Instagram Is Disabling Its NFT Features
nftnow.com
nftnow.com
“Imagine if you gave up on the Internet in 2000”. This again.
This is how distorted people’s perceptions become when they live their whole life in echo chambers.
Leaving the obvious aside, It genuinely seems like a lot of those still pushing this are utterly unaware of the harms their whole mess has caused.
Also, they’ve made it way harder to teach non-techies how to stay safe online in the future by co-opting the term “crypto”. They immediately think any use of the term crypto is related to this stuff. Your Digital ponzi scam != cryptography.
The worst part is how the public now thinks if you’re involved in software you must be a massive believer in cc/NFTs because they keep hearing about it so all techies must think it’s awesome, right!?
It’s exhausting.
It's the same concept but without the baggage of "crypto".
Why should I change? They’re the ones who suck.
And yet you are wrong :)
And libgcrypt in 2000: https://github.com/gpg/libgcrypt/commit/bf2fc9201cfa96cd70ef...
Totally normal and not cringy at all.
Edit: And on Usenet in 1982: https://www.usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=net.misc&mid=dGVr...
Here's a conference from 1981 put on by the IEEE:
I have to assume this is sarcasm, right?
That's literally what "crypto" has always meant for decades, cryptography.
The Crypto conference started in 1981 for instance.
What used to be "crypto" is now "cyber".
What used to be "cyber" is now "metaverse".
Most computers are not compromised because of flaws in cryptography or the application thereof, they are compromised because of operational security (opening suspicious email attachments, reusing passwords, running systems with default admin passwords, etc). These things have little to do with cryptography and are much better understood as "cybersecurity".
I'd love to see mandatory education in basic cryptography and such, but in reality I'd assume that even that would end up being security theater for the sake of ticking a box on the compliance score sheet.
I don't think GP was talking about learning modulo arithmetic and prime factorisation.
No mention of crypto required.
Fundamental cryptographic primitives (encryption, signatures,...) don't require any advanced math to understand if you don't go into the concrete instantiations. The technical community should really try to better teach these concepts to the general public as we move further into the digital age.
The important point is that TLS is referred to as crypto in some cases, and I believe that's what the GGP was referring to. Were I writing an expository piece, sure, I might use different language, but that's not really what my reply was about.
It's important because for example it makes it clearer why they should still check the url in the address bar (and not get phished) or that the communication with the website itself is not hidden (only the content is), etc.
I would probably start there and work your way up to https :(
The answer is symmetric cryptography, and you can give a layman example of what that is. But the key word is cryptography.
what do you think you're teaching, then? Just general good practices?
A teen can be told and taught to wear a condom without explanation of the virology and biology behind the things that it helps to avoid -- similarly Grandma can learn the importance behind https without memorizing the cypher suites; it's still an aspect of cryptography.
To give another example where this comes up: keeping backups of your data is prudent. Encrypting those backups is a good idea in a lot of cases to protect your data in case of device theft. While most modern systems make this as simple as possible for the casual user it still helps the user to have a basic understanding of what’s actually going on and the implications.
I think it's about understanding concepts and uses, not the inner workings. As an example, Glenn Greenwald (despite being a reporter handling sensitive topics) didn't know how to use encryption when he was contacted by Snowden, and learned it later. [1]
I think it would be very useful if the general public could use encryption to the same level they drive cars.
[1]: https://theintercept.com/2014/10/28/smuggling-snowden-secret...
This used to be the case about a year ago, now I see the trend shifting towards AI.
The people I've found that have embraced NFTs and altcoins are the ones that are much more focused on business and making money rather than the tech under it all.
Do you have a source or some proof for this statement?
There are tons of reasons to use Web3. You typically do so when you want a community to manage some value without trusting a middleman. Here are a lot of examples: https://intercoin.org/applications
If I were Zuck, I might start another crypto project next year and ask for volunteers because it seems like a pretty good way to extract the worst performers into a neat org chart box that can be shut down without breaking anything else.
Have you ever tried steelmanning your arguments?
"I have been pretty actively arguing against every single metaverse effort that we have tried to spin up internally in the company from even pre-acquisition times."
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/10/29/2144232/john-carmac...
- Recruit people to a new project that has a selection bias towards under-performers (or some other characteristic you want to weed-out)
- Let the project rot for a quarter
- Cut the project and all its teammates
More than under-performers, I think these kind of projects tend to attract those with shiny object syndrome or political ambitions.
https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=wazirx-closes-nft-marketpla...
Oh my god, these guys were true believers. That’s even more hilarious.
Goodbye and good riddance.
If I made $1M of bitcoin proceeds-of-crime and I put it through a coin tumbler then cash out, it can't be directly linked to the crime - but I also can't explain where the money came from.
On the other hand, if my legitimate account creates some shitty digital art and auctions it, then my proceeds-of-crime account buys it, I get slightly less money (auction fees etc) but a good explanation of where I got the money from: I'm an artist, you don't understand my work because you're a dumbass.
Of course, there are plenty of other ways to launder money - feed the proceeds of crime through a fixed-odds betting terminal and I'm just a lucky gambler. Anonymously buy fine art with a suitcase full of cash, then resell it as something I found in grandpa's attic. Sue my own anonymous tax-haven company, and report a big payment as an out-of-court settlement. And so on.
With NFTs, each one is valued independently and the price is what you and someone-who-definitely-isn't-you-wink-wink traded it for most recently.
Its a good idea to handle ownership of finite digital assets. Imagine buying a song or video game online, and then being able to sell it or give it to a friend later, without having to go through a central authority (and not be breaking copyright law). Just like with a CD.
Unfortunately, 99% of NFT projects have been essentially penny stock schemes, so now that's what everyone thinks of them as.
That's a nice oxymoron you have there. Digital assets are not "finite" or scarce, that's their biggest strength: that they can be copied and shared infinitely. I know that some people hate that, and would love to change it (see DRM). But to hell with that.
You wouldn't need a single central authority, you could have multiple certifying agencies who would have their own reputation. Similar to how there are multiple ratings agencies that can certify a bond as AAA, or multiple art curators who can certify a painting as genuine, or different comic book graders.
The spec was technically amateurish — basically just URLs in a bit of JSON in a slow database, with barely any connection to the asset. NFTs allowed regular non-IPFS URLs without any checksum, which allowed HTTP servers to change the asset at any time! And they had absolutely no uniqueness checks, allowing automating piracy!
https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/14/22726556/signal-founder-...
You could literally copy an image, and make a new token for it, and there was no way to decide which token was the true one for any given image, except maybe if you trusted some central authority, haha.
I don't have to imagine it. That's the reality right now without NFTs in the mix.
Way too complicated, I'll stick with mp3s.
When people say "good riddance" they don't expect all NFT code to vanish from existence.
They're just saying that it will be tucked into its own dusty corner of tech history, to be forgotten by the masses and especially by tech professionals.
[0] https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/standards/tokens/erc...
- BBC: Twelve-year-old boy makes £290,000 from whale NFTs https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-58343062
- Guardian: Rishi Sunak asks Royal Mint to create NFT (note 11 months later, it seems this project has quietly died) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/apr/04/rishi-sun...
It was always screamingly obviously a scam/sham/whatever, yet it was lapped up. Unreal. Critical faculties chucked enthusiastically out of the window, including by people and companies that should've known far better. And I appreciate there was of course some cynical deliberate bandwagon jumping, but still.
"I don't understand the first thing about what's going on with all this but smart people seem excited so what could go wrong" is a horrific basis for anything involving money and possible consequent loss of huge amounts of it!
Ape together strong.
There is nothing funny in seeing retail being abused by fake Shamans telling the way to win was to buy overpriced shares from...
And to this day, some irreductible think they re fighting dtcc (why ??) by direct registering...
That's trillions of $$ transacted and in value. Will put Bitcoin price at $250-$400 Thousands of dollars.
Instead of double entry accounting, where each firm keeps a separate ledger for a project, they can all transact off one record of truth.
That kind of paradigm change won’t happen until oracle and sap etc agree on standards and interoperability. Give it another 40-50 years to displace current databases.
