1,347 karma · joined January 22, 2013
Not if you, the owner, or someone else, stores a copy. Even if the URL associated with the URL is broken, it doesn't change the fact that it still represents the thing people want it to represent.
NFTs are not a backup system for your data.
I certainly encourage you to buy NFTs on on those centralized websites. Nevertheless, paying for ledger entries representing art didn't really gain popularity before blockchains, so there is that.
You are correct. Note that there can be multiple different URLs pointing to the same file. And note that multiple files (unique sequences of bytes) can represent the same object, say, a JPEG with slightly different compression ratio.
The point then is that neither the the url nor the hash matters. What matters is that the artist says "this NFT represents this work of mine". Everything else is just extra.
If your metaphor is correct, it remains correct even with a hash being stored on-chain. Frankly, most NFT critiques seem just as thinly thought through as yours.
The NFT is a ledger entry that says you own an edition of a piece of digital art. People coalesce around this believe, because the edition was released by whoever owns the actual copyright (ideally the artist).
The link is conceptually irrelevant. Cryptopunks never had one. As long as the community of collectors remembers and agrees on what each ledger entry represents, there is no problem. A hash can help with this, which is why almost all high-value fine art NFTs have one (in their IPFS-url). No, moxie could not be more wrong when he thinks IPFS should be enforced; the NFT never represents a set of bytes, it always represents an idea. The NFT may link to a 4K render of the artist's 3D scene, but it also represents the 8K render.
The first tweet will always be the first tweet, in the same way as the first transatlantic flight has no physical presence. If Jack sells the first tweet as an NFT, it is no requirement that Twitter stay online for ever. It is merely strongly preferred that someone will archive it so it doesn't disappear from our collective memory, but that need not be the job of the NFT. The job of the NFT is simply to record your ownership of the concept. And you need a blockchain for this, to give it the credible neutrality needed for it to be considered something equivalent to real ownership; you can't have it be at the mercy of a single entity.
If you think paying money for database entries is stupid now, imagine how stupdi it would be if they were in Google Art, a product that will shut down in 3 years, and where Google will delete all your art when your country attacks a neighbour.
I see no evidence of this. Authorities have been going after crypto-currencies users very effectively ever since the early days of Bitcoin; from the first darknet market takedowns, to arresting people on LocalBitcoins because they didn't register as money transmitters.
It sounds like we agree on the limitations of a ledger, but saying it "doesn't work" simply because the physical world exists and governments can arrest you, attempt to track you, make rules for exchanges and merchants etc is nonsense. Of course they can.
They can equally block encrypted chat apps, VPNs, prevent device makers from allowing them onto the hardware, force backdoors, effectively threaten people who use them, or spy on your communications locally.
None of these things mean that encryption doesn't work, or that it isn't useful.
They can still have meaning (we know what item it was); whether there are people who would value the pure notion of owning such a digital item in the absence of concrete functionality is indeed the question that NFTs explore/raise.
It is not a geo-location issue. The enforcement measures in question either manage to control 50% of the hashrate or they don't. If they don't, the protocol will ignore their censorship. Yes, they could continue mining a minority fork chain, but you would need to convince Bitcoin-users and services to use the fork instead of the uncensored version. You could imagine this being done by force: ISPs block the download of the software, exchanges no longer trade it etc.
The point is merely: <50%, the power is not with the miners at all; it is the users that need to be controlled.
Critics like to say "it doesn't work", then the next day complain about how it enables a ransomware plague. You can't have it both ways. The fact is it clearly works.
This isn't to say it's magic; it doesn't protect you from bullets any more than it makes you coffee. It is not a magical unicorn; just finding a reason why there might still be censorship somewhere is not a valid argument.
Free speech laws work even if Facebook deletes your post, or you a fired, or sometimes someone doesn't appeal their conviction. Your argument about "miners, developers or exchange operators" existing is not any more valid than this one is.
Just to put some extra emphasis on quite how wrong this is: they are likely banned in almost no Middle Eastern country. Source: Married a woman from and in a Middle Eastern country under heavy sanctions just a few years ago.
