NFT misconception: JPEG aren't stored on the Blockchain

https://erickhun.com/posts/nft-misconception-image-arent-on-blockchains/

by greenSunglass • 5 years ago

101 254 5 years ago

Animats2• 5 years ago

Right. And not even encrypted. It's not like you need the NFT to view the image. You only need it to sell it to the next sucker.

sbierwagen2• 5 years ago

ERC-721 is the standard that dictates how one should create an NFT. Each ERC721 NFT must have a tokenURI field, that is an external link to a JSON file stored on an external server ... You can notice the image field, which is a link to an image.

Not just a link, a link to a link! And when that server goes down next year, all those JSON files will vanish.

folli4• 5 years ago

I mean, as the article mentions, you could store the image on the chain. Or at least a Hash of the image to prevent a bait-and-switch.

But it would cost too much of added gas fees and the average user wouldn't understand the difference.

meowkit• 5 years ago

But it would cost too much of added gas fees and the average user wouldn't understand the difference.

Reminder that this a poor line of thinking.

The average user of a smartphone has no idea how it works. The average user of software has no idea how their apps work. The average user of a blockchain doesn't know how it works, and they won't need to. This stuff gets abstracted out and developed enough to hide these details over time.

nuerow5• 5 years ago

But it would cost too much of added gas fees(...)

If your goal was honestly to just buy art, why would "gas fees" matter? They only matter in a scenario involving wash trades and high rates of transactions involving small deltas in price.

greenhatman3• 5 years ago

Does it also store a hash of the content? What if the content at the URI changes?

spixy• 5 years ago

Then content of your NFT changes https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1448066579611234305

m0sa• 5 years ago

I'd expect at least a hash of the image to be stored on the blockhain..

hoten2• 5 years ago

Wait, is this not how it works? Seemed like a safe assumption...

arcticbull12• 5 years ago

Even if it is, you can't really reconstitute the image from the SHA. I mean, unless we just created a new proof of waste algorithm.

renewiltord7• 5 years ago

No. The value in the thing is in the key that minted it. Think of it like a signed baseball: easy to replicate, but the original is worthwhile.

robertlagrant4• 5 years ago

Yeah it's an encrypted thing pointing to a URL which has a JSON file in it that contains a URL of an image.

TheDong• 5 years ago

It does not contain a hash, and the image may vary over time or based on the requesting server.

See Moxie's tweet thread showing this experimentally: https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1448066579611234305

vbezhenar3• 5 years ago

NFT is low tech scam. I'm surprised so much money were attracted. Must be very good marketing campaign.

LurkingPenguin• 5 years ago

The best scams are usually low tech or even no tech.

arcticbull12• 5 years ago

Lots of wash trading to bid up prices and create the impression of enthusiasm. Drags in the suckers. Like Logan Paul and his 99.9% loss on a $600,000 investment. He is the biggest fool. [1] But hey, he was in it for the tech/art right? He's still got the weird yellow robot bee thing.

[1] https://twitter.com/coffeebreak_YT/status/145670132936840397...

can16358p7• 5 years ago

The idea of NFT is not scam, but the current scene is more like it. Not exactly like scam but more like a super-hyped balloon.

framecowbird• 5 years ago

Exactly. I don't understand this. What's the half life of a URI? A year?

Surely we're going to see a whole bunch of the links replaced with porn any day now..

quotemstr4• 5 years ago

Yeah. That's the shocking thing: I can understand offloading the raster data storage to various external services, but a hash is practically free to store and provides a kind of verifiability that a mere URL doesn't. Seems like an egregious oversight.

vbezhenar3• 5 years ago

IPFS URL actually contains hash or something like that.

fomine3• 5 years ago

This. Surprising.

soco2• 5 years ago

The article fails to underline that if you want anything serious you would use IPFS URIs and pin it at least once. I would say, they don't know much technically and just jumped on the bandwagon. Because the serious aren't many in this NFT area.

tiku• 5 years ago

The only real future for NFT's is a coupling with the physical world. Like buying physical art. Or proofing ownership of an asset like houses.

rvz2• 5 years ago

Or an uncensorable domain name service which has both utility and rarity and cannot be downloaded and is stored on the blockchain.

sweetbitter• 5 years ago

You might be thinking of Namecoin, the first fork of Bitcoin.

onion2k2• 5 years ago

cannot be downloaded

I can't help thinking this criteria makes the DNS service a bit less useful.

blackoil• 5 years ago

Which will require the authority to recognize it. Your NFT of house is worth nothing unless court/police recognize it to be so.

can16358p7• 5 years ago

Which kills the whole idea blockchain is based on: decentralization. It's a feedback loop with no known exact solution yet.

onion2k2• 5 years ago

Would anyone buy a house if the proof of ownership was a URL to JSON file on a server you didn't control, with no regulation of the blockchain that the "proof" resides on?