That being said, with NFTs I have never met any truly technologically knowledgeable person who could explain me in detail why it solves the problems it (wrongfully) claimed to solve.
Suppose I'm a small indie game studio. I create a game, and this game has skins for characters, weapons, what have you. I want to build a real money economy around these assets, but don't have the manpower to deal with payment processors, build a marketplace, etc. My company could just represent the skins as ERC721 tokens and instantly have access to the wealth of infrastructure that already supports the ERC721 standard. People can buy and sell on a marketplace of their choosing (Opensea, Blur, etc.), they can manage their assets using a wallet of their choice (Metamask, Rainbow, Frame, Coinbase Wallet, etc.).
This is just one example, but can be applied to literally any non-fungible asset that be represented digitally. And although the application I mentioned is primarily a financial one (because Ethereum is the internet of finance), there are certainly non-financial use cases for having a fully interoperable, decentralized representation of a digital good.
It's important to understand that NFTs didn't invent digital scarcity. This is an idea that's existed for a long time. Downloading a song I have to pay for, League of Legends issuing a limited edition skin, even the notion of a privileged role on a website (e.g. moderator) implies some sort of digital scarcity. People value having status, people value having scarce things, NFTs didn't invent that idea, they just make it much easier to represent these things in a very standard way and plug into mechanisms that allow for price discovery of these things (which I repeat, already are deemed to have value, but have extremely high friction to trade).
Maybe you don't understand because you aren't a digital native. I grew up playing World of Warcraft, and even from a young age I understood the power of having something other people didn't have. When I saw other players with their Naxxramas gear and I'm sitting there in normal Uncommons, it implied a difference of status. There was value in getting this gear because it made you feel special and important, or part of a certain community. The entire premise of the game revolves around the idea of scarcity (people have to work to get the best gear). If people had the best gear from the start, they wouldn't show up to raid every week, they wouldn't spend hours and hours farming materials or gold. That's digital scarcity, it's always existed.
It's not a real money economy when you're asking your customers to first convert their money to crypto magic beans. Dealing with crypto exchanges has been shown to be a great way to put your money into scammers' pockets. Customers will blame you when that happens.
If you want to sell skins, why not let customers pay with real money via Stripe or another payment API? It's certainly a much easier integration task than reconciling your game database with the Ethereum state of those assets, and the end-user UX is lightyears better so you'll probably sell a lot more skins.
This Instagram NFT shutdown demonstrates again that the mainstream has no appetite for crypto despite the breathless claims of the past ten years.
Because stripe takes a massive cut?
"the end-user UX is lightyears better so you'll probably sell a lot more skins"
for now
"This Instagram NFT shutdown demonstrates again that the mainstream has no appetite for crypto despite the breathless claims of the past ten years."
Everybody in the community already knew this. Like you've said, the UX isn't there yet. That's obvious to anyone that is in the space. Nobody was sitting here applauding Meta for their obvious bandwagoning onto the latest thing. Maybe if they actually wanted people to adopt NFTs they should work on improving the UX or build some fucking infrastructure instead of just leeching off the community trying to make a buck. If you want people to display their art as NFTs on instagram, then create an Oculus App that's a virtual art gallery, allow people to display their instagram NFTs in that gallery. Interface with other technologies that already exist in the space. Use your billions and billions of dollars to make the experience better for everyone. They didn't even fucking attempt to build anything.
With crypto prices trending down, your game skin business is probably going to lose more money just to the crypto exchange rate than they'd pay out to Stripe... And meanwhile you didn't get any of the convenience of using Stripe, so your revenue is probably a lot smaller because your players just aren't using the feature.
2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction, sure, but after that you have actual fiat money that you can use to pay salaries and suppliers.
Ethereum isn't free, either. You gas fees, withdrawal fees, and the volatility in selling. Probably comes out to a little less in total, but is a 0.5% saving worth adding all that attrition to your sales process?
People want to pay in their local currency with their local bank account not jump through shady hoops. I want to play videogames not chat with little girls in the Philippines.
Shows complete lack of understanding of what you're talking about.
NFT seems only useful if there is a zero trust situation and irreversibility is wanted, but I see nearly no situation where this is the case.
The ability to say this with a straight face and realise nothing is amazing.
Then there's no need for Ethereum.
I mean, knock yourself out, and build your tower of Babel where every next layer is an increasingly complex patchwork of workarounds, but don't pretend that this is somehow good, great, fats, amazing, better than grilled cheese etc.
Or a database on the game server…
People keep trying to shoehorn blockchain whatever into places where a simple database would suffice and already exists.
Nobody is going to save in game character state in a Account Abstraction and Application Specific Rollup.
Many times while playing the game, I changed my main character, but had skins for other characters I no longer played (maybe they got nerfed or something). It would be great if I could exchange those skins for other skins of equal value for the character I switched to.
Yes, the company itself could implement all these different features, but at that point you're re-inventing the wheel. We have a set of standards regarding digital assets, and the technology already exists to do the things I mentioned seamlessly. The only thing the company needs to do is implement their assets as part of that (ERC721) standard.
I hope you understand that for the same reason, Riot does not want you to be able to sell your skins?
The NFT spec doesn't even guarantee the basics of what it needs to support.
The game publisher still has the final authority on whether a skin is displayed in game or not, and no blockchain is going to change that.
The reason Riot doesn't do this is that it would reduce profits. If they would make more money otherwise, they would be doing that already.
One look at this line and all further delusional house of cards falls down. There are no technical possibilities for NFTs to represent anything, it is technically impossible for current chains. There are only two exceptions - punk pixel art because they live fully on chain, and ENS records which are somewhat useful but only inside tokenbro industry.
But doing all the work to integrate ERC721 into your game might take the same time (or more) than a simple centralized payment system (not to mention that transacting these ERCshits is costly, more than 5USD per trade most of the time). So why bother?
The DX can continue to get better, but that’s not what is holding game devs back from choosing an L2.
If another, which one? Take in account that L2s are based on a network of channels. You can only transfer value atomically among a network of channels if the tokens being transferred across the channels are fungible, otherwise what you transfer from Alice to Bob is not the same than what you transfer from Bob to Carol.
Why do some people insist that if others disagree with their opinion, it has to be because those others don't understand?
To make it clear, this doesn't mean that these companies are actually _making_ money.
It is now dead in the water in any app, unfortunately. Apple charges 30% fee on all in-app NFT sales, and on top of that Apple ToS strictly prohibits any “functional” use of NFT tech in their apps.[1] As you’d expect, NFT markets have moved to web in general, outside of app space.
[1] https://twitter.com/wongmjane/status/1584609845570768897?s=2...
You'd think a market place like https://bandcamp.com/ would make this a trivial event: create the release, set the release date, let people pay, once the release date hits everyone downloads a ZIP with some FLAC files and a JPEG cover.
Instead, this was an "NFT" release: took 15 tries (and several credit card charges) to "reserve" my spot. My purchase is now on some confusing website with random ID's all over the place, and I need to "mint" a "ticket" to log into it.
If ever there was a solution in search of a problem, NFT's are it.
It's just token ownership. What ties tokens to actual physical assets is the institutional framework of laws, contracts, courts and law enforcement. Not a glorified pointer in a glorified ledger.
Times can and should change.
NFTs are on their death bed, there's nothing early about this.
What makes them have "NFT features"? (except some tags and the obvious "NFTish" art style)
I don't use Instagram either but a Google image search shows a "digital collectible" checkmark in the bottom left corner. I hope this wasn't the whole thing as I don't see what would stop you from putting this checkmark into the image.
And yes it says "Digital Collectible" and the image animates back and forth in a partial spin before settling into place.
And in the end, people care about reality a lot more than they do about blockchain data.
Oh, and many of the people involved are going to stay anonymous, and attempting to prove the authenticity of one of these things by deferring to off-chain authorities goes against the intended spirit of the entire thing.
Utterly baffling.
I'm not sure anyone at any point thought they were legit, it was crypto chuds hyping their next scam, and the media willing to join in for extra clicks. The real losers were the the ones who bought in thinking they would find a greater fool to off load their magic beans to later.
