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Comment by miracle2k | Hacker News Reader

> The entity selling them just takes payment via ethereum or other coins, but at best what they're storing on that chain is a pointer saying "oh yea, nytesky bought this thing that we store elsewhere".

The thing that I never understand when people make this complaint: Do you think my purchase of the "monkey picture" is now more real, because someone else paid for Ethereum nodes to physically store the bytes to it, instead of a link? Do I own it "more"? Does it have to be stored in a particular location within the Merkle tree? Can I upload it myself to make my ownership of my monkey more "real"?

What if I store it in the Arctic World Archive instead, does it now have more or less permanency than on the blockchain?

The line of critique inherently seems to make no sense; it's IMO a strong sign that it is fundamentally flawed.

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I think the flaw is that you’re misunderstanding the critique.

If you’re OK with “ownership” being “I paid somebody to write down that I am the only person who owns this asset, and they won’t give it to anybody else”, you don’t need any blockchains. You can own the monkey picture in the same way that I own my domain name, or my RuneScape account. If OpenSea decides to change the deal, they can just do so, because while they’re using a blockchain, they are the sole entity that controls how it interacts with the Ethereum blockchain. So other than for the “NFT” hype, they may as well just run a MySQL DB with “item” and “owner” columns.

By contrast, the thing that Ethereum actually does, for better or worse, with on-chain contracts, is that the consensus of the chain is what counts. If you hold ETH according to the chain, it’s yours. The only way for another entity to take it away from you is to have your private key, or convince 51% of the participants to agree with them.

> If you hold ETH according to the chain, it’s yours.

So is my NFT! No one can take it away from me. There are a couple things that could happen:

- The artist can mint an additional copy; this could mean my own copy loses value, or it could mean the community doesn't care, and continues to value the original one. Similarly, the folks that issue some ERC-20 token can decide to issue a new one and abandon their old token. In fact, vitalik et al could advocate for a fork for ETH. This is just how the social layer works.

- The media file associated with the NFT could be lost or changed. This can be a problem, but can also be addressed (IPFS), and can also be art: https://publico.pob.studio/piano

Larva Labs, the pioneers behind Cryptopunks, didn't even bother to put a link into their NFT at the time: it literally is a item/owner table. They didn't forget the link, they correctly understood that what the token represents is defined at the social layer.

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