I will genuinely put effort in to starting a company that provides a blockchain proof of real estate ownership if this ever happens, just so I can fraudulently sell everyone's houses while they live in them after a few years. It'd be hilarious.

thephyber12• 5 years ago

I have not seen any compelling project successfully bridge analog world content with digital signatures for blockchain purposes. These things always seem to require some trusted party like a government to support them.

That said, I suspect something along these lines may some day be the "killer app" that NFTs/smart contracts need but are currently missing. The scarcity of atoms combined with the public, immutable digital records on a blockchain ledger. Too bad we are 12+ years into the blockchain and I've yet to see a compelling use case.

mastazi3• 5 years ago

I'm very surprised that those (the JSON and the picture) are not stored in a decentralised way e.g. IPFS or Swarm.

So if I buy an expensive NFT, and the domain goes down, the NFT is now worthless?

We should be on the lookout for any of these domains expiring, then we will buy them and upload Rick Astley GIFs

himlion• 5 years ago

Most NFT projects are in fact stored on IPFS. You can put an IPFS URL in the tokenURI field.

mastazi3• 5 years ago

Oh yeah, I saw NFTs with IPFS URLs before, the reason why I'm surprised is that I thought all of them were using some form of decentralised storage.

swiftcoder• 5 years ago

However, if someone ever stops paying a 3rd party to actually pin the file in IPFS… poof

Just because you put a file in IPFS doesn’t mean IPFS actually retains it

fshbbdssbbgdd• 5 years ago

There’s a popular genre of NFTs which consist of a recording of some physical object (often a painting) being destroyed. So perhaps we should create an NFT which represents the stranding of other NFTs through hacking. We could upload the logs from the shell showing us deleting everything.

zenlikethat• 5 years ago

They often are. For instance on Arweave

meheleventyone11• 5 years ago

IPFS doesn’t guarantee safety either, it’s still possible for the link to rot and no longer be accessible.

mastazi3• 5 years ago

Oh of course, but at least it is decentralised

sva_2• 5 years ago

At least the owner of the NFT would have an incentive to keep the file available.

DougBTX• 5 years ago

So if I buy an expensive NFT, and the domain goes down, the NFT is now worthless?

Well, that’s a question and a half. If its intrinsic value dropped to zero, would that be a change in value?

amomo2• 5 years ago

Thanks, you made my day

Freeboots• 5 years ago

I honestly thought they had some kind of torrent pointer. I dont have a deep understanding of how ANY of this works, i just figured smarter minds had ironed out the kinks, such as 'what if the original source goes down or is coopted?'

vmception15• 5 years ago

Its just a bad use of the NFT standards. Not that complicated.

Not all are doing it the wrong way.

But some are definitely doing unnecessarily centralized things.

todd3834• 5 years ago

I hate to admit it but I’m still struggling to understand why people would pay so much for NFTs. I feel like I fully understand what they are and why most people want me to believe it has value but I still don’t agree. I’m waiting for my mind to change but it hasn’t happened yet. It’s frustrating because so many people I respect are leaving their high paying jobs to work in web3 startups around NFTs and I feel dumb for not getting it.

sbierwagen2• 5 years ago

The most plausible conspiracy theories I've heard is that the big sales ($1 million plus) are wash trades, ("sell" an object to a confederate for 500 ETH, then they transfer the money right back via another route) and some classic money laundering

Now of course there's a mountain of clueless suckers kicking off a regular tulip mania-style bubble. I wonder how many more weeks it will last.

arcticbull12• 5 years ago

Like this $500,000,000 flash loan backed wash trade of punk 9998. [1]

[1] https://news.artnet.com/art-world/crypto-punk-500-million-sa...

