Can you make NFTs make sense to me?
January 29, 2022 4:39 AM Subscribe
Please explain NFTs to me like I'm five, with a minimum of under-the-hood jargon.
(I know that it's fashionable to bash NFTs and the general crypto scene. I'm not a fan myself. Regardless, let's stick to the bare facts here.)
Below is the general understanding that I've absorbed. Please confirm, deny, or amend each item in this list, as appropriate:
1. An NFT is something like a deed: it states that the holder of the deed/NFT is the owner of a particular thing (typically a digital file, such as a stupid picture of a gorilla).
2. This deed is stored on The BlockChain™, which serves (among other things) as an immutable public register for recording which deeds are held by which individuals.
(Please resist the urge to tell me which BlockChain™ it's stored on, or how it works, unless it's specifically necessary to answer the question. Most explanations of NFTs get bogged down in these technical details, and end up obscuring more than they illuminate.)
3. Each NFT is, somehow, explicitly linked to the specific digital file that it represents. (How? I assume that the NFT and the file have some kind of mathematical relationship with each other? Like, does the NFT contain a hash of the file's contents? Or something like that?)
4. The holder of an NFT only "owns" the stupid picture of a gorilla in the sense that other crypto enthusiasts have come to the mutual agreement that holding the NFT for a thing represents a kind of "ownership".
5. No mechanism exists for enforcing this system of ownership. The concept of ownership described above is completely unrelated to our existing legal system of intellectual property rights. If someone sells prints of the stupid picture of a gorilla, and you take them to court with the argument "but I hold the NFT for this picture!", the judge is going to throw the case out for being stupid.
Further, there are no technical mechanisms which prevent someone from copying and distributing the stupid picture of a gorilla just as easily as any other JPEG.
What have I gotten right above? What have I gotten wrong? What have I overlooked?
Thanks!
(I know that it's fashionable to bash NFTs and the general crypto scene. I'm not a fan myself. Regardless, let's stick to the bare facts here.)
Below is the general understanding that I've absorbed. Please confirm, deny, or amend each item in this list, as appropriate:
1. An NFT is something like a deed: it states that the holder of the deed/NFT is the owner of a particular thing (typically a digital file, such as a stupid picture of a gorilla).
2. This deed is stored on The BlockChain™, which serves (among other things) as an immutable public register for recording which deeds are held by which individuals.
(Please resist the urge to tell me which BlockChain™ it's stored on, or how it works, unless it's specifically necessary to answer the question. Most explanations of NFTs get bogged down in these technical details, and end up obscuring more than they illuminate.)
3. Each NFT is, somehow, explicitly linked to the specific digital file that it represents. (How? I assume that the NFT and the file have some kind of mathematical relationship with each other? Like, does the NFT contain a hash of the file's contents? Or something like that?)
4. The holder of an NFT only "owns" the stupid picture of a gorilla in the sense that other crypto enthusiasts have come to the mutual agreement that holding the NFT for a thing represents a kind of "ownership".
5. No mechanism exists for enforcing this system of ownership. The concept of ownership described above is completely unrelated to our existing legal system of intellectual property rights. If someone sells prints of the stupid picture of a gorilla, and you take them to court with the argument "but I hold the NFT for this picture!", the judge is going to throw the case out for being stupid.
Further, there are no technical mechanisms which prevent someone from copying and distributing the stupid picture of a gorilla just as easily as any other JPEG.
What have I gotten right above? What have I gotten wrong? What have I overlooked?
Thanks!
If you pay someone money, they will add data to a list anyone can look at.
The rest is just techbabble tulipmania; the breathless inanity is part of the plan to get you to pay someone money for no reason.
posted by tivalasvegas at 5:12 AM on January 29, 2022 [36 favorites]
The rest is just techbabble tulipmania; the breathless inanity is part of the plan to get you to pay someone money for no reason.
posted by tivalasvegas at 5:12 AM on January 29, 2022 [36 favorites]
To my understanding, you haven't made any errors in your numbered list.
If you want more detail, I found this video essay/documentary by Folding Ideas, who got his start in film criticism and now does more social commentary, quite illuminating. It goes into some technical detail you've said you wanted to avoid, but it does so in order to make social points.
Additionally, it might be relevant to point out that the images most emblematic of NFTs, the Bored Apes of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, are ickily fascist-adjacent.
