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Blockchain can’t really store an entire image (it could, but that would be a loooooot of space), so you’re just buying a URL. Imagine paying for a URL of an image of an ape.
It would cost tens of thousands of dollars per megabyte or something
but isn’t that their point? i was always confused by this
No.
What you’re buying is a non fungible token on a specific contract. This contact may link to an external resource for the image. It should be IPFS but some contracts link to a specific IPFS gateway. Either way [with IPFS] the link contains a cryptography secure ID of the image. Sometimes the contract just links to a private website.
The owner of the NFT does not own the image and certainly not its copyright. They own a number inside a specific “smart” contract.
The copyright owner can also legally make another NFT for the same image set. In fact I think anyone can because the links to the images on IPFS aren’t copyrightable. Although [regular] contracts and defamation law might mess with that. Although they can’t then change the original smart contract outside its logic.
What exactly are the terms on that contract? The
suckerbuyer pays money and receives…?He gets the “rights” to “ownership” of the image. Whatever those two words may mean to the buyer, seller and everyone else.
It’s no different from how your landlord owns the house you live in, really. You’re in posession of it (live in it), but he’s written in some registrar the county keeps that says who owns what.
NFTs are similar in that regard. They’re like a land deed - they " both prove" you “own” something. However, land deeds are common in society (and courts take them into account, police throw out “squatters”, etc).
With NFTs? It might become the same as a land deed, where you do “own” the stupid image referenced in it as you own the house referenced in your land deed. All ownership is like this - you don’t need to “have physically” in order to “own”.
Will NFTs be the next land deed? Probably not. But they’re conceptually quite close. What makes the difference is wethersociety upholds them or not.
Just think of money: $50 canadian in cash is worthless in a US Walmart. You can’t use it to pay. With a card, it’s a different story.
And about that card: it’s also a similar situation. It doesn’t hold cash. It identifies your bank account and then the POS machine does some magic so your bank promises the money you paid will be taken from you and given to the store. Again, whatever that may mean (and entail).
No. As I said the buyer does not own the image. They known the token.
So by the landlord analogy, if you were to “steal” the image and save a copy, you’d be the equivalent of squatters?
Except the comparison between “stealing” an NFT and squatting is the same as between pirating and movie and stealing a car, in that the owner of the digital object doesn’t actually lose anything like the physical one does.
The fact a land deed and an NFT do the same thing (serve as a proof of ownership) doesn’t mean a photo is land.
Ownership comes in different forms, and each is specific in a multitude of regards, including crimes against them. Land, vehicles, phones, money, art, IP,… Each slightly different from the rest. I nowhere made the equivalence you did. I merely said an NFT is like a land deed in that it “proves” “ownership”, whatever that may mean. Nothing more, nothing less.
Anyone who ever did a squat at the gym is a criminal by your logic.
I think a better analogy is with IRL art.
A bunch of art in museums and galleries does not belong to the museum or the gallery, but rather to private parties. These parties own the art and have a document proving it, but anybody can visit the museum/gallery and photograph the art, or even purchase reproductions of the art.
NFT is the document proving ownership.
So, I get what you mean. Think about it more like this. Gold is expensive, right? People want gold because it’s valuable. But what if gold was way more inconvenient to move around. Like if it was way bigger. That’s not desirable. You want it to be valuable, but not expensive to manage. (Security aside, because obviously you want to protect your valuable things. But even if gold was inconvenient to work with and you had a lot you’d still want security.)
Cryptocurrency Blockchains give the miners rewards for working, but there are also transaction fees. The miners get that too. If the amount of data you’re storing in the Blockchain is bigger, then the fee would be bigger. Which isn’t good.
I hope that clears it up lol, I don’t know if I made sense.
Quick aside: Always irks me when someone says “Blockchain” singular, like it’s a proper noun entity cargo cult god. “A blockchain” is a particular type of data structure akin to a decentralized linked list, or in the context of one particular cryptocurrency you’d say “the blockchain”. I know that the crypto VCs use the word in that singular proper noun way, but they’re doing that intentionally to cultivate a misplaced reverence and we shouldn’t ape them.
Anyway bitcoin core v30, which just released, expands the maximum data size of a non-monetary transaction parameter called the “OP_RETURN” from 80B to 100kB, meaning that normal bitcoin transactions really can now store plain old jpgs with basically zero extra encoding. It was a wildly controversial change within the dev community, some people probably being paid under the table to push it through etc, but yeah it can do that now. I assume that some blackhat has already put CSAM onto the blockchain in protest.
However at this time you only have to pay < 0.2 sats/Byte to almost guarantee your transaction goes into the next block, so absent miners showing discretion and refusing to mint big OP_RETURNs, that 100kB transaction would actually only cost about 20,000 satoshi, or ~22 USD.
It was a wildly controversial change within the dev community
Sounds like it would be, isn’t the reason to keep storage expensive that everything included in a transaction needs to be stored forever by every single network participant running a full node?