Bombthecat• 5 years ago

Or: kids who started early with crypto with no idea of wealth and worth of a coin. When you habe thousands of coins. Giving out one isnt that expensive..

nuerow5• 5 years ago

The most plausible conspiracy theories I've heard is that the big sales ($1 million plus) are wash trades, ("sell" an object to a confederate for 500 ETH, then they transfer the money right back via another route) and some classic money laundering

I'm not sure if the link between NFTs and money laundering can be downplayed as conspiracy theory. Even yesterday Reuters published a newspiece on NFTs being auctioned by the likes of Sotheby's, and where crypto-rich buyers pay NFT auctions with crypto, where a cryptocurrency lawyer was quoted as pointing out money laundering via cryptocurrencies was a "known fact."

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/new-masters-how-auc...

Using NFT transactions to launder money isn't exactly a novel idea as the art world is dominated and driven by money laundering schemes. In fact, in Mexico the art market tanked 70% once the Mexican government passed legislation requiring more info from buyers, because it's believed Mexican cartel rings were behind these transactions.

https://www.artandobject.com/news/how-money-laundering-works...

greenhatman3• 5 years ago

I'd be money on this actually being the case. This whole NFT craze is pure insanity.

iszomer• 5 years ago

And the kicker is, the record of your "wash trades" is now stored on an immutable blockchain, a stark contrast to actual paper trails.

LogonType10• 5 years ago

Money laundering.

can16358p7• 5 years ago

Hype. Hoping it will become even more popular to sell it for even higher.

cloogshicer2• 5 years ago

The analogy that helped me understand it (even though I would still not buy one myself and think the hype is way over the top):

Think of a booth at Comic Con, where an artist hands out signed copies of their comic books. The comic book itself is nothing special, but the signature is. But there is a problem: if you ever want to sell the signed comic book, how do you prove it's a real signature? NFTs solve that problem.

omgbear• 5 years ago

How does it solve the problem? You still have to trust the physical object I hand over is the real signed copy.

mrtksn10• 5 years ago

Like any other coins, it's simply a note useful to figure out who owns what within the framework of the community.

NFT's connection to art is just a way to put a face on new coins. Instead of creating a sum of a coin brand and trade those(HN coin with total of 100K coins), you create a new coin brand each time(The most upvoted post, the post that made something famous etc.) and trade those with each other.

It looks like a solution to the problem of early adopters having all the wealth. BTC up %10 or even %100 doesn't mean much, the crypto wealth was created by investments having %1,000,000 returns. Memecoins, NFT etc. serve the purpose of being able to bet like it's the early days of the BTC.

The misconception of "selling JPG's for millions" appears to be as a result of thinking with the pre-blockchain mental models. I know a few people trading and chasing NFT's and none of them are into the art part, they are into the trade part and they are trying to buy NFTs that they expect to sell for a better price later. Their criteria for buying NFTs revolve around things like size of the community interested in it, promoters having the blue badge on Twitter, the age group etc.

MaxBarraclough2• 5 years ago

it's simply a note useful to figure out who owns what within the framework of the community

Owning an NFT does not mean you own the underlying asset.

iamwil6• 5 years ago

It's best to think of NFTs as deeds to the art (or certificate of authenticity), rather than the art itself.

I wrote this a little while back, and it might help you. https://interjectedfuture.com/nfts-unbundle-ownership-from-e...

If NFTs as deed to art isn't convincing for you, check out ENS. https://ens.domains/ It's a name registrar that's a smart contract. Each ENS domain name is an NFT.

atoav• 5 years ago

On a practical level it is the attempt to bait rich people into believing into ownership and scarcity in a place where it doesn't exist: The internet.

sanmon3186• 5 years ago

May be a dumb question but how can we certify that the same asset doesn’t exist as two or more NFTs on different block chains. There are tons of them and each can have its own monalisa.

b3n2• 5 years ago

Each ENS domain name is an NFT.

Wasn't Namecoin solving the same problem years before Ethereum existed? What makes ENS/NFTs novel?

samuli• 5 years ago

I think it is a combination of The Greater Fool Theory and fear of missing out. If you missed out on Bitcoin, now is your chance to ride the next wave.

sva_2• 5 years ago

I think it's mostly speculative - the expectation that you can sell for a higher price (which often turns out to be true.)