(to answer the headline question, I suppose, the answer is "no" because they don't make sense.)
posted by Fraxas at 5:29 AM on January 29, 2022 [19 favorites]
If you want more detail, I found this video essay/documentary by Folding Ideas, who got his start in film criticism and now does more social commentary, quite illuminating. It goes into some technical detail you've said you wanted to avoid, but it does so in order to make social points.
Additionally, it might be relevant to point out that the images most emblematic of NFTs, the Bored Apes of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, are ickily fascist-adjacent.
(to answer the headline question, I suppose, the answer is "no" because they don't make sense.)
posted by Fraxas at 5:29 AM on January 29, 2022 [19 favorites]
What you have overlooked is the deep deep potential for fraud, scams, and grifting. Every old scam you can google or have seen in a movie, someone can do with NFTs.
posted by Chrysopoeia at 5:34 AM on January 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by Chrysopoeia at 5:34 AM on January 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
You may be confused because you think there should be more to it. There really isn't.
My favorite description of an NFT is that you buy a receipt, and in return you get the receipt. Wow. That's worth millions of dollars.
So let's say you buy an NFT of a an image. It's just an image. A png or something. Anyone in the world can get the same image, with the same pixels in the same place. It will look exactly the same. But someone floating around the internet is a promise that YOU and ONLY YOU own the one true NFT version of it.
It's basically a bizarre, ritualized wealth display with nothing real behind it.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 5:51 AM on January 29, 2022 [22 favorites]
My favorite description of an NFT is that you buy a receipt, and in return you get the receipt. Wow. That's worth millions of dollars.
So let's say you buy an NFT of a an image. It's just an image. A png or something. Anyone in the world can get the same image, with the same pixels in the same place. It will look exactly the same. But someone floating around the internet is a promise that YOU and ONLY YOU own the one true NFT version of it.
It's basically a bizarre, ritualized wealth display with nothing real behind it.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 5:51 AM on January 29, 2022 [22 favorites]
Response by poster: Folks, I specifically asked for answers to be constrained to the mechanics of NFTs, and to avoid editorializing. (Perhaps I erred by allowing my own skepticism to show.)
I don't doubt (or necessarily disagree with) the social, environmental, etc. concerns – but those do not address the question that was asked. Answers like "don't bother trying to understand it; it's all just a shell game anyway" are the opposite of what I'm looking for. If you're making that claim (which, again, I'm perfectly willing to believe), then you have presumably looked into questions like the ones that I've asked above in order to arrive at that conclusion. I'm just trying to do the same thing.
Regardless of one's feelings about NFTs, there are some kind of mechanics at play. The effects of those mechanics might very well be fraudulent, inane, etc. Nonetheless, I am trying to understand what the mechanics are. Thank you!
posted by escape from the potato planet at 5:52 AM on January 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
I don't doubt (or necessarily disagree with) the social, environmental, etc. concerns – but those do not address the question that was asked. Answers like "don't bother trying to understand it; it's all just a shell game anyway" are the opposite of what I'm looking for. If you're making that claim (which, again, I'm perfectly willing to believe), then you have presumably looked into questions like the ones that I've asked above in order to arrive at that conclusion. I'm just trying to do the same thing.
Regardless of one's feelings about NFTs, there are some kind of mechanics at play. The effects of those mechanics might very well be fraudulent, inane, etc. Nonetheless, I am trying to understand what the mechanics are. Thank you!
posted by escape from the potato planet at 5:52 AM on January 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
Well, without getting into technical details you say you don't want to get into, there's not much to add beyond the explanation you yourself give in your numbered list. Perhaps I'd add that the thing actually stored in the blockchain is usually a URL to a stupid picture in step 3. My answer wasn't intendeded (and I don't think other answers were either) to tell you not to try to understand, they were telling you that there is nothing more to understand.
posted by Fraxas at 6:00 AM on January 29, 2022 [21 favorites]
posted by Fraxas at 6:00 AM on January 29, 2022 [21 favorites]
Best answer: An NFT is an entry in a registry that cryptographically declares that whoever has a certain password (cryptographic key) is the owner (whatever that means) of a digital asset identified by a URL (https://monkey/monkey.png). It's countersigned in a sense by who ever made the NFT, presumably the previous "owner" of the asset. It's a deed, with cryptographic signatures instead of real ones, in a public register that anyone can read and verify
posted by dis_integration at 6:18 AM on January 29, 2022 [24 favorites]
posted by dis_integration at 6:18 AM on January 29, 2022 [24 favorites]
The way I'd literally explain NFTs to a five-year old is something like 'NFTs are a game that grown-ups play with money. Most of the people that play, lose. If someone tries to talk to you about NFTs, they probably don't spend a lot of time around kids.'