Ironically, the law in question is not about the legality of the marriage, but about the rights of getting citizenship afterwards, and indeed, I would not be able to become a citizen of this country by way of my marriage, so in that sense, it is similar.
Look, this argument is a narrow one against PoW chains. You can point out correctly that a large share of the market/money is on those, and maybe Ethereum will or will not switch at some point, but it remains an argument against PoW nonetheless. Go support artists selling NFTs on Tezos then.
> This is a solved problem: you pay them for their work, which is how artists have made money since time immemorial. The degree to which artists can make a living off their art is a function of demand and discoverability, not whether they have a payment system (they do need this, but they already have them).
Some digital art cannot be printed (i.e. videos). "Paint my portrait"-style commissions are undesirable for many artists. "Here is some money create whatever" style commissions run into the same problem that for digital art, in that it is not clear what the buyer actually gets. People are commissioning NFT artists! It's all good.
The attitude of "buyers don't need NFTs they can support artists another way" is strangely inverted. If you can convince more people to spend money on art in other ways, that's great. Meanwhile, /artists/ need to find a way to earn a living.
How many new art buyers will NFTs bring when the speculative dust settles? How much will artists need to adapt to cater to that audience (i.e. creating PFP style collections?). We do know that the number is > 0.
Ultimately, this a civic matter; as much as we want to ensure we have the right to encrypt our communications, to not disclose our passwords to police even when being prosecuted for a crime, as activists commonly insist on, so should we fight to maintain our existing rights to financial privacy.
No, because it is possible to actively validate the initial conditions with reasonable effort.
There are in fact two initial conditions:
- Was the NFT created by person X? This is trivial to validate - check the artist's website for their key/wallet/signature, or ask your peers.
- Was an artwork (represented by the NFT) created by person X? This is equally as hard to validate as any claim to authorship, and something humanity has been able to manage for centuries.
It is shallow criticism that often amounts to no less than "blockchain bad because it can't do that magical thing".
NFTs cannot solve this, and therefore don't want to. Once you accept that, they work perfectly fine for their actually intended purpose!
The Cryptopunks only contain a hash of the file. The link is just a utility so wallets can display something w/o having to support each NFT individually.
The key difference to naming a star, as always, is that the person selling this thing to you has a moral claim to it.
Nevertheless - it doesn't matter if Jack Dorsey deletes his account, or even Twitter shuts down. The tweet cannot disappear in the same way that all historical events continue to be a part of the human story. It sure would be nice to have a copy - the Internet Archive probably will, and surely others. But the fact that Twitter existed and that Tweet existed will never stop being true, and once the website disappears, nothing changes for the person who owns that NFT: There are no rights that he loses, nothing tangible that disappears for him.
The answer is that the NFT represents the artwork, not the bytes in any particular file, in the same way that intellectual property law recognizes that the painting on your wall is merely a particular instantiation of the real, immaterial artwork that is protected.
The trick is to understand that neither links nor hashes are a key component of the concept (though both are useful to create a link between ownership record and some kind of representation of an artwork).
I agree its incoherent, but I struggle to understand of how it makes sense to them.
Bitcoin cannot be stable relative to other currencies as long as 90% of its forex volume is speculation. If there are businesses having long-term obligations and trade denominated in Bitcoin, providing for a large base of regular demand and supply that outweighs the speculation, it will stabilise.
This is obviously really really though to achieve, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the "tech" (which is essentially a spreadsheet). This makes the debate around the volatility and whether its qualifies as a "currency" rather boring. It will happen, or it won't, and we can try to predict the future, but it is not really about Bitcoin at all, just marketplace behavior.
It's much easier to pay off some influencers.
It's like a Bitcoin, but we say instead of saying it is digital gold, it represents a picture of a monkey instead.
Because no matter how many times misinformed critics call NFTs a "scam": there is something inherently honest about them: pay money, get a collectible. There are no financial instruments here that can be misunderstood.