MaxBarraclough2• 5 years ago

This topic turned up a week ago. [0] Personally I like the analogy to baseball cards. From [0]:

Owning an NFT generally doesn't grant you copyrights over the underlying work of art. Owning a baseball card doesn't mean the athlete now works for you. They can both still have value as collectible items, if that's something that interests you.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29050802

tempestn2• 5 years ago

However with a baseball card you do own the card. With an NFT you don't even own the digital item, nor is it intrinsically associated with a blockchain entry that you can prove ownership of. You basically own a link to a url which for some period of time will hopefully point at the jpg (or whatever it is).

cloudking• 5 years ago

Think about collectables in the real world, and imagine how they could possibly work in the digital world. For example, people collect trading cards for various sports, and there is 1 owner per card who can trade/sell the card to others. How would you facilitate this idea in the digital world?

Well you can't use a regular database, because it's easy for it to be hacked/shutdown, and if it's run by a third-party then even if you have entry in that database you don't technically "own" it. Turns out blockchains are a good solution for facilitating the idea of digital ownership, it can't be easily hacked/shutdown, it's run by the community, and if you own the keys to the NFT token that represents your ownership, technically you own that "database entry". You can easily sell/trade your NFT to others via smart contracts, transferring the ownership of the collectable/object they represent. The market has decided that NFTs are a good way to represent digital ownership based on the technical solution.

Want to see a successful example of the trading card world gone digital with NFTs? https://nbatopshot.com/

encryptluks2• 5 years ago

Except, in many cases the value isn't derived from simply owning something when it is still publicly accessible and can be copied and reupload with many people claiming original ownership. Imagine Hollywood movies in the NFT space where anyone can access them for free and share then for Profit. , or the platform where they are hosted might shutdown. And while you might in some legal sense still have rights to something you'd no longer have access to something the courts haven't really got the involved yet so there is very little case law. It would be like going to judge and saying you own something, and someone else says but they share it for free on the Internet. It would be like movie studios bootlegging their own content

mrow84• 5 years ago

I’ve unfortunately forgotten who it was I saw making this argument, but: why would you want that? We, as a society, finally figured out how to eliminate scarcity of (most forms of) media. New works are being produced at unprecedented rates. What is the social value of reimposing scarcity, beyond an appeal to our (possibly culturally instilled) desire for exclusive possession?

a_f2• 5 years ago

Steam manages to have digital trading cards without blockchains. And I'm pretty sure pokemon and magic the gathering do too, although I am less familiar with them. Whilst there is definitely a security risk with high value digital goods, I'm not sure that it is solved by the blockchain.

DanHulton2• 5 years ago

Trust your instincts on this one. I bet you the people who couldn't figure out WTF was up with tulip bulbs felt much the same way.

e93• 5 years ago

I think a lot of it is to just support artists. A kind of charity from universe for artist to continue doing what they are doing. People who are making big money on NFT are already established artists. With physical art, artist sells it once and has no idea where it is. With NFTs, artists can set up royalties for every sale. With block chain, if you can verify address of artist then as a buyer you can guarantee that you are buying original work and also ensures that all (or some during resale) money goes to artist.

nuerow5• 5 years ago

I think a lot of it is to just support artists.

To me that assertion, albeit convenient to paint a rosy picture, doesn't make any sense. No one needs a convoluted technical scheme to support artists as donating cash is easy and effortless. Buying the rights to a work from an artist also does not require a convoluted technical scheme, and considering that NFTs haven't been used to enforce any right then that hypothesis is also highly dubious.

What NFTs offer is the ability to perform transactions, and ones which don't have any artist or provenance in consideration.

ayngg• 5 years ago

I think you have to look at art and collecting art in general to get an idea of what is happening. When rich people spend big money on art, it is less about having a nice painting and more about things like flexing wealth, tax avoidance, being part of the provenance or whatever. People think that the most expensive painting ever sold, Salvator Mundi, which sold for ~450m, is sitting in storage somewhere in Switzerland. You also have to consider that for these people, it isn't actually a lot of money for them. They are the foundation for the mania that dogpiles on top.

These early NFTs are going to be like the early works of an art movement, and the iconic ones are probably going to be valuable to some degree just because of their place in art history. The art world has probably been waiting for the next kind of innovative movement to come along too. It is sort of a self fulfilling prophecy in that the ones that are bought for absurd amounts of money create the buzz that solidifies them as iconic pieces of the movement. Most will probably end up being worthless.

Art NFTs are like a tiny proof of concept of the idea of NFTs having value. The space, like crypto, is like a sandbox of primitives and people are just figuring things out, throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. That creative environment is probably alluring to people in boring dev jobs who have the financial flexibility to explore. I think it just looks stupid to many because it is basically a completely chaotic wild west where basically nobody knows what is actually going on in terms of a big picture, and so much dumb stuff happens which the media loves talking about for clickbait so that is what everyone sees and uses to form their opinion of it.

rvz2• 5 years ago

You don't hear about the bagholders stuck with their expensive receipts of their CryptoKitties being unsold for years, nor do you hear about the thousands of dollars of gas fees spend on approving and buying these NFTs.