posted by box at 6:21 AM on January 29, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by box at 6:21 AM on January 29, 2022 [7 favorites]
Best answer: Note that there is no real uniqueness to an NFT, in the sense that anyone could mint a new set of NFTs on another Blockchain (or indeed even the same one) that claimed to represent the same digital assets. There could be an ape schism with competing claims to ape ownership. What's non fungible about NFTs is the that the token that represents the entry in the registry cannot be exchanged for another one. 5 Ethereum is 5 eth even if you bought and sold things over and over to end up with 5 eth. Your 5 eth is the same as mine. But there is only one entry in the registry for the NFT. No other token would be the same token.
posted by dis_integration at 6:30 AM on January 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by dis_integration at 6:30 AM on January 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
Best answer: Your list is correct, except that the only connection from NFT to the work it refers to is a URL. That's it. No mathematics or hashes or whatnot. Just a web link. And the image itself isn't stored on the block chain, just the NFT. The image can be hosted wherever the creator uploaded it (hence the URL).
posted by ananci at 6:31 AM on January 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by ananci at 6:31 AM on January 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
I found this blog post on web 3.0 to be helpful in wrapping my head around NFTs.
posted by phil at 6:52 AM on January 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by phil at 6:52 AM on January 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
I think part of why you're having difficulty understanding things on a mechanics nature alone is because the mechanics alone aren't wh they have taken off so much; there's a social-pressure element that is itself part of the popularity.
The video Fraxas linked to is long, but informative, and very good at explaining NFTs. Based on my having watched it recently myself (although I'm not an economics expert), it looks like you do understand the basic mechanics. However - one big reason why NFTs are as widespread as they are is not because of the mechanics - there is actually a huge amount of social pressure among NFT advocates not to question its workings in the first place. Any time someone questions a flaw with NFT mechanics, they are shamed by others for their lack of faith in the system.
I know that this isn't a technical and mechanical explanation - but I think it's important to also remember that social pressure is happening, because it may explain why so many people seem to be going along with elements that don't make sense to a non-participant.
Again, though, in terms of mechanics it looks like you've got it.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:54 AM on January 29, 2022 [8 favorites]
The video Fraxas linked to is long, but informative, and very good at explaining NFTs. Based on my having watched it recently myself (although I'm not an economics expert), it looks like you do understand the basic mechanics. However - one big reason why NFTs are as widespread as they are is not because of the mechanics - there is actually a huge amount of social pressure among NFT advocates not to question its workings in the first place. Any time someone questions a flaw with NFT mechanics, they are shamed by others for their lack of faith in the system.
I know that this isn't a technical and mechanical explanation - but I think it's important to also remember that social pressure is happening, because it may explain why so many people seem to be going along with elements that don't make sense to a non-participant.
Again, though, in terms of mechanics it looks like you've got it.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:54 AM on January 29, 2022 [8 favorites]
NFTs are one of many iterations of the ownership of art. I am ignoring here the many complications of receipts, crypto, Blockchain, DRM, etc. in order to point out what I see as a larger fact. While there are NFTs of things that are not visual art, those seem to be the majority I bump into.
The history of ownership of art is long and has many wrinkles, but digital (and/or online) art led to questions and problems almost immediately, like:
* How can you "own" something without a physical manifestation?
* How can you tell who "owns" digital art?
* How can you "own" something infinitely replicable?
* How can artists make money when the work is no longer unique and reproduction is hard to control--and ultimately uncontrollable, once the internet arrived?
* How can or should gallerists and museums buy or display digital art?
There was and remains an "ownership gap" when it comes to digital art, compared to physical works. Not to say there isn't profit from it at all, but there's been a gap in the landscape for a long time now, and people are still trying to fill it. While I don't suspect (I do not know) these conditions were sufficient to produce NFTs, they were necessary.
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:55 AM on January 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
The history of ownership of art is long and has many wrinkles, but digital (and/or online) art led to questions and problems almost immediately, like:
* How can you "own" something without a physical manifestation?