If you believe that ownership of a hash of the brooklyn bridge in a ledger is the same as the real thing. Well i have the brooklyn bridge to sell you.
What they cannot do is forge your signature.
This is how asymmetric crypto works.
You are viewing a website right now with a certificate stating this is news.ycombinator.com signed by someone in your OS trust store.
I can just make a certificate saying a different website is news.ycombinator.com. What I can’t do (hopefully) is get it signed. You will have a very different UX when I do this.
Even though I can easily make an unsigned document, the digital signature in the certificate still has value, just like the NFT.
Same way as if I receive a 'real and valid' message claiming to be you, but not signed by you, I can't say it was you that sent me the message.
I worked for a company that made NFT character skins for their games; of course when the game checked your wallet for game skins, it only looked for NFTs that were signed by the game company. As you said, impossible to clone or forge.
Of course anyone could (and did) clone the ARTWORK associated with the NFT and create fake/pirate NFTs; but they had no in-game value. That's still a problem for players who might get duped by the fakes though.
In the end, though, using the blockchain didn't enable any functionality for the users that couldn't have been accomplished using a plain database of ownership. In theory the blockchain would grant some permanence to the asset, but once the game company shut down the market value of the asset cratered anyway.
NFTs are simply crypto scammers trying to find a problem to their solution they have.
It's not about copying the pixels, it's about showing provenance.
I can paint something right now and show provenance for it, but that won't make my childish scrawl valuable.
The problem with electronic art is that there's nothing special about the original over copies in this sense. You can't hold it and know that you're holding the very thing that the artist was working on.
NFT's I think potentially had SOME initial interesting tech (mainly the early talk about being able to track photo copyright for photographers for example) but quickly evolved into the crypto BS investment crap.
Same was said for the user-generated content that lived in the community forums on the fringes of the web back in 2000s. Big sites and 6-figure columnists even suggested that these were 'littering' the Internet.
15 years later, content is user-generated, and now there is even something that is called the 'creator economy'. And even those 6-figure, out-of-touch elite columnists who derided it are jumping on the bandwagon.
...
Crypto is a technology. It does things. We observe that it is able to do things and it works. Its just missing a widescale use-case. The moment someone finds that use-case, it will explode like how the actual web exploded back then. Solely the DAO concept is revolutionary by itself, enabling large-scale, democratic economic organization for the masses, which was not possible or difficult and totally non-transparent before. That a few people here and there used it for dumb reasons or failed in accomplishing various objectives like buying the constitution etc does not change what potential DAOs provide.
Of course, there is also the problem of crypto space and all the features and applications within them being WAY too out of the average user's league in terms of user friendliness. Just like how it required knowing what a 'forum' was, knowing how to 'register', and then even knowing the right people who could refer you to the forum so that the administration would approve your membership back in early 2000s.
True, but it's entirely possible that such a use case will never materialize. People haven't even been able think of plausible theoretical ones except in niche applications. That's not to say none are possible, but they're hiding pretty well.
My personal hypothesis is that the interesting tech in crypto will eventually find a real, solid use -- but it won't be one resembling what anyone thinks, and won't be sexy.
Hard disagree. DAOs already exist, for example, and they are widely used even if the phenomenon is unknown to who doesnt have an interest in it or who is not technical enough. They are still way too technical for the average user, and even solely this use case could easily explode the moment everything is simplified and presented to the users with an intuitive and easy to use interface by a new service.
A lot also depends on the infrastructure improving - IPFS is great, for example. But its not as fast as a server, forcing you to store very little data using it. For the moment, any use case that will involve IPFS must fit into those narrow confines. Actually, same goes for most of crypto - Ethereum is a framework that you can literally, actually program on. But you wont be compiling any complex modern app code and serving it from there. One reason why the use cases still revolve around financial things, NFTs and other things that are built on the ledger functionality.
> but it won't be one resembling what anyone thinks
That's entirely possible.
> and won't be sexy.
And that totally depends. Anything that gets mass adoption ends up 'sexy'...
To be honest even an example of a DAO that only votes on token allocations but has spent them on something more useful than a book about Dune would be interesting.
Are there any DAOs that do something that's NOT entirely about crypto things?
That will be difficult until crypto is improved to have the user friendliness to allow non-crypto-savvy people to use crypto services. Even the very act of 'getting a wallet' is a high bar to entry for the majority of the population, leaving aside 'connecting it to something' then using the still-complex crypto features like DAOs.
They're also a pretty niche application. And I'm not convinced they're something that requires blockchain to accomplish anyway.
> Anything that gets mass adoption ends up 'sexy'
Not if it ends up being an invisible piece of machinery, which I think is the most likely result. Different bits of the more interesting tech will get incorporated into larger systems to support their goals. The larger systems may (or may not) be sexy, but the bits of crypto they incorporate will just be background players to that.
But then, the surest way to be wrong is to predict the future. Who knows what will really happen?
So not only were they bandwagoning, they were slow too.
I feel like the general sentiment is that cryptocoins have mostly been used to scam people out of money. The field seems full of manipulative tactics all for the purpose of feeding the early investors.
Blockchains are not a magic technology, they will probably have a niche use somewhere, but cryptocoins seem like a dead end.
So it might be like e-mail spam, it'll stick around as long as there are suckers born every minute.
But I'm hoping it will fade away from the mainstream at least.
Is this true? Are NFT’s / crypto done? You know some people that are involved in it and they still seem to be hard into that world, so I was surprised to read all of this.
I think you'll find it's more the case the people here are a) educated on how the technology literally works b) educated on how product as it applies adoption literally works c) able to think abstractly about market need.
NFT as a technology and product... use case is... incredibly small.
Check out this article for what I think is a good perspective on how blockchain tech is not useful: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/11/19/AWS-Block...
https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&...
Just because there are some people around the world doing similar things to you doesn't mean it's a community. I feel like people crave so much this feeling of "being a part of a community" that they try to apply this to everything, up to a point where the term is becoming meaningless.
Struggled to ever see the point of NFT's - at least as anything beyond 'trading cards' (which granted have their place).
No problem with the hype moving on. Leaves a cleaner space behind for more compelling innovations to gain some limelight.
The fact that they've mostly been made to create bored apes and all that was a bit mind boggling unimaginative :')
They solve a real world problem of ownership of digital assets in an interesting way. We need a solution here and NFTs proposed an "open" one. I wish we keep exploring this space.
I dont think its a great idea, largely because making the ledger operate in a zero trust environment isnt a great value add for video game tokens, but it's important to judge things on their merits and in this case you could build a system as described.
This use-case always broke down for me when I realized you inherently can't have a secondary market when you still rely on the first market (the owners/operators of WoW) to maintain the integration(s) with token<->game.
If I sell an owned mount token to a friend but the ownership of that mount doesn't actually transfer in-game, the entire system breaks down. Ergo, the livelihood of any secondary market relies entirely on Blizzard maintaining whatever in-game functionality uses the tokens, rather than solidifying a promise of any real decentralized ownership.
The system as described doesnt 'break down' if that transfer doesnt relay to in game, it never launched whatsoever.
I dont know what would be in it for developers to tie into such a system - unregulated video game markets are notorious for the scams they breed (don't believe me? Meet me in Thais depot for some fast hands), so ceding control so that a secondary market can spring up sounds.. counterproductive.
I don't know why you started your sentence with "No". What you describe is exactly the same as buying the name of a star, except it's on blockchain instead of some kind of database.
If you like, you can write code to associate the ownership of that star (by access whichever star registry institution you like) to some game feature. Or you can let the player submit a "star ownership certfication. It's just the same except the data source is decentralized.
Right now I dont think there is a programmatic way to do that with star certificates. I guess I dont see what your point is - are you just trying to link two things that seem frivolous to you?
You buy "something". That "something" doesn't represent any legal right for you. If you buy a NFT of an image, you won't be the copyright owner of that image. You can't stop other people from using it either. Maybe there are some exceptions, but generally you just don't get anything legally. Similarly, buying a star doesn't give you legal right on that star.