A lot of manipulation happens in the NFT markets which creates the illusion of a marketplace that has 'value' in NFTs that are downloadable. It is either for money laundering purposes, artificially creating volume in a NFT collection or both.

There is a tiny subset of NFTs that have value and utility, but the ones that are downloadable or are audio, videos or image-based ones do not have any value, hence the NFT misconception post.

thephyber12• 5 years ago

The definition of value here is what someone is willing to pay for it. If no one is willing to pay much for a CryptoKitty now that was worth a lot in Dec 2017, that means the value has changed because the market has changed.

The parent says that they don't see the value in current NFTs. I tend to agree that I don't agree with their current values. But I also don't agree with the proven value (at public auctions) of baseball cards, original NES game cartridges, the vast majority of sports/concert memorabilia, most fine art, etc. But then again, value varies from person to person because we all make priority and value decisions about what we are willing to spend our scarce currency on. Some people are able to make vastly different choices about their NFT purchases because they have vastly different wealth than I do.

Also, CryptoKitties are an interesting choice because they total number of kitties grows as owners breed theirs. The number of CryptoKitties has grown a lot since Dec 2017. Most NFTs I have heard about have a limited run.

koonsolo11• 5 years ago

This is how I understand it: Baseball cards sell for millions of dollars.

Do those cards provide ownership to anything or anyone? No. Are they signed by the original players? No. Do they give you any other benefit? No.

It's just collector items that refers to something, and there is a limited amount of them. But that's basically it.

Now you could argue that you can hold a card in your hand, and an NFT not. But that is not where that crazy value is coming from.

I'm not claiming that NFT's value is justified, I have no idea about that. But to me it seems like a "collectors" thing.

Because let's be serious, nobody in their right mind would pay millions of dollars for a freaking card with some baseball player at the front. Same goes for NFT's.

yokoprime• 5 years ago

With an NFT you own a token with a link to a resource, but the perception is that you own an actual artwork. Think is, the artwork (e.g. a jpg) can be copied an infinite amount of times. So the baseball card analogy falls short, at least as far as the posession of an actual item.

greenhatman3• 5 years ago

I don't think you're actually missing anything. I think those people are just insane.

feketegy• 5 years ago

NFTs are not about the asset itself.

1. Ownership of the "original" - why do you pay so much for an original painting when you can buy cheap/free knockoffs?

2. Flexing - look at me I bought an expensive NFT, look at me I own this and this NFT (just like sports cards, pokemon cards, etc.)

3. Money laundering - cleaning dirty money through NFTs.

4. Legit investment / value store - if NFTs picks up more and more (see Reddit, Twitter implementing NFTs), it's a legitimate investment strategy, just like BTC or ETH

5. Hype and FOMO - why do people buy Supreme branded products? Why are lines at Apple stores when a new iPhone is released?

vmception15• 5 years ago

The NFT collectibles are where the action is. These are more akin to trading cards than expensive one-off art in a gallery that may have made headlines earlier this year.

Imagine that its the same trading card pools of capital that would have bought collections at MSRP, what would the seller’s annual revenue be? There had been no transparency in that. Instead, imagine if the seller only did a single set and everyone could verify that was the only one, the same amount of capital is squeezed i to that one set, which would push the price up. The issuer here makes more money from royalties when people trade pieces of the collection, instead of needing to continually issue that collection.

TomSwirly3• 5 years ago

I hate to admit it but I’m still struggling to understand why people would pay so much for NFTs.

Why would someone pay _anything_ for an NFT?

You only get ownership over the NFT itself, not the artwork.

Someone else could create another NFT from the same artwork or the original artist could.

forgotmyoldname• 5 years ago

So how exactly is the "gas money" calculated? I was led to believe it was expensive because putting all that data into the blockchain costed a significant amount.

Asking because, wanting to verify whether NFTs were really a scam or scheme instead of just following heated Twitter arguments, I looked into uploading my own NFT. Gas money for a single image was $250--estimated earnings for an NFT are in the low dollars for most people, so it certainly wasn't worth it for me. I told a friend how insane the price was and went back to attempt the process once more a few minutes later to get a screenshot showing him I wasn't lying--gas money for the same image was suddenly over $800.