* How can you tell who "owns" digital art?
* How can you "own" something infinitely replicable?
* How can artists make money when the work is no longer unique and reproduction is hard to control--and ultimately uncontrollable, once the internet arrived?
* How can or should gallerists and museums buy or display digital art?
There was and remains an "ownership gap" when it comes to digital art, compared to physical works. Not to say there isn't profit from it at all, but there's been a gap in the landscape for a long time now, and people are still trying to fill it. While I don't suspect (I do not know) these conditions were sufficient to produce NFTs, they were necessary.
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:55 AM on January 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
Looking at this question and thinking about the Dan Olson video and other things I've read, I have an analogy that might make sense to you.
"I've read about designer jeans, and they seem to be made of the same stuff as budget jeans. Designer jeans are available in fewer sizes than the budget ones, and they're not as durable. Everyone in my school considers designer jeans good and budget jeans bad. Why? Please don't editorialize or dig too much into politics or culture in this question, or get too far into the mechanics of materials science or clothing design."
To the best of my knowledge, this is fundamentally an economics and culture question, which is why so many people are pushing back on that part of it. The cryptographic stuff is as irrelevant as the materials science of denim was to which jeans were cool among teens when I last checked.
The reasons I believe NFTs are fundamentally not about any kind of real value, just techno-fetishism and hyper-capitalist shenanigans, have to do with a few facts.
1) Very few people seem to believe that they have any intrinsic value as, like, art, it's all about how much value they will have in the future. They're not good-looking, they're like very ugly low-effort randomized picrews, they're not designed in a durable way, and they're built on and closely associated with the speculative financial instrument cryptocurrency.
2) The SEC in the US - the Securities and Exchange Commission - regulates everything called a "security" - basically, an investment vehicle or finanical instrument where you put some money in now and you can, in theory, get some more money out later, maybe. Since SO MANY things that have presented themselves like securities have been incompetent, fraudulent, or scams, those rules have gotten strict and complicated. If something walks like a security, swims like a security, quacks like a security, and operates in the US, but isn't making efforts to comply with SEC regulations or at all associated with an established financial institution, it is extremely likely to be bad news preying on less knowledgeable people.
3) In the late 2010's, the SEC started to crack down on "ICOs," Initial Coin Offerings, in an effort to stem an earlier wave of get-rich-quick schemes related to cryptocurrency. It's harder now than it was in 2014 to make up a new cryptocurrency "coin" and raise funds in USD from credulous people who believe they'll make a lot of money if they get in early. It's still possible, as with the Squid Game Coin scam late last year, but it's not happening constantly like it used to.
4) Just like an ICO or a lot of shady investment schemes, a new minting of NFTs involves an explicitly finite quantity of things that will, supposedly, be worth more money later. Sometimes this is even a true claim, for now, as with Bored Ape Yacht Club. But a huge fraction of these involve the original creators taking the money and running. Even the ones that are successful-ish rely on the Greater Fool Theory: the idea that somebody out there is a bigger fool than you who will pay more than you did for your ape or punk or coin or timeshare or bond or whatever.
posted by All Might Be Well at 7:05 AM on January 29, 2022 [6 favorites]
"I've read about designer jeans, and they seem to be made of the same stuff as budget jeans. Designer jeans are available in fewer sizes than the budget ones, and they're not as durable. Everyone in my school considers designer jeans good and budget jeans bad. Why? Please don't editorialize or dig too much into politics or culture in this question, or get too far into the mechanics of materials science or clothing design."
To the best of my knowledge, this is fundamentally an economics and culture question, which is why so many people are pushing back on that part of it. The cryptographic stuff is as irrelevant as the materials science of denim was to which jeans were cool among teens when I last checked.
The reasons I believe NFTs are fundamentally not about any kind of real value, just techno-fetishism and hyper-capitalist shenanigans, have to do with a few facts.
1) Very few people seem to believe that they have any intrinsic value as, like, art, it's all about how much value they will have in the future. They're not good-looking, they're like very ugly low-effort randomized picrews, they're not designed in a durable way, and they're built on and closely associated with the speculative financial instrument cryptocurrency.
