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Comment by xodjmk | Hacker News Reader

The NFTs are not broken at all. People just paid for the URL and meta-data stored on the blockchain. I don't think anything has changed on the blockchain. The real issue is that people didn't understand what they were actually paying for in the first place. The images were never physically, digitally or legally bound to the NFT in any way. This is how it was designed to work.

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the functionality advertised by the NFT is broken. the files referenced on the blockchain are gone and so someone wanting interact with the NFT (e.g. to show the image) will fail to do so.

No. If you read the documentation and understand how the technology works it is very obvious that it is too expensive to store the actual images on the blockchain, and in fact only the URL or some meta data in a small number of bytes is bound to the NFT. The 'functionality advertised by the NFT' does not include the image data. If someone lies to you and convinces you to buy an NFT with the assumption that the NFT and the image is one and the same then this only means someone lied and you got scammed because you were naive. That is bad behavior, but there is still nothing wrong with NFT or blockchain technology. It is working as is intended. Many people were warning that this exact situation was going to happen.

> it is very obvious that it is too expensive to store the actual images on the blockchain

> but there is still nothing wrong with NFT or blockchain technology

You sound like you're trying to deceive yourself.

What are you talking about? I've never purchased an NFT, and I have always tried to warn all the people around me to make sure you understand what you are getting into before spending money on anything. There is plenty of good uses for blockchain and NFT technology. Paying for a URL to a stupid monkey picture that is not guaranteed to persist is not a good idea in my opinion.

> What are you talking about?

I'm talking about the fact you said there's nothing wrong with the technology and in the same paragraph you said it's too expensive to store an image. Sounds like something wrong to me.

At the moment, if someone wants to store information on a blockchain using proof of work, proof of stake etc., arguably the best implementation that humans have invented is Ethereum (Bitcoin is arguably the best for slow stable $ preservation, think what you want..). The gas price of Ethereum is not fixed, but at the moment far too expensive to store large images. The purpose of Crypto technology is not specifically to store images, that will probably come in the future. It does work to store financial transactions, and to perform smart contracts that don't require large amounts of data. NFTs don't have to be used for images. They could be used for tickets, proof of membership, to run small algorithms etc. The value is always going to be subjective. But saying there is something 'wrong' I don't think is correct. There is definitely something wrong with many people's intentions obviously, but that is sociology, not technology.

That's a lot of words to say that it's too expensive to store a picture. Even a fucking floppy disk can store pictures.

It's not meant to be a storage medium. By the way, you sound like you might like to buy a pixelated picture of a Monkey? It will fit on a floppy disk.

In other words, don't blame the technology that is working the way it was designed to work. Blame the people who are intentionally or unintentionally being deceptive.

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