I can't think of any reasonable way to justify such costs if it's just encoding a few bytes of text and not an actual image, so now I'm doubly suspicious of how these costs are actually calculated. It reminds me of countless other schemes where you put in a bunch of initial cash to "start your own business", then spend the rest of your days desperately trying to find buyers.

Fckd• 5 years ago

Of course its a scam. all are fuelled by cheap printing press

folli4• 5 years ago

(just speaking for Ethereum)

The gas fees are a constant, so you pay a certain amount of ETH to mint your NFT. You don't upload any image data but solely the address (so a couple of bytes) of the owner.

The reason that this costs so much is the exponential increase in ETH prices in the recent years and the network congestions (gas price depends on the workload of the ETH network). What used to be a couple of cents or so is now easily $70, depending on the ETH price and network congestion.

I whipped up a calculator some time ago: https://nuftu.com/pricing

meheleventyone11• 5 years ago

The cost is about how expensive it is to execute the smart contract. Plus a tip to get your transaction executed earlier.

https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/gas/

If you’re like “well those costs are ludicrous compared to the computational complexity” then you’re right. But then the entire thing is secured by the ludicrous overspend of power through computation.

IceWreck• 5 years ago

NFTs are such a sham to claim fake "ownership" of an asset. All the images/files are public anyways.

Nothing stops me from creating another blockchain and call it NFTv2. And then I can create an NFT which points to the original asset. Its just as legit as the Etherium one.

Or just change the link to the same file and create an NFT on the Etherium blockchain.

Kiro4• 5 years ago

NFTs has nothing to do with ownership or uniqueness of the image itself. It's all about bragging rights that you bought something that was minted by X.

MrPatan2• 5 years ago

You can also copy and set up your own land registry and say it's all yours. Yes, it's all a social convention, like all property. If enough people decide it's "real" then it is.

robjan• 5 years ago

You can't copy and enjoy my property for free, you can copy and enjoy an NFT for free.

If you were to get the new Land Registry enforced you would have to change the law, in which case the blockchain is no longer needed since the idea and enforcement of ownership is centralised with the government.

notindexed• 5 years ago

Why misconception? NFT = proof of ownership

iamacyborg• 5 years ago

The only thing it proves ownership of is of the NFT itself and not the asset the NFT claims to be.

thephyber12• 5 years ago

The point is "proof of ownership" of what.

The misconception seems to be that people think the owned content is inlined in the blockchain, when it more often is a URL in the NFT / on the blockchain. Hence, the proof of ownership is contextual around what content existed at the URL at the time of minting, which might change if the controller of the URL changes the content after minting.

parafactual• 5 years ago

This means that NFTs still don't denote much without a centralized authority. Doesn't that defeat the point?

(That might not make them worthless, since value is socially constructed, but it makes the claims of decentralization seem less impressive.)

meheleventyone11• 5 years ago

All the trading hubs like OpenSea are centralised to the point that some NFTs will get blacklisted if a famous enough person in the community gets scammed out of theirs.

jamespitts• 5 years ago

Here is more information about current NFT-related standardization efforts in the Ethereum community:

https://www.nftstandards.wtf/

Discussions about proposals & implementations are happening here:

https://ethereum-magicians.org/tag/nft

iamwil6• 5 years ago

This isn't the whole story. Some NFTs are written to the blockchain.

Avastars https://avastars.io/ is an NFT collection that's represented by an SVG. The SVGs are all written on-chain, back when it was cheaper to do so. https://nft.substack.com/p/the-art-of-avastars

The original NFT, Cryptopunks is also written on-chain now. (It wasn't originally). https://www.larvalabs.com/blog/2021-8-18-18-0/on-chain-crypt...

One of the oldest NFTs, MoonCatRescue https://mooncatrescue.com/ writes an encoded version of the image onchain, and uses a published function to regenerate the image. The MD5 hash of the algorithm is written onchain so you know you're using the right one. https://github.com/ponderware/mooncatparser/blob/master/moon...

For other NFT projects that can't use these techniques, they use decentralized storage like IPFS and ARWeave.

You can check what technique is used with this tool for any NFT project on ETH chain: https://checkmynft.com/

exclipy• 5 years ago

Did you read any of that code?