2) The SEC in the US - the Securities and Exchange Commission - regulates everything called a "security" - basically, an investment vehicle or finanical instrument where you put some money in now and you can, in theory, get some more money out later, maybe. Since SO MANY things that have presented themselves like securities have been incompetent, fraudulent, or scams, those rules have gotten strict and complicated. If something walks like a security, swims like a security, quacks like a security, and operates in the US, but isn't making efforts to comply with SEC regulations or at all associated with an established financial institution, it is extremely likely to be bad news preying on less knowledgeable people.
3) In the late 2010's, the SEC started to crack down on "ICOs," Initial Coin Offerings, in an effort to stem an earlier wave of get-rich-quick schemes related to cryptocurrency. It's harder now than it was in 2014 to make up a new cryptocurrency "coin" and raise funds in USD from credulous people who believe they'll make a lot of money if they get in early. It's still possible, as with the Squid Game Coin scam late last year, but it's not happening constantly like it used to.
4) Just like an ICO or a lot of shady investment schemes, a new minting of NFTs involves an explicitly finite quantity of things that will, supposedly, be worth more money later. Sometimes this is even a true claim, for now, as with Bored Ape Yacht Club. But a huge fraction of these involve the original creators taking the money and running. Even the ones that are successful-ish rely on the Greater Fool Theory: the idea that somebody out there is a bigger fool than you who will pay more than you did for your ape or punk or coin or timeshare or bond or whatever.
posted by All Might Be Well at 7:05 AM on January 29, 2022 [6 favorites]
Best answer: 1. More or less. It’s a token, which is the result of a contract between the buyer and seller.
2. First the contract is executed on the blockchain. The token then remains on the blockchain.
3. The token is linked to an image or asset because the contract says it is.
4. The owner of the NFT doesn’t own the image at all. The vast majority of contracts ensure ownership remains with the artist/content creator. The owner simply owns the token.
5. Again, there is no connection between ownership of an image and ownership of a token.
How I would explain it: an NFT is like a baseball card you can’t take home from the store. It stays in the shop window and you get to tell passersby about it.
posted by fairfax at 7:16 AM on January 29, 2022 [38 favorites]
2. First the contract is executed on the blockchain. The token then remains on the blockchain.
3. The token is linked to an image or asset because the contract says it is.
4. The owner of the NFT doesn’t own the image at all. The vast majority of contracts ensure ownership remains with the artist/content creator. The owner simply owns the token.
5. Again, there is no connection between ownership of an image and ownership of a token.
How I would explain it: an NFT is like a baseball card you can’t take home from the store. It stays in the shop window and you get to tell passersby about it.
posted by fairfax at 7:16 AM on January 29, 2022 [38 favorites]
To build on cupcakeninja’s comment, let me tell about my experience related to on of Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing. The Wall Drawing’s are works of art that are produced by assistants following written directions from Sol LeWitt.
The National Gallery of Art in DC used to have Wall Drawing #65 on display in the East Building (it was subsequently painted over during renovations). The instructions for the Wall Drawing were included in the description of the work. There was also a noted that the Wall Drawing was donated by a private collector, meaning that this was at least the second reproduction of this work.
After seeing the the work, I filled out a comment card asking about the specific nature of this work. What had the museum actually acquired? If someone else followed the instructions (which the museum posted) would that work also be Wall Drawing #65? If not, why not?
About two weeks later, I received a letter (this was 2005) from the NGA, which said the following:
” The National Gallery of Art, Washington , owns the rights to replicate the Sol LeWitt installation indefinitely because it owns the drawings/instructions for these works. By owning these, the Gallery holds the copyright and right to reproduce them. If someone recreated the wall drawing or wall painting, he would be in violation of copyright law if he described the work as a Sol LeWitt. The reproduction would not be an authentic Sol LeWitt because the reproducer did not own the original Sol LeWitt drawing or instruction. The same applies to the Dan Flavin untitled work (to Barry Newman to commemorate his simple problem, red, yellow, and blue, 1970) that was created for the recent exhibit of his works. The Gallery owns the drawing for this work; so it was able to create an original Dan Flavin from the drawing/instructions (unnumbered, certified gift of the artist) he made before his death.”
To go back to cuppcakeninja’s comment, despite flaws in their execution and the questionable value of some of the content itself, NFT’s are a digital extension of a discussion that’s been going on in the art world for 50+ years.
posted by chrisulonic at 7:27 AM on January 29, 2022 [14 favorites]
The National Gallery of Art in DC used to have Wall Drawing #65 on display in the East Building (it was subsequently painted over during renovations). The instructions for the Wall Drawing were included in the description of the work. There was also a noted that the Wall Drawing was donated by a private collector, meaning that this was at least the second reproduction of this work.