Yeah that’s the dominant perspective, and the way I see it. The core devs seem to have the perspective that if they don’t allow storage of arbitrary data, they’ll only encourage the abuse of other transaction parameters to work around it, or encourage anticompetitive side channels where users pay miners directly to include their zany data. And that by opening the floodgates, they allow market competition to decide how much that data is actually worth.
The blockspace has not exploded to capacity with OP_RETURN data in the past week, so the whole controversy could just end up being what politicians these days call a “nothingburger”, without even the demand to reveal who was right now that the NFT craze has mostly ended. And if that’s the case, the core devs technically made the right choice. We’ll see.
What I was talking about is the storage requirement for holding a blockchain containing every NFT ever minted on that chain. That’s a lot of storage if it’s the actual images.
Oh yea you’d be trying to store essentially a whole image hosting site, it’d be absurd and only data centers would do it. In the case of bitcoin the block size limit is roughly 4MB and they rarely if ever hit that. Whole chain going back to 2009 is less than 800GB.
I’ve heard Bitcoin on-chain CSAM allegations for years but could never verify it. It would be interesting if a pruned copy was safer than an archival copy, forcing users onto Tor if they’re unwilling to trust anyone.
Pruned copy would indeed be safe, it omits OP_RETURN data completely.
has an NFT theft (right click save) ever gone to trial? did anyone ever sue for NFT theft?
That’s not NFT theft. The original author of the image holds rights to the image, so they could (if they were insane enough) try prosecuting saving a jpeg.
The NFT owner holds the token, not the image.
The NFT doesn’t hold the rights to the image. That’s one of the biggest parts of NFTs. Transferring the NFT doesn’t transfer the image rights, because the NFT doesn’t inherently hold any image rights. The NFT is simply a string of characters that say you own the specific image. But it doesn’t confer any actual rights, aside from being able to say that you own it.
I could mint an NFT for the US constitution. That doesn’t mean I can sue others for reprinting it. Because owning that NFT doesn’t mean I own the copyright for the constitution. I also couldn’t stop someone (like congress) from changing the constitution later. Because again, I don’t actually own the rights to the constitution. All I own is an NFT, which says I own the constitution.
NFT theft would require stealing that token. But again, stealing the token wouldn’t steal the rights to the constitution, because the token didn’t actually confer any ownership rights to the constitution.
The NFT doesn’t hold the rights to the image (…)
Yes, that’s what I said.
so you’re saying that an NFT owner could sue someone who right click saves a jpeg by claiming copyright infringement?
I’m assuming that by now, someone would have tried that in court. possible, but all court cases regarding NFTs tend to be about fraud or stealing the NFT itself rather than going after someone who just right click save the image.
which would be such a BS trial. because they are automatically downloaded in a temp cache whenever you see it displayed in a website.
They’re saying the opposite of that. The image creator could theoretically do so for copyright infringement if they were so inclined, as they retain the rights to the image. The NFT owner owns the Token embedded in the image. The image itself it not what is being traded when NFTs are traded, the ownership rights to the token associated with the image are being traded.
so you’re saying that an NFT owner could sue someone who right click saves a jpeg by claiming copyright infringement?
No, because they don’t hold any rights towards the image. They have the rights to the token proving “ownership” of the image.
Think of it this way: many museums and galleries have art that doesn’t belong to them, but rather to private parties. These owners have documents proving they own the piece of art, but you can, at any time, go to such a museum/gallery and snap a photograph of the art. Or even buy a professional replica.
NFT is the document proving ownership.
I think the trend died so quickly that nobody cared about theft lol
I would be shocked, that’s pretty much just a joke about NFTs. The people who own them think being part of the club is what’s valuable, not the jpeg.
A lot of IP theft and license violations is not prosecuted anyway.
But if you saved someone else’s to your computer, you could still see it, lol
nooooooo that’s illegal /s
I paid thousands for that URL please be respectful when you access it, the few months it’s accessible.
Not even, you can save the URL to the image, which is public, because the blockchain is public.
One person sold some NFTs then changed the images to rugs, no clearer way of showing what your actually paying for.
They were hosted on AWS! 😅 I thought the expensive ones at least had to be good enough to have the assets on IPFS.
It’s unrealistic to expect 100% apetime.
All my apes gone
instead of spending money on an nft you should just pay $20 to get punched in the face
Too cheap, it cost about 200$ to process an NFT transaction on top of whatever price it was meant to have.
when they were talking about having nft movie tickets, those tickets would have been over 200$ each.
it was as expensive as stupid
The image is not the NFT. How do people still not get it. You own the TOKEN not the image
Bro that’s worse
Yeah you own a token which holds a copy of the link because storing image data on blockchain would be a fucking nightmare.
Entire things a gag.