I looked at mooncatparser and it just hardcodes all possible 2-bit art as a big string array constant at the top of the JS file. Definitely not "on the blockchain". The part that's stored on the blockchain is the index into the big string array.

iamwil6• 5 years ago

Good job reading the code! It's as you should do when looking at a project.

Is there a way where the image can be replaced with another based on the scheme? I didn't see any, which achieves the same result as putting the image on-chain.

Kosirich• 5 years ago

I haven't studied NFTs but I will admit I had an misconceptions that the low pixel art NFTs purpose was that it was able to be stored on the chain itself as "it's own thing" or as a representation of a "bigger piece".

My question would then be.... why the lowres pixelated NFTs if they are being hosted somewhere else?

amomo2• 5 years ago

Funny to see this "epiphany" just now. Maybe one solution would be to store files on bittorrent and Blockchain pointing to a bittorrent link ? There are already multiple webclients for bt, this would not be an issue. Reliability would "just" depend on the number of peers

thephyber12• 5 years ago

Website, BitTorrent, IPFS, etc all have the possibility for bit rot.

There is, however, incentive for the person who currently owns the NFT to maintain the content at the current URL or their investment would suffer a loss of value.

nieve• 5 years ago

Is it necessarily true that the owner of the NFT has any control at all over the server being pointed to? It seems highly unlikely to me that it's universal or even common.

skinnyasianboi• 5 years ago

"..There are other techniques such as using a solution like IPFS,.." IPFS is pretty much the standard

ebanana• 5 years ago

sometimes i feel like nfts are the new mlm

bananamerica9• 5 years ago

Three types of people "get" NFTs:

- those that have something to gain from it, and are likely insincere;

- those that are ashamed of not getting it and merely pretend to understand it;

- those that duel in such profound abstractions that the actual world for them becomes a nuisance, a minor detail, an after thought.

NFTs are a joke, a thought experiment taken too far. They're the modern version of The Emperor's New clothes.

koonsolo11• 5 years ago

Or they are the new baseball cards.

thinkingemote3• 5 years ago

Baseball cards used to come with a purchase of a real product. They were an incentive to buy actual things. People collect them now, but they didn't exist on their own back then initially.

bananamerica9• 5 years ago

Please stop with this ridiculous comparison. I can hold a baseball card. I can look at it. I can put it on a binder. It's an object of appreciation, like a painting I hang on the wall. It is tangible. NFTs are nothing but an empty concept which seduces programmers with a weak grasp on reality. It's fairy dust, or an eunuch's cum.

NFTs are magical thinking, occultism for programmers.

koffiezet• 5 years ago

But you get a baseball card that's pretty hard to perfectly duplicate, not a link to a digital picture of a baseball card, which can be copied at virtually zero-cost, and where you have zero control over the hosting of that picture, and can be replaced at any time.

What's the point of 'owning' a digital baseball card if anyone can download it and store it on their PC? There's only one Mona Lisa, it only hangs in the Louvre, you can't just have an exact copy of it at zero cost.

It's make-belief ownership. The only viable application I've seen is digital licensing, for non-free software or digital assets. This can work in a closed-garden system, like in-game assets, software licensing, ... where you don't have control over the environment you're in, but cannot work on an open internet. But anyway, the gas-cost on eth is WAY too high ($70-ish to mint?) for this to be actually used for these applications, and if you're in a walled-garden anyway, who needs decentralisation?

aorth2• 5 years ago

What happens when the domain in the tokenURI expires? Or when the HTTPS certificate expires? Or when the server gets hacked? Or the server changes owners? Or the server operator just decides to abscond? Etc... this is complete nonsense.

thephyber12• 5 years ago

Caveat emptor. This is no different from due diligence when making any other form of investment.

Observation: there is an incentive for the buyer to maintain the content (or perhaps even to replace with higher value content) at the URL. Perhaps NFT owners can band together to form a co-op / condo association if an NFT-content host site/domain goes down to maintain it. The next set of features I keep reading about in cryptocurrency/NFT space is "governance", which could cover this type of responsibility.

aorth2• 5 years ago

Caveat emptor. This is no different from due diligence when making any other form of investment.

Thanks for taking the time to respond, but it's _literally_ the value proposition of "crypto" evangelists that this stuff will be around "forever" on the blockchain. When you invest in stocks or put money in a savings account there are shit tons of regulations against insider trading, fraud, etc, not to mention federal deposit insurance. With "crypto" you have nothing except a pinky promise from some developers, essentially, who say that their "blockchain" aka directed graph will be around forever!