After seeing the the work, I filled out a comment card asking about the specific nature of this work. What had the museum actually acquired? If someone else followed the instructions (which the museum posted) would that work also be Wall Drawing #65? If not, why not?
About two weeks later, I received a letter (this was 2005) from the NGA, which said the following:
” The National Gallery of Art, Washington , owns the rights to replicate the Sol LeWitt installation indefinitely because it owns the drawings/instructions for these works. By owning these, the Gallery holds the copyright and right to reproduce them. If someone recreated the wall drawing or wall painting, he would be in violation of copyright law if he described the work as a Sol LeWitt. The reproduction would not be an authentic Sol LeWitt because the reproducer did not own the original Sol LeWitt drawing or instruction. The same applies to the Dan Flavin untitled work (to Barry Newman to commemorate his simple problem, red, yellow, and blue, 1970) that was created for the recent exhibit of his works. The Gallery owns the drawing for this work; so it was able to create an original Dan Flavin from the drawing/instructions (unnumbered, certified gift of the artist) he made before his death.”
To go back to cuppcakeninja’s comment, despite flaws in their execution and the questionable value of some of the content itself, NFT’s are a digital extension of a discussion that’s been going on in the art world for 50+ years.
posted by chrisulonic at 7:27 AM on January 29, 2022 [14 favorites]
Response by poster: OK! I have learned things:
– I am, more or less, understanding the basic mechanics correctly.
– An NFT is associated with a thing because it contains a URL that points at the thing.
(Which, frankly, makes the whole enterprise seem even more dubious. Because not only can that URL become a 404 – as scorbet points out – but the person who hosts the URL could also change the file to something else.)
– Even proponents of NFTs don't claim that owning the NFT for a thing is the same as owning the actual thing. The NFT system doesn't seek to integrate or compete with existing systems of ownership. Buying an NFT is more like paying money for a certificate which states that you've symbolically "adopted" a thing. (The only difference is that your certificate is guaranteed to be the only one in existence. No one else can "adopt" the same thing.)
(Which, again – means that it's all even dumber than I'd previously imagined.)
posted by escape from the potato planet at 7:50 AM on January 29, 2022 [12 favorites]
– I am, more or less, understanding the basic mechanics correctly.
– An NFT is associated with a thing because it contains a URL that points at the thing.
(Which, frankly, makes the whole enterprise seem even more dubious. Because not only can that URL become a 404 – as scorbet points out – but the person who hosts the URL could also change the file to something else.)
– Even proponents of NFTs don't claim that owning the NFT for a thing is the same as owning the actual thing. The NFT system doesn't seek to integrate or compete with existing systems of ownership. Buying an NFT is more like paying money for a certificate which states that you've symbolically "adopted" a thing. (The only difference is that your certificate is guaranteed to be the only one in existence. No one else can "adopt" the same thing.)
(Which, again – means that it's all even dumber than I'd previously imagined.)
posted by escape from the potato planet at 7:50 AM on January 29, 2022 [12 favorites]
There is no reason to assume a court will not enforce an NFT which confers on the token-holder ownership of or a license to certain intellectual property. (Note of course, as pointed out above, many NFT's don't license or transfer IP.)
NFTs have all the elements required to make a contract enforceable in common law, and any civil law regime of which I am aware. Absent a law that specifically invalidated blockchain smart contracts or denied them remedies for breach (perhaps the Chinese anti-crypto currency laws might have that effect in China?), an NFT owner can sue for breach by the seller/licensor or infringement by a third party as with any other transferred or licensed intellectual property.
Of course, the person being sued would have all the defenses that anyone being sued would have: invalid copyright in the first instance, fair use, absence of damages to the plaintiff, etc. Also, if the token holder purchased anonymously (as they can by design of most blockchains that host NFTs) the defendant would likely be able to compel the NFT holder to provide its/his/her real world identity, which might operate to chill enforcement.
posted by MattD at 7:50 AM on January 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
NFTs have all the elements required to make a contract enforceable in common law, and any civil law regime of which I am aware. Absent a law that specifically invalidated blockchain smart contracts or denied them remedies for breach (perhaps the Chinese anti-crypto currency laws might have that effect in China?), an NFT owner can sue for breach by the seller/licensor or infringement by a third party as with any other transferred or licensed intellectual property.