Why does doing this programatically make it different? Plus, buying a star is not inherently non-programmable. You can launch a star registry with an API. You can laucnh an NFT for stars. What makes buying a star stupid is that it doesn't represent any legal right, not that it's doesn't scale.
The hypothetical under examination here is if I built a system that used NFT ownership as ownership of some in game thing - it represents a promise to value a given token, which is wholly different from the star thing (they dont value that certificate in a meaningful way). If your first instinct is to launch into a tirade about how dumb that is then great - total agreement. But, you could build it and it would work, and it would be meaningfully different from star ownership certificates.
In my hypothetical game I can enforce that relationship. Lets say the game is pokemon except with scorpions, and each scorpemon is represented as an NFT. Your wallet contents then determine what scorpemon you can play with.
Does that make sense?
They can do that research as part of PhD dissertations.
Maybe eventually we'll put things like deeds on-chain as NFTs. This would have the benefit of decentralizing the record-keeping power, so we wouldn't have to worry about failure of some central authority in this regard.
Enforcement of these ownership rights will probably depend on some centralized power, but if the deeper record-keeping layer becomes decentralized, is that not a win?
I can print a copy of the Mona Lisa, but that doesn't devalue the original painting.
/shrug
For now, you’ll have to settle for a court system and copyright law.
All the digital ownership stuff is whack funny money low rates bullshit. That usecase for it is a concession that the copyright industry got it right, which is obviously not the case. NFTs just don't have the muscle to prop themselves up like Copyright does.
Do we, though?
NFTs were always daft, but the fiction, as fiction often does, spoke to a real need.
Again, my concern is for the artists who were briefly given hope, however false.
For context, this book is helpful: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Artist-Creators-Struggling-Bill...
Of course no one was going to pay $1000 for landscape_digital_painting.png which you can get a dime a million on dall-e.
This is hardly a new phenomenon. Artists today have more ways of getting paid than ever, but it is still a buyers market.
If DALL-E emerged before NFTs, I don't think we would have seen them gain any traction _at all_.
It literally describes an effort by Meta to put NFTs to use for artists.
Again, decay.
It's also easier than ever now for an independent artist to make money. Patreon, Fanbox, Skeb have vastly simplified the logistics of getting money for your work. Promotion through social media is free, though time-consuming.
The problem is the same as it always was: artists want to focus on creating art, and not running a business. If I told you I was going to make a software company, with the expectation of a livable salary, but spend $0 on sales, marketing, or customer support, you'd call me an idiot, because there's a lot more to a software business than churning out code. Similarly, there's a lot more to making a living as an artist than drawing pictures or creating music.
Ironically, NFTs were most successful with people who already understood all this. Unscrupulous people like Steve Aoki aggressively marketed their own NFTs using their existing brand power and made a hefty sum, while your dime-a-dozen 10k Twitter follower artist got nothing.
Very condescending and, at the same time, not true at all. Many existing artists did much better in revenue than ever in the way of getting paid for their craft during the rise of NFTs, there were many spaces where artists would brag about their success and help onboard others into the space, often paying their transaction fees.
For many of the small audience artists it's very sad the momentum faded, and the spring of generative AI doesn't help them either.
NFTs and the guys pushing them were only out to hurt artists and exploit them, and nothing else. If they weren't out to scam them, they were out there just stealing the art.
It was not "a nice idea" and the fact that people still try to tie them to "but what about the artists" narrative is a disgrace. I'm sorry, but there is no "but" here.
Yes something for artists would be nice, everyone agrees. NFTs were never that, not even a little bit. It was not "an attempt to provide artists with revenue", it was an attempt to use artists for revenue.
You make a difference between what you say, and the people cheering for NFTs, but the whole "yeah but what if it works" or "yeah but wouldn't it be nice if..." angle is exactly the type of crowbar all the cryptocurrency/NFT scammers used and still use to stay relevant.
This is dead in the water in any app, anyways. Apple charges 30% fee on all in-app NFT sales, and on top of that Apple ToS prohibits any “functional” use of NFT tech in their apps. [1]
[1] https://twitter.com/wongmjane/status/1584609845570768897?s=2...
The fact that I have not met a single knowledgable person who managed to convince me that NFTs are a good technology that solves problems that need solving in elegant ways doesn't speak about me, it speaks about the topic at hand.
To me NFTs look like this: Somebody was like "how can we make money off the internet if people just can copy everything? We need to limit the supply somehow!" and then they tried to market it to artists "you will earn money this way". I don't even agree that copyability of data is a problem, and the argument of "we can make money by owning and not putting in a lot of work" attracts exactly the kind of bad actor you talked about.
Any technology doesn't live in isolation from society, especially not something like NFTs that makes the extraordinary claim to introduce something as fundamental as ownership within a system that has been built on free copying of data. That means bad actors need to be factored in, especially if you're marketing the thing in the style of a get rich quick scheme.
Maybe you can explain why this is something we want and why this is the technology that solves it?
Some benefits of NFTs in the property deed example would be:
- The elimination of the need for municipalities to maintain proprietary databases to hold property deeds
- 24/7 globally accessible property information. (No downtime)
- Standardized and globally interoperable property records across municipalities and potentially countries
- Easy to prove and verify ownership of properties, which could be used to grant access to third party services for homeowners. (e.g. HELOCs)
- Dapps could allow property owners to post the NFT deed as collateral and automate the loan application process to reduce processing costs.>Dapps could allow property owners to post the NFT deed as collateral and automate the loan application process to reduce processing costs. Do you not see how this is a bad idea? What value is the NFT deed? The house has the value - what's the NFT worth? If you have the NFT deed, are you the house owner? Bruh.
What value is the property deed? The house has the value - what's the property deed worth? If you have the property deed, are you the house owner?
That's a great question.
Riddle me this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564
Your question was, quote, "If you have the property deed, are you the house owner?"
I gave you an example of a property deed, and issues that could arise around that property deed. Now, how exactly will blockchain help in the cases I described?
It's not. NFTs are non-enforceable.
> Public blockchains can help expose manipulations of property records
No they can't. I literally provided you with examples.
They are as non-enforceable as property deeds. (i.e. property deed enforce-ability relies on the government too)
> No they can't. I literally provided you with examples.
They absolutely can. If someone modifies the NFT on the blockchain you will see exactly when and by whom it was modified. This could be provided as evidence in court.
Translation: government enforces property deeds. They are enfoceable.
NFTs are not
> If someone modifies the NFT on the blockchain
The question isn't about modifying the NFT is it. Go and re-read the cases I provided.
Edit: What amazes me about all the cryptobros is their inability to look beyond the simplest of the most simplest of the most trivial of cases. Probably because of their childlike belief in the magic of blockchain.
How did property deeds come into existence? Was there a time before property deeds? The point is technology evolves and blockchains offer an alternative to record keeping that is an improvement over existing systems. If governments adopt them for tracking property ownership, then they will be just as enforceable as property deeds.
> The question isn't about modifying the NFT is it. Go and re-read the cases I provided.
The point is the on-chain historical record of transactions can be provided as evidence to a court. A blockchain will not prevent corruption and bribery from arising, but it does represent an unalterable record of transactions. Ultimately courts are the enforceability layer of the government, but that does not make blockchains useless for the purposes of property record keeping.
> Edit: What amazes me about all the cryptobros is their inability to look beyond the simplest of the most simplest of the most trivial of cases. Probably because of their childlike belief in the magic of blockchain.
This seems like your inner bias coming out. There is certainly no shortage of grift in the crypto space. Nevertheless, the technology is real and there are people with PhDs in CompSci and vast amounts of distributed network experience working in the space. I'd invite you to try and look at the technology objectively, because there are some really exciting and cool things happening in the space.
You've yet to show it's an improvement.
> Ultimately courts are the enforceability layer of the government, but that does not make blockchains useless for the purposes of property record keeping.
Of course it does. For example, immutability of the record makes everything but the most trivial of cases very complex or impossible:
- every single case in the linked comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564 is made worse by the blockchain
- death, incapacitation, loss of access to wallet/private keys and many more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27217681
> This seems like your inner bias coming out.