Observation: there is an incentive for the buyer to maintain the content (or perhaps even to replace with higher value content) at the URL.

Why would the buyer of the NFT have to maintain the content at the URL? It's pointing to an external, off-chain URL that the _seller_ chooses.

vmception15• 5 years ago

In response to the title, some are.

Since blockspace has increased some people are deploying NFTs that put the binary data directly into them

A particularly novel one, to me, was that people did it with SVGs and html injection directly into the image location methods of the NFTs

It works! The marketplaces and wallets just read that. No ipfs required.

kerng• 5 years ago

There was a post on Embrace the Red a while ago. It also talks about how there is not even a hash required on-chain.

https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2021/broken-nft-standar...

It all is really up to whoever implements it to make decisions on how secure/verifiable/reliable an NFT is.

Storing the image itself on-chain actually makes most often not a lot of sense if you think about it, but at least a hash should be required in such cases.

Kiro4• 5 years ago

People seem to gloss over the first example (Project Memento) which I think is a great example where NFTs make sense. It's just a configuration with a fixed value (the coordinates) and a dynamic value you can actually change yourself (the letter). Other apps and games can use the same NFTs to build something different based on the same coordinates.

Let's say I build a war game where Project Memento NFTs decide ownership of land on map. The blockchain is an open API and players just need to connect their wallets to my game in order to play. HyperDragons eating CryptoKitties to grow stronger is a good example of one app using NFTs from another.

Art NFTs on the other hand are more like digital signatures. It doesn't really matter what is stored in the NFT. What gives it value is the fact that it was minted by X (where X can be an artist or a service). Yeah, you can use IPFS or store a hash but what's the point? You're buying the bragging rights, nothing else.

can16358p7• 5 years ago

I believe it really boils down to consensus. If enough entities in a community "accepts" some platform/publisher as valid, those collectibles created by those entities (which can easily be validated on the chain) will have subjective value. Just like money: it's a piece of paper but enough people/companies/governments legally accept it so that paper now has a value more than it's physical components. I can print money too but it will be fake and worthless, even if I print it on a more expensive paper. An NFT is just some bits on a blockchain after all, but when enough people accept those "bits" by a particular entity, they are worth something. Sure anyone can clone/copy paste those JPEGs and mint them just as I can print dollars on my home printer, but as long as they aren't issued by an entity that many trust (e.g. A legally accepted central bank) they are worthless. Which in this case community is free to choose their central bank and currency, and change if they have the interest, creating a whole new economic system.

ostenning• 5 years ago

Consensus needs realistic price evaluations otherwise NFTs and most of crypto will remain what it actually is: a pump and dump asset class.

can16358p7• 5 years ago

Currently the "value" is determined by hype and speculation. The more NFT (or whatever replaces that idealogically) is accepted into the society, the more "real" uses it will have and whatever real (non-pump-and-dump-JPEGs) use it has will stabilize its value when the hype ends.

thinkingemote3• 5 years ago

Exactly if people don't value it , it has no value.

So it's fundamental to shill, promote and evangelise and maybe stretch the truth for NFTs for it to succeed.

To not do so endangers the hype and your own investment. If people don't believe it, it has no value.

Money was a token that has direct exchange value. You don't really need to promote it to give it value.

andronov04• 5 years ago

The longevity of many NFT projects is a real problem. This is why we set out to create the Smarts platform. The platform combines smart contracts with generative arts (smart arts, abbreviated into Smarts). Smarts is a new platform where the entirety of the artwork is stored in, and computed from smart contracts with no external dependencies at all. No IPFS, no Arweave, no APIs, no baseURI, no p5js, etc. So all Smarts artworks will live as long as Ethereum itself.

However, the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) has some severe limitations for smart contracts - less than 25kb, no floating point math, limited gas amount for each invocation. So this makes it an interesting coding challenge to create smart contract based arts, it’s bearing some similarities to the demoscene.

We haven't launched yet, but you can check it out the work in progress here: https://smarts.is/

casi18• 5 years ago

in this thread: people claiming crypto people dont understand society, whilst also ignoring the existence of reputation, legitimacy, and community.

hermitsings• 5 years ago

Enlightening

MrPatan2• 5 years ago

Many are fully on chain, SVGs generated on the fly or JS code that generates the artwork.

NFT misconception: JPEG aren't stored on the Blockchain

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