Hacker News Reader

Comment by libertine | Hacker News Reader

>NFTs were advertised as a way for creators of digital content to monetize their work, but without some authority that verifies that the seller owns the copyright, the system cannot work...

If only there was a system, or an authority, like an independent body, that would do it's due diligence and verify the provenance of things... oh wait.

View on HN

I'm tired of saying that NFTs are not a tool to verify the original property, which can't be done inside the blockchain, but to prove that the following transactions are legitimate.

Which is basically useless in the face of how trivial the initial conditions are to violate.

> Which is basically useless in the face of how trivial the initial conditions are to violate.

No, because it is possible to actively validate the initial conditions with reasonable effort.

There are in fact two initial conditions:

- Was the NFT created by person X? This is trivial to validate - check the artist's website for their key/wallet/signature, or ask your peers.

- Was an artwork (represented by the NFT) created by person X? This is equally as hard to validate as any claim to authorship, and something humanity has been able to manage for centuries.

> This is equally as hard to validate as any claim to authorship, and something humanity has been able to manage for centuries.

Tens of thousand of pieces of digital artwork being scraped by bots from DeviantArt and monetized as NFTs is a problem fairly unique to our time.

Probably not as big as people make it out to be. First, the vast majority never sees sales. Secondly, we know that a large number of artworks are used w/o permission across the web, on sites like red bubble, or to sell prints or drop ship products on Amazon. No doubt this is on the tens of thousands too.

All of these things could have been done twenty years ago without a blockchain, with digital signatures.

How pointless.

No, you can't - you need state to enable the concept of ownership. We need a way not just to verify that your signature is valid - we need to be able to deny the seller the ability to still claim a valid signature.

Then the issue is in the aforementioned institutions. What's the point in blaming the techonlogy that solves part of the problem?

This. Are we done solving all problems of the world, that we started solving non-problems?

New middle men wanted to take a cut of things so they keep popping up in the Crypto space. It isn't about getting rid of current middle men, it is about becoming the new middle men.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com