No. This is the result of many, many such discussions where crypto absolutists fail to imagine any but the most trivial of cases (and even those work only barely, with a bunch of constraints and reliance on existing centralised mechanisms). And for anything outside of those trivial examples they invent more and more bizarre constructs that make the whole thing collapse under its own weight.
> I'd invite you to try and look at the technology objectively,
I have
> because there are some really exciting and cool things happening in the space.
We've heard this magic mantra being repeated ad nauseam for the past 10 years. There's still nothing exciting or cool coming out of this cesspool.
Ransomware or other attacks are always going to be a risk, and the more municipalities that use a single system, the bigger a target it becomes, so smaller but properly secured and backed up systems have advantages.
Cryptographic signatures paired with identity information makes all transactions easily verifiable for tax collection purposes. There are purposes such as proving ownership of a record anytime someone needs to that would be convenient if the records are accessible 24/7.
> Ransomware or other attacks are always going to be a risk, and the more municipalities that use a single system, the bigger a target it becomes, so smaller but properly secured and backed up systems have advantages.
If the past is any indication, local governments and small businesses have had a heck of time securing their IT systems. I would much prefer a hardened blockchain system to secure my property ownership record, than the current situation.
I don’t think they even care who pays the tax as long as it gets paid. They aren’t going to not take your money if they can’t verify you’re the legal owner.
> I would much prefer a hardened blockchain system to secure my property ownership record, than the current situation.
The current system isn’t even digital. There’s some sort of master book or something that records every title transaction since there’s been a legal claim on the property. I’m pretty sure the one for my house is archived with the title insurance company, probably something I should know.
When you ask a question like that I can't help but asking back: How would you design any system that has "literally 0 downtime" and why do you think it is only possible to achive it using a blockchain?
As for the second part: proving some digital data is originating from someone is what we have been doing using cryptographic signatures for quite a while now. How to do so in a stable fashion that resists changes to the original data e.g. editing, cropping, color-manipulation, pitch shifting, etc is the challenge. This is called fingerprinting.
To proove ownership of a material you just need a list of fingerprints and a reference to the entity that owns the rights. How to do reliable databases is a problem that we sort of know how to deal with in 2023.
The question is, why would you need a blockchain for that problem? The hard part is not trusting the entity that stores the data, the hard part is trusting the data that is entered into that database. And for this kind of problem the best construction we have found so far is dedicating some institution to that purpose and have copyright-holders proove their ownership of their data to that institution. But if you have an institution that you already need to trust with data entry you can also trust them with data storage or not?
Not sure how a blockchain helps when some guy claims the song I have written on another blockchain. In the end it will be governments who will have to recognize my ownership so I can sue and by that point you can safe yourself the trouble of using a blockchain in the first place.
Blockchains are great for proving ownership because you can provide a signature for verification and then that can be cross-referenced to see if that same signature also owns the on-chain data.
There is no getting around the fact that the government chooses the system of record and property owners have to abide that choice. If the government though chose to use a blockchain as the system of record (for all the benefits I listed previously), then you don't need to worry about other blockchains, because that's not the one the government cares about.
Its value is that it is proof of ownership certified by whichever county officer has the job to do these things.
> The house has the value - what's the property deed worth?
Literally nothing since anyone can show up at the county office and get a copy. They don’t even ask for ID because it’s a public record.
> If you have the property deed, are you the house owner?
No, the property deed is an official record of the property owner.
With the deed you can prove you own the property but even that isn’t ironclad which is the whole reason there’s a title insurance industry. Which, and I’ll give you this one, could be the only valid reason for “blockchain” in this whole argument but would require having every historic property transaction already on chain or you’d just be where we are today.
Oh, the real hard problems are creating the standardised representation of a property deed and getting everyone to use it. Something not at all addressed by use of blockchain!
>Cryptographically prove ownership of a property literally no one is asking for this except the sellers of cryptographic proof.
> Oh, the real hard problems are creating the standardised representation of a property deed and getting everyone to use it. Something not at all addressed by use of blockchain!
And Oracle databases addressed this? Standardizing property deeds is more of an application level concern not core blockchain infra.
>Cryptographically prove ownership of a property literally no one is asking for this except the sellers of cryptographic proof.
A good UI/UX would make this a push button capability from a wallet. No need for the general public to understand the technology powering push button verification. :)
You claimed it as a benefit! There's no reason that NFTs for property deeds would: Be standardised, or be on the same chain. That's more an application level concern, so please take that point back.
>Just because you host on AWS doesn't mean you get 0 downtime.
You get as near to 0 downtime as anyone needs for transacting property.
Also, still no one is asking for cryptographic proof of property ownership, even if you make it a single button push. No one needs it now, what does it add? Why is what we have now in need of cryptographic verification? Crypto boosters want it because they're selling it, directly or indirectly. You have not answered this question.
There's different standard levels right? I'm talking about when you build a property deed NFT you'd have to adhere to the on-chain standard for how NFTs are created on that particular blockchain. Then once those NFTs existed other people could integrate them. If you want the property deeds to have a set of standard specifications of how they deal with particular situations that might arise through inheritance, multiple parties, lost keys, etc. then that would be an application level specification.
> Also, still no one is asking for cryptographic proof of property ownership, even if you make it a single button push. No one needs it now, what does it add? Why is what we have now in need of cryptographic verification? Crypto boosters want it because they're selling it, directly or indirectly. You have not answered this question.
I'm asking for it and I'm sure others would like to have it to. :) Having cryptographic verification provides an ability to quickly prove ownership from an application and then that verification could unlock certain home owner benefits (e.g. HELOCs)
Why would you want to make house deeds easy to hack?
>There's different standard levels right? I'm talking about when you build a property deed NFT you'd have to adhere to the on-chain standard for how NFTs are created on that particular blockchain.
Okay, why bother with that particular blockchain standard then, and not the hypothetical FOSS software for hosting a property deed database? Because then you have the same benefits, but also don't need the blockchain?
It helps facilitate more automated approval b/c if you were to complete an application with your wallet then the system could check for the presence of the NFT to indicate ownership.
> How does cryptography proof that you own it?
The presence of the NFT in your wallet.
> Because you know a private key attached to a wallet address with the NFT in it?
Yes
> Okay, and how does that NFT relate to actually owning something?
If the government decides to use a blockchain as its system of record for property deeds, then the NFTs on that blockchain would be just as legitimate as paper property deeds. The NFTs hold the hash of any off-chain data whose validity could be verified.
> What if you get hacked, does the hacker now own it?
Perhaps in a poor implementation. I would expect clawbacks to be implemented for property deed NFTs.
> And if the hacker takes out the line of credit, fail to pay, does the defi protocol they borrowed from now own your house?
Hopefully that user is using a hardware wallet and again clawbacks are implemented, so that doesn't happen. If it did, then you'd probably seek resolution through the courts as needed.
> Why would you want to make house deeds easy to hack?
It's very hard to steal NFTs from a hardware wallet with clawback support. Good luck!
> Okay, why bother with that particular blockchain standard then, and not the hypothetical FOSS software for hosting a property deed database? Because then you have the same benefits, but also don't need the blockchain?
Because a FOSS property deed database could be censored and cannot be independently verified outside of the governing body easily. I would expect the uptime to be slower. It would also become a central point of failure for all property deeds and would need to protect against DDoS attacks.
Does this exist? What would it look like? Can you force a wallet to release an NFT? Or is it just governmental - centralized! - approved reminting of an NFT?
Also your security model is "I hope users use a hardware wallet" - not a great track record of this! Even among professional cryptocurrency developers!
>Because a FOSS property deed database could be censored and cannot be independently verified outside of the governing body easily. I would expect the uptime to be slower. It would also become a central point of failure for all property deeds This is the state of play today and it's... fine? Like I know many, many, many people buying houses and the hard part is not the record keeping of the deeds. That wouldn't even make a top 10 problem. And I know several people who've remortgaged or taken out credit against their house. They managed! Generally, taking out a big loan doesn't need to be fast - you don't do it that often.
Not exactly crying out for this solution, is it?