Basically someone noticed you could make a crypto where each one holds unique to the blockchain data, and this is the best use they could make with it…
It makes me wonder what happens when one of these bag holders straight up no longer runs nodes, the few others who ran them follow, and no one is holding up the blockchain anymore. I guess someone could set up a new node, but would that temporary loss make it a new blockchain? Also they’d just be able to gank everyone’s worthless tokens lol.
It’s a bet, the current owners have wagered that the structure will exist long enough for someone else purchase it later at a higher price, under the auspice that they in turn will be able to pass this bag forward again later. Everyone actually involved knows there’s no value to it OTHER then the record of previous sale prices and the line that keeps going up.
…nobody’s saying it’s not worse
That’s… That’s the entire joke. Is that you don’t own it.
No, NFTs are a joke but the post doesn’t land
Jets flying low today then eh?
Oh yeah? If you own the token, show it to me. Hold it up in your hands. Show it to me fungibly.
I mean, I own a snow shovel but I have no way to prove it because I’m not at home and I don’t have a photo of it.
I’m not saying blockchain is amazing, and I don’t even think we’ll put it to any good use (I mean it’s been years), but the concept of property can be nebulous.
I was just talking shit about NFTs since they are specifically non-fungible. I have a dim view of them, and have yet to see a use case that couldn’t be done more elegantly through account ownership, like owning a game on Steam for example. I know proponents like to argue that they own their token, and I don’t own my games, but I feel like enacting laws over software ownership can fix that, where NFTs are fundamentally valueless without a company providing value. Like the Nascar mobile game NFTs that became worthless once the game was canceled. I own the token for a virtual car, but it now does nothing and has no value. And I wouldn’t mind that, except for the fact that the lock chain is inherently resource intensive, so we wasted a lot of electricity and clean water to prove someone has a now useless Dale Earnhardt.
Well, I don’t think having something in your steam library counts as owning it either, needs to be totally DRM-free and available if you or Steam is offline.
Agreed on the account ownership though, just a straightforward system that NFTs overcomplicate.
NFTs are useful in cases far removed from owning a jpeg. Things like supply chain, where each item is tied to an NFT, akin to a tracking number. You now have an immutable history of when and where each item is along every step of the supply chain
But again, the computer that would go into that kind of a system is astronomical per item. It just doesn’t make sense to use.
Only if you’re talking about a Bitcoin-style public ledger blockchain. The auditable, immutable history can also make sense in a private blockchain that costs next to nothing to add to, can be backed up for a song, and can only be added to if you hold the private key.
I haven’t heard of this implementation. Yeah, this 100% is viable.
Yet. That is the big reasoning behind proofs of chain like work, etc.
Well then go home, get your camera and your token, and show it to us. We can wait.
Hey buddy, I got the deal of a lifetime for you. As a one-time offer I’ll sell you the Brooklyn Bridge for a never-before seen price.
I think most people actually do understand the distinction at this point and just aren’t impressed enough to care. Like wow, after my computer’s PSU ignites and fries the whole rig into a charred cube, I still have the sales receipt for it… Big flex. Snapping photos of my gaming rig’s sales receipt to impress my buddies on discord. Look at all this money I spent.
No no no, an NFT purchase only means you own the concept of that NFT.
I learned that from Futurama.
Not related to the outage itself, but I wonder… can I take an existing NFT’s URL, add a shard (or modify the existing one?), and mint it as a new NFT?
The same URL can be used for an infinite number of NFTs, no idea about that shard thing, tho.
Wait what? I thought it was the hash of the URL, and the same URL generates the same hash (that’s why I thought about changing it by using the fragment - which I’ve mistakenly called “shard” (not sure where I heard that name exactly…))
Every time I think cryptocurrency can’t get any dumber, and every time I’m proven wrong…
From my understanding, and it’s likely I’m remembering it wrong, the whole idea was “you just check the ledger for the first NFT that points to that URL to know who’s the real owner”, which would make the others useless.
So the fragment thing really is necessary, because it’d technically be a different URL and my new NFT will be the first one to match it.
Are you telling me people are STILL paying money for these in 2025? Cause it does say 7. something ETH right there.
if there’s a consistent track record of being able to sell an nft for more than one paid for it, people are more likely to buy it just so they can sell it later for more than it was purchased for. It’s not that much different than any other kind of authenticated memorabilia; you’re not paying for the memorabilia, you’re paying to track the authentication in a repeatable consistent way.
You know the banana with tape over it art piece, right? There is nothing special about the tape or the banana at all, the special part is the authenticated set of instructions that allow the ‘owner’ of the certificate to present the work according to specifications, and since the maintainer of the records proving authenticity will only recognize one person at a time that set of instructions becomes non-fungible.
Are they just images hosted on a web server? Who owns the server?
If it’s in the cloud, you don’t own it. There is probably some language in the plethora of TOS involved in these platforms that makes it so you don’t actually own it. You are just licensing it.
Don’t tell me we need to bail out Amazon’s banks now too?
All our apes…gone
