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Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

Most of the comments made in this thread about NFTs could also be made about digital signatures, HTTPS, Signal, PGP and traditional forms of crypto.

“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.

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In most nft marketplaces the actual artwork was not signed. They signed a url, not even a fucking hash of the jpg.

The URL usually lives on arweave, which is a binary blockchain.

metaplex defaults to arweave for uploads.

If the image stored at the URL changes, does the NFT have the information needed to detect that?

Arweave is permanent.

You might want to provide evidence for "usually".

That's not how it works. The url was ipfs, which is immutable and is a hash by itself.

>The url was ipfs, which is immutable and is a hash by itself.

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

1. Sites like https://nft.storage/ (which I dislike as they have a silly bug with content types) or Pinata also go to IPFS. Just because the https URL doesn't look like a well known IPFS HTTP gateway doesn't mean it's not on IPFS.

2. Good point. I haven't investigated this but I should.

https://www.rightclicksave.com/article/how-many-nfts-are-act...

66.44% of NFTs are HTTP (centralised servers) and only 23.81% are on IPFS even when taking into account the gateways

That’s not what that report says:

> 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.

Yes, I misread that.

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.

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