So, in summary, this use case isn't a high priority for nearly anyone (HELOCs already exist and can be accessed, and in any case, who needs them to be much faster? how often do they take out credit against their house?) and requires either centralized authority OR a future improvement to a blockchain (clawback!) and still requires the courts to looks at analog paper deeds (otherwise, how could seek resolution through the courts) in any case.
Now some potential scenarios:
1. A sells deed to B. So now they do in on chain and NFT is sold from wallet X to Y. All of that is registered in the CDB and confirmed with paper documents, contracts and stuff. Maaaybe that can work, but as we see NFTs are useless fifth leg in a horse here.
2. Inheritance. Deed is inherited by law by person C (with or wihtout wallet Z), but chain doesn't know about it and thinks wallet X still owns NFT. CDB has actual data and overrides "wallet X" line, so that chain now useless and outdated.
3. Law enforces deed transfer from A to B. Again, NFT is not sold and chain is not updated.
The list of situations can go on and on.
And last note - these so called "dapps", which are neither smart nor contracts, are the most stupidly delusional thing you can introduce into a valuable commodities market. Only people not familiar with the scale and rate of exploits caused by usage of these dumb and badly designed programs can suggest it. Or the one profiteering from this. Phishing is over the top and even experienced users at r/CC are regularly losing everything due to a single click mistakes. This is not how housing market worked and will work. Not how any market works actually.
It amazes me how people say this with straight face. "Just store all the data off-chain!". Then the chain isn't needed.
What jump? You literally said that all the data is stored somewhere else.
> stores and establishes cryptographic proof of ownership.
It stores some unenforceable token that is only valid as long as those who actually enforce ownership agree that it proves anything.
So:
- all data is stored elsewhere, on centralised servers
- proof of ownership is enforced by centralised entities (governments, courts, police, etc.)
Great application of blockchains.
No, I didn't. The NFT would be stored on chain and inside the NFT would be hash of the data that is stored off chain. Anyone can then source the off chain data from any location and then compute the hash of that data and compare it with what is stored on chain.
> It stores some unenforceable token that is only valid as long as those who actually enforce ownership agree that it proves anything.
This is no different than any other system. What makes that Oracle database that your property assessor uses to store your parcel information in enforceable? Oh yeah, the government.
> No, I didn't... NFT would be hash of the data that is stored off chain.
Yes. You literally said all the data would be stored somewhere else.
> This is no different than any other system.
If this is no different than any other system, then it has no benefits of any other system.
> What makes that Oracle database that your property assessor uses to store your parcel information in enforceable? Oh yeah, the government.
Indeed, the government.
Who makes your fantasy tokens referring to physical objects enforceable? Oh right. No one.
Meta data (ownership data) is stored on-chain. (supplemental data is stored off-chain) So again, no I did not say that all data is stored somewhere else. The meta data that is stored on-chain serves an important role.
> If this is no different than any other system, then it has no benefits of any other system.
We are talking about the enforceability. Governments can choose to embrace a blockchain as their system of record. If they do, then NFT deeds are as enforceable as traditional property deeds.
> Who makes your fantasy tokens referring to physical objects enforceable? Oh right. No one.
The government would in this particular case. Maybe in other cases it would be a company and in still other cases it could be an on-chain contract.
So actual data that proves that this physical person is the owner of this physical asset.
> It could be stored in a, b, c
> then an application can pull the data from wherever it is stored
Ah yes. Because when it's stored in a non-centralised database of "local computer at owner's residence" or "hosted server controlled by the owner" that data is easily accessible and retrievable.
Who is this "you" who is going to do that?
Remember we were talking about property deeds? Their availability is of great concern.
Before you answer that, go back over all your comments here and in other threads, collect all the limitations you've run into, all the workarounds you proposed, all the additional external systems you need to run just the most trivial of scenarios, and riddle me this: why would anyone want this?
That's just centralised in a different form. Or more precisely - not decentralised.
Sure, some app can interact with centralised DB holding all actual information like deeds or music or whatever. Why do you need NFTs for that? Centralised BD must me utilised to track ownership of actual data or items by real people and it won't work any other way due to the IP rights and complex ownership agreements. NFTs are useless and impotent for this task.
How many copies of the data in different locations do you need to be considered decentralized? In fact, I'd argue you just care about having enough copies of the off-chain data that you feel well insulated from data loss, so I'm not sure that the off-chain data needs to actually be decentralized. The goal is to have the ownership proof (on-chain NFT) be as decentralized and easily auditable as possible.
> Sure, some app can interact with centralised DB holding all actual information like deeds or music or whatever. Why do you need NFTs for that? Centralised BD must me utilised to track ownership of actual data or items by real people and it won't work any other way due to the IP rights and complex ownership agreements. NFTs are useless and impotent for this task.
I feel like many of these conversations in this thread are focused on the current state of blockchain adoption today. I don't know of any government today that has adopted a blockchain to track property records at scale, but I do think that will probably come eventually. As soon as that happens, then you can have rules and regulations drafted around all these tertiary concerns including IP rights and complex ownership rights, potentially some of those codified in on-chain contracts, but some would remain as processes for the government or the courts. Putting property deeds in an NFT on a blockchain does not solve all problems that arise with property ownership, but it could improve the record keeping process in some areas.
For it to "come eventually" you need to answer all these questions that you ignore or swat aside as irrelevant, or easily solvable by magic.
> As soon as that happens, then you can have rules and regulations drafted around all these tertiary concerns including IP rights and complex ownership rights
No. These things have to be solved first. because complex ownership rights exist today, and not in some fantastical future after blockchain has been implemented at scale.
> potentially some of those codified in on-chain contracts
"On-chain contracts" of course make zero sense even for the most trivial of cases. Much less the complex ones.
Because what you propose is replicating human-readable texts with programs in esoteric programming languages that get routinely "hacked" because even multiple audits cannot find vulnerabilities in them. And for what?
> Putting property deeds in an NFT on a blockchain does not solve all problems that arise with property ownership, but it could improve the record keeping process in some areas.
It "may improve record keeping" but produce an insane amount of complexity, inane and insane workarounds, friction and problems everywhere else. So, will not be implemented until those issues are solved.
> In fact, I'd argue you just care about having enough copies of the off-chain data that you feel well insulated from data loss, so I'm not sure that the off-chain data needs to actually be decentralized.
Remember how it all started? "The [government] staff still does what they do today, but they no longer need to maintain their own database and IT application."
And now they need to maintain "enough copies of the off-chain data" anyway and deal with blockchain.
IP rights aren't just for property deeds, they are relevant for every single digital or physical creation made by humans. So let's take a picture as an example:
There are NFTs and associated CDBs which supposedly allow trading pictures TODAY. No need to wait for any government or laws or technical advances. Supposedly NFTs allow me to buy and sell pictures in a decentralised way right here and now. The problem is that they can't do it. There is technically nothing inside NFT which can deal with IP rights for the pictures. You can't transfer IP rights completely, you can't do it partially, you can't do it with multiple peers, and of course you can't do any combination of the above. So current NFT platforms either ignore it or do it old fashioned way with centralised accounts, Terms of Service and other centralised stuff tracked on the platform and not on chain.
No need to wait for some far future and government adoption, NFTs has already failed at the much more simpler task and have no paths forward from this failure.
This is splitting hairs. Actual data that is actually relevant to the property, is stored somewhere else. Which is ironic because elsewhere you stated: "but they no longer need to maintain their own database and IT application."
Oh look. They have to maintain their own database for the actual data
> The government would in this particular case.
Not in this particular case. But in all cases.
> Maybe in other cases it would be a company
So. You need central entities to verify and enforce rights to physical objects. You need central entities to store the actual data pertaining to objects and people.
So the point of blockchain in all this is...?
Public permissionless blockchains help in easing the verifiability of ownership records, transfer of ownership records, and auditability of transactions. In the digital goods you don't necessarily have to rely on a single third party like a government. Checkout Chia offer files (https://chialisp.com/offers/) for an example of this. You can post these offer files on Twitter, forums, text messages, emails, etc.
To add it you need to show it produces more value than the problems it causes.
