives, doxing/attack information, private keys for copy protection systems, etc...

It would be possible to make Ethereum or any similar blockchain illegal to the level of "penalty of death" in many countries by simply adding some horrendously blasphemous text content to it.

Even if bulk image or video data is too expensive to store, an option would be to simply use torrent "magnet:" links.

Bitcoin is just for financial transactions, so I doubt it would be vulnerable to this, but the more generic chains don't seem to have any way to protect themselves from this kind of attack.

Seriously, what would happen if a bunch of paedophiles started minting NFTs of their favourite child pornography and trading it? They would be "protected" by the inertia of the block chain. Governments eventually would have to step in and make it totally illegal, and then.. that's it. The value would instantly go to zero!

Alternatively, NFTs would have to be made revocable or erasable in some way, but that then totally defeats the purpose. That's the author's point -- his dynamically changing NFT was revoked in this manner.

I just don't see a way around this. Either you allow indelible illegal content, or allow forced revocation. Either way, the value of NFTs must go to zero.

> That's the author's point -- his dynamically changing NFT was revoked in this manner.

For me the much scarier weaponization is to change the linked content to be something illegal after you buy the NFT. How would you prove the illegal thing is not the thing you bought? (You will certainly not be treated as innocent until proven guilty if we're talking child pornography in the USA or democracy advocacy in China, etc etc.)

I don't think making them revocable defeats the purpose, it's having the registry of NFTs effectively being "OpenSea API" and not "blockchain" that's the problem. Having the NFT content itself be erasable is probably a good thing as long as there is some way of making a local copy. Sometimes we want the government to have the ability to stop the spread of information; but (subject to the risk of your possessing it) your "ownership" of content with a hashed URL is also going to apply to the download, assuming the hash is reproducible.

Bitcoin is 'vulnerable' to this. The most common use is to put financial transactions on Bitcoin, but you can put whatever binary data you want. Famously the genesis block[1] includes a newspaper headline to prove it was created after a specific day.

It's possible to place illegal content onto the Bitcoin blockchain.

[1] - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block

> It's possible to place illegal content onto the Bitcoin blockchain.

I wonder if Bitcoin already has illegal content in it.

Yes, both Bitcoin and Ethereum have very illegal content. So far, nobody cared about this aspect.

So anyone running a mining node could potentially be prosecuted for distributing illegal content? That definitely seems like it will be a massive issue in the future.

If your only solution is clunky, then sure, maybe NFT's are worthless as a distributed asset, if you can even call most of them that at this point.

But you're solution is bad, that's why no one does it. A much better solution is to use a decentralized file hosting protocol and store your base NFT file on it. These protocols are free to prune illegal data should their government force them to, but are economically motivated not to. With enough redundancy, (and if you're NFT is so valuable you'll keep a local copy) this isn't a problem.

Without sounding negative, it basically says that sometimes its good to have centralisation because you have: - Moderation - Parties with skin in the game for protection - Support - Someone to reach-out to when things go wrong

And the second argument is that country can still censor (to an extent)

I wonder how this works out from a legal perspective. It seems like an NFT is a contract, that never expires, to host content at a URL. Can a buyer sue the seller if the seller shuts down the serving of that image? Otherwise an NFT is just a signed URL string.

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