> It doesn't replace existing relational databases, nosql databases, object storage, etc.
Hm. Strange. In a comment elsewhere you literally claimed this, emphasis mine: "The staff still does what they do today, but they no longer need to maintain their own database and IT application."
> Also, just because some data is stored off-chain does not mean you need to run your own infra.
And the people will run the infra for you out of the goodness of their hearts? And of course the data that you store "somewhere elsewhere who knows where" will of course be easily available and accessible in perpetuity because blockchain, right?
Why is it that most NFTs in the world are now pointing to non-existent files?
> Public permissionless blockchains help in easing the verifiability of ownership records, transfer of ownership records, and auditability of transactions.
They don't. Moreover, they only work for the most trivial of cases, and make actual real-world scenarios hard or impossible. I've provide several of those, and you answer? "No one is claiming blockchain is helping in that situation and that's okay!"
> In the digital goods
We're not talking about digital goods.
I think it's fairly easy to understand (but you clearly hate the technology for some reason). The proof of ownership would be in the blockchain. NFT X represents X property, the address owning that NFT would technically own that NFT.
Also NFTs may also have descriptive data on them, so technically you could have a description marking that NFT as X property.
It's very much feasable, but from what I'm reading from you, you just hate the technology for the sake of it. Reminds me of Apple haters.
On top of that you need many more documents actually linking the actual physical person with that wallet. And additional documents dealing the actual property.
And of course "oh it's just simple record pointing to an address" is exactly why I keep saying that crypto proponents have this childlike inability to imagine anything beyond the most trivial of use cases.
Examples where "the address owning that NFT would technically own that NFT" falls apart and "useless discussion" is the one I'm having, not crypto-absolutists with their trivial cases and increasingly complex workarounds:
- ownership disputes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564
- ownership transfer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27217681
> you just hate the technology for the sake of it.
As wrote elsewhere: I've had this or similar conversation many, many times. Crypto proponents can only come up with the most trivial examples, and for anything more complex they rely on magic and increasingly complex and arcane constructions that fall under their own weight.
Edit:
Just in this discussion: we "don't need a centralised database", but we need a centralised database, or an external party to store our data that also needs to be available and accessible by anyone, but also reliable, maybe federated, or a local server, and it's also standardised, but maybe third parties will make it standard for governments, or maybe someone will provide infra to store data, or maybe it will be hash of data that may or may not be standardised, or...
And with all that it still doesn't solve or help any of the complex issues that arise from property ownership.
This would also make very easy to prove ownership. You have access to the address that owns said property, it's yours. It's as simple as that.
The database you'd need locally would be pretty much to store useful information and to track data on the blockchain.
I don't see any country using this anytime soon, or at all, but it is possible.
PS: I do understand you hate NFTs representing pictures of monkeys being worth millions of $, I also find it stupid, that doesn't give me the right to hate the entire technology that makes it possible.
No, it shows that I define people talking about this tech by how much of reality they ignore.
> This would also make very easy to prove ownership. You have access to the address that owns said property, it's yours. It's as simple as that.
Who is this "you"? And who do you prove this ownership to? How all the other use cases like death and loss of access to the address are resolved? How are court orders are resolved? And so on, I've provided links where I listed various use cases in similar discussions.
See? Your "easy" ignores so many complexities.
> The database you'd need locally would be pretty much to store useful information and to track data on the blockchain.
So, you need to store useful information somewhere anyway. What exactly is the value of blockchain in this case?
> that doesn't give me the right to hate the entire technology that makes it possible.
Your emotional outbursts don't affect me. It's not hate when every single thing that you say is possible is only possible for the most trivial cases, makes other cases hard or impossible, requires complex workaround for complex issues, and in general doesn't improve an iota over existing situation.
Ok, but what's the benefit of doing that?
But if the entity that is charged with keeping track of who owns what needs to keep a central database anyway, what value does keeping the ownership records elsewhere bring? I see doing that as accomplishing nothing but increasing the number of things that can go wrong.
When it comes to things like real estate, the "proof of ownership" is completely without meaning unless you also have the extra data beyond that. Things like where the land is, what the boundaries of the property are, etc.
If the off-chain data is "incorrect", what are you going to do? Can anybody mint those NFTs? What's the point then? The government is the only one who can kick you out of that house irl.
The minting process could be managed by the government or some entity using an on-chain contract or it could just be a manual process that the government does in conjunction with banks. The enforcement of the ownership records would still be held with the government. The point of having property records as NFT on-chain data is it enables easy to verify ownership of property records, transparency/auditability of property records, and easy transfers of property records to new owners.
Correct, which means that there has to be an ultimate source of truth that everyone agrees on that is independent of the blockchain. Which means there has to be an authoritative central agency of some sort to handle that. Which means that the blockchain has not, in fact, accomplished the stated goal.
So those don't look like things that NFTs make better in this space.
Let's suppose that the off-chain data is a PDF containing all the information for the property deed. If the hash values don't match then it means the PDF should be disregarded. If the off-chain data was kept in multiple locations, then one could potentially still retrieve a good copy of the PDF whose hash matches and then can be trusted.
Now, just because a blockchain can be used as the system of record for property deeds does not mean one wouldn't need to still have laws and other organizations enforcing that system of record. The blockchain is just a tool that makes some aspects of the record keeping easier and opens up some interesting possibilities as I've outlined in other comments of this thread.
> If you could do that, then you could be breaking into all sorts of systems.
Absolutely. And this is one of the methods that is used to do just that. I'm not talking about a theoretical security issue here, this is a weakness that has been leveraged in the real world for a long time.
> Cryptographic one-way hash functions are actually the preferred way to secure passwords.
Yes, but they're also not considered bulletproof. They're a bit of a compromise effort. That's why the leaking of password files is considered a security problem even when the passwords are salted hashes.
And, like with password hashes, it's not actually necessary to break the hash in order to alter the hashed record while maintaining the same hash. There are mathematical shortcuts to doing this, but you can even just brute force it if you have enough computing power or time.
Oh really? Care to share some examples of SHA-256 and SHA-3 collisions?
That said, there are readily available tools that use things like rainbow tables to "crack" SHA-256 salted password hashes. By "crack", I mean to come up with a password that hashes to the same value.
These tools are in successful use every day.
Cracking SHA-256 with rainbow tables is a fundamentally different exercise as you are relying on someone having selected a weak password that you can then generate a hash for. The weakness is not in SHA-256, but in the weak user selected password.
That's fine, I don't expect you to believe me without evidence. But I have seen this happen more than once in my work.
> you are relying on someone having selected a weak password
Stated another way, you are relying on having some idea of what the original data looked like, so you can reduce the search space. Absolutely correct.
However, if you're hashing public records like real estate, where you literally have the clear text, that's a much simpler problem than cracking passwords. All you need to do is alter the document in the way that you want, then find what other changes are needed to create a collision with the original hash. This is not very computationally intensive compared to password cracking.
Add in that the amount of money on the line with real estate can be high enough that it would make it worth throwing serious resources at it -- more than the average password cracker could even begin to summon -- and my confidence in the security of the hashes is greatly reduced.
Here's an interesting general overview of the problem: https://medium.com/asecuritysite-when-bob-met-alice/can-i-cr...
Of course it doesn't eliminate the need. Who's going to enter those records and enforce them?
> Standardized and globally interoperable property records across municipalities and potentially countries
Just because it's on blockchain doesn't mean it's standardised, or interoperable.
> Easy to prove and verify ownership of properties, which could be used to grant access to third party services for homeowners.
Yup. Until a corrupt government official puts his friend as the owner of your house and evicts you. Look, the proof is in the blockchain, and it's irrefutable, and cannot be amended.
> Dapps could allow property owners to post the NFT deed as collateral and automate the loan application process to reduce processing costs.
This is just a string off made-up terms that make no sense
The staff still does what they do today, but they no longer need to maintain their own database and IT application.
> Just because it's on blockchain doesn't mean it's standardised, or interoperable.
Once it is on a blockchain it is conforming to a published standard for NFTs for that particular blockchain and others can interact with it and build additional systems that interoperate more easily.
> Yup. Until a corrupt government official puts his friend as the owner of your house and evicts you. Look, the proof is in the blockchain, and it's irrefutable, and cannot be amended.
Because corrupt government officials have never doctored official records that weren't on the blockchain?
> This is just a string off made-up terms that make no sense
No, it's not. A Dapp stands for a "decentralized application" and posting property deeds as collateral is a real thing. Further, being able to do that digitally will likely lower processing costs.
That's a very minor thing to maintain as compared to the multiple issues that blockchains bring into the mix.
And of course they will need to maintain an IT application: they will need secure wallet implementations, data entry applications to interact with blockchains, security audits for the shitty programs people keep calling "smart contracts" etc.
> Once it is on a blockchain it is conforming to a published standard for NFTs
Ah yes. It automagically conforms to some standard. Just because it's on blockchain.
> Because corrupt government officials have never doctored official records that weren't on the blockchain?
And how is blockchain helping you in this case? Or in the cases I linked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564 and that you even failed to understand.
Most likely a third party company will provide a standardized overlay that government's can tweak to suit their needs, but the bulk of the important data is now stored securely on chain. This should help reduce the security footprint and FTE overhead for governments.
> Ah yes. It automagically conforms to some standard. Just because it's on blockchain.
No magic involved. If you want your NFT to work say on the Chia Blockchain, then you need to conform to this standard -> https://www.chia.net/2022/06/29/1-4-0-introducing-the-chia-n...
> And how is blockchain helping you in this case? Or in the cases I linked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564 and that you even failed to understand.
I've already explained this in another comment. No one is claiming blockchain is helping in that situation and that's okay! :)
So, we're squarely in the realm of magic and wishful thinking.
Some third party (who?) will provide some standardised way (which standards?) that governments will tweak (what? if tweaked, it's no longer standard).
> but the bulk of the important data is now stored securely on chain.
Of course not. Storing anything in bulk on-chain is prohibitively expensive. All you're proposing to store is a hash of off-chain data
> No magic involved. If you want your NFT to work say on the Chia Blockchain, then you need to conform to this standard
Why would government want a) NFT to b) work on Chia?
On top of that, you are literally saying: "You will just need to store a hash of the off-chain data on chain". What's the standard for that hash?
> I've already explained this in another comment.
You haven't
> No one is claiming blockchain is helping in that situation and that's okay! :)
No, it's not okay. You keep saying that blockchain is some solution for something, but every single case runs into "no, you don't use blockchain for that".
A blockchain solves the specific problem of how to track ownership of some piece of data in a decentralized fashion where multiple parties do not trust each other.
This, however is not the hard problem when we talk about ownership databases. The hard problem is ensuring the data entered into that database represents actual real world ownership and having the database universally recognized by everybody as a representation of ownership.
What purpose does a database like that serve, when the actual place where the rubber of ownership hits the road is somwhere else?
Agreed. The parties that are interacting must agree on which blockchain to interact on first. More likely an industry, trade association, or government would say this chain is going to be the system of record of where transactions take place and then individuals and businesses are forced to abide by that. Then once that is decided, any transfer of ownership on that chain would expect to be honored by the transferring party. If not, then consequences would be enforced by the governing industry, trade association, government. etc.
> A blockchain solves the specific problem of how to track ownership of some piece of data in a decentralized fashion where multiple parties do not trust each other.
> This, however is not the hard problem when we talk about ownership databases. The hard problem is ensuring the data entered into that database represents actual real world ownership and having the database universally recognized by everybody as a representation of ownership.
> What purpose does a database like that serve, when the actual place where the rubber of ownership hits the road is somwhere else?
Yes, there is sort of a bootstrapping problem around how do you get people onboarded onto a particular blockchain. For that I think you need some novel use case(s). For Bitcoin it was being the first alternative monetary system. For Ethereum it was the ability to create on-chain programs. Zcash it was private transactions. etc. Once people are onboarded though, then you can use that system to agree on where ownership entry and change of ownership transactions take place. Then you can use the publicly auditable history to prove ownership. For a physical good, then that becomes evidence that can be presented to a third party presiding entity who settles disputes.
Yeah, but would I like to do that? All these blockchains are literally some shady guy that tells me "trust me and my tech to manage that ownership for you". What is in it for me?
It doesn’t say anything about the correct answer to the question and all about your analysis process. Keep looking, good luck!
For example:
> The fact that I have not met a single knowledgable person who managed to convince me that eating poop is a good idea that solves problems that need solving in elegant ways doesn't speak about me, it speaks about the topic at hand.
Do we conclude that eating poop is a great idea, and that more looking is what's needed? Or can we conclude that there's probably a reason folks struggle to justify the concept?
It doesn't necessarily say something about the correct answer to the question. That however doesn't automatically mean it never says something about the correct answer to the question.
I decided in this case, that it does.
We can do an experiment here - you can describe what you think is an NFT and I can reply why is that technically impossible (because we have heard this broken record for a thousand times already) :)
Zuck announced that they're pivoting to AI, shuttering Reality Labs, and moving Oculus to a pure gaming platform. They have no ambitions for the metaverse any more.
She says that like it would’ve been a bad thing.
Really? Will nftnow.com be sending their helicopter to the Meta headquarters?
“I can open up devtools and change the words on this page. HTTPS has no value.“
“I can photoshop you digitally signing a different document. Digital signatures have no value.”
I fairly obviously disagree with those statements but if you do too - you may wish to put your pitchfork down for a moment and think deeper about the value of digitally signed artwork.
metaplex defaults to arweave for uploads.
1. For the majority (perhaps even vast majority) it was never pointing to ipfs, but to some server running somewhere.
2. On ipfs files will disappear eventually if there's no one to pay for their storage
2. Good point. I haven't investigated this but I should.
66.44% of NFTs are HTTP (centralised servers) and only 23.81% are on IPFS even when taking into account the gateways
> Put simply, ~10% of NFTs are on-chain, ~40% of NFTs are on private servers and are doomed, and ~50% remaining are on IPFS.
40% is the doomed figure. Which is way too high but there’s a lot of idiots minting shitty NFTs. Since the study wasn’t limited to NFTs on marketplaces (like we’re discussing here) that doesn’t surprise me.
Still, due to how IPFS operates, the majority of those assets will be gone, too.
Example from infura: https://community.infura.io/t/does-data-that-hasnt-been-used...
--- start quote ---
if the data you’ve pinned to IPFS is not accessed within the 6 month period, our garbage collecting system will delete the data. In order to keep data around indefinitely, you will need to access it somehow at least every 6 months.
--- end quote ---
And more on Hedera: https://hedera.com/blog/nft-storage-why-it-matters
I can't find the article now. IIRC someone crawled through OpenSea NFTs and the majority of the assets were gone.
NFTs make more sense when representing ownership of digital assets that grant some utility.
I am a believer in the idea that in-game assets will become NFTs. Playing video games professsionally is like being a tradesperson, and just like a carpenter doesn't need to use a different hammer for each job, a gamer shouldn't need to get new stats or weapons for each game they play.
Just like a famous musician might, a gamer should be able to sell the gun they used professionally to a fan and that fan can have that represented in any game (using that game's native assets).
I see a lot of value in an open registry of digital items I own, each with a cryptographic proof of provenance, and which doesnt require a centralized entity to control and decide which games can and can't participate. This can be done without a blockchain, but then there's no central proof of who owns what (I can own the item, sell it, but still submit old proofs to a game to keep using the item).
I may think this way because I own a lot of digital goods that are stored in private databases which will someday shutdown. At that point, I'll loose all of those items.
- If they want money, NFTs are directly competing with microtransactions/loot boxes. Any NFT imported is money the developer isn't making off their own content.
- If they want a good game, allowing users to import random items from other games is going to be impossible to balance.
- If they want a free for all, they can already implement mods and steam workshop without the crypto aspects.
As an aside, if the goal is simply trading items between players, that's better done with a traditional market. Allowing real money to enter the game tends to incentivise all the worst player behaviors and ruin the experience, as Blizzard discovered with the Diablo auction house.