Of course, the person being sued would have all the defenses that anyone being sued would have: invalid copyright in the first instance, fair use, absence of damages to the plaintiff, etc. Also, if the token holder purchased anonymously (as they can by design of most blockchains that host NFTs) the defendant would likely be able to compel the NFT holder to provide its/his/her real world identity, which might operate to chill enforcement.
posted by MattD at 7:50 AM on January 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
You explanation is essentially correct. As a few other people have mentioned, the only connection between the NFT and the "artwork" is that the NFT contains a URL to the "artwork" (with all the obvious problems that entails).
The only thing that I think you're missing is that the NFT marketplace is a fundamental part of all of this as well, and there are a bunch of them that all work in different ways. This is sort of complex, because it's unclear (to me) what it means to "be" on a particular marketplace. What marketplace the NFT was minted on matters, because the different marketplaces have different "smart contracts" that they will produce when you create a NFT, which can different platform fees, revenue splits, etc. However, the website for a a given NFT marketplace may also show NFTs that were created on different marketplaces, and you can transfer a NFT to someone's wallet regardless of whether they have an account on that marketplace. Some of how NFTs work is standardized (ERC-721 and ERC-1155 are examples of these standards), although there is some flexibility for different marketplaces to implement those standards differently, or to create their own new standards entirely.
This is the stuff that it's really difficult and annoying to figure out how it works, largely because it's mostly way less decentralized than the NFT marketplaces' marketing would like you to believe, so they generally put a lot of effort into obscuring the actual technical details of how things work as much as possible. Sorry :(
posted by wesleyac at 7:53 AM on January 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
The only thing that I think you're missing is that the NFT marketplace is a fundamental part of all of this as well, and there are a bunch of them that all work in different ways. This is sort of complex, because it's unclear (to me) what it means to "be" on a particular marketplace. What marketplace the NFT was minted on matters, because the different marketplaces have different "smart contracts" that they will produce when you create a NFT, which can different platform fees, revenue splits, etc. However, the website for a a given NFT marketplace may also show NFTs that were created on different marketplaces, and you can transfer a NFT to someone's wallet regardless of whether they have an account on that marketplace. Some of how NFTs work is standardized (ERC-721 and ERC-1155 are examples of these standards), although there is some flexibility for different marketplaces to implement those standards differently, or to create their own new standards entirely.
This is the stuff that it's really difficult and annoying to figure out how it works, largely because it's mostly way less decentralized than the NFT marketplaces' marketing would like you to believe, so they generally put a lot of effort into obscuring the actual technical details of how things work as much as possible. Sorry :(
posted by wesleyac at 7:53 AM on January 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
Best answer: One thing you might be missing is that there's no technological reason why NFTs have to represent ownership of a digital asset. First off, they don't have to encode URLs. If they do encode a URL, the URL doesn't have to point to a file. If it does point to a file, the file at that location doesn't have to stay the same. And in any case, theres no reason that pointing-to relationship has to be interpreted as ownership.
Right now, the game people are playing with them is speculation on digital trading cards.
But none of that is inherent in the technology. The technology just enforces these rules:
Why am I insisting on this? Because it's possible that in the future, we'll start hearing about NFTs being used for some extremely different thing that doesn't have to do with art trading at all, or even with digital files or ownership. (This is similar to what happened with blockchain technology itself when NFTs first came about. For a while, everyone was using blockchains for currency, because nobody had popularized other games to play with them. But then it started finding other uses, including smart contracts, of which NFTs are one variety, and suddenly a bunch of people were like "Wait, I thought Ethereum was money, why are there all these pictures?")
I'm a big blockchain skeptic, FWIW. I'm not saying any of this to defend the people making money off of it. But it's good to keep this stuff in mind if you want to follow the news about it—the technology is bigger than the current game that's being played with it, and there will be other games in the future.
posted by nebulawindphone at 7:55 AM on January 29, 2022 [19 favorites]
Right now, the game people are playing with them is speculation on digital trading cards.
But none of that is inherent in the technology. The technology just enforces these rules:
- A decentralized database contains unique strings of characters.
- Each string has exactly one person's "name" attached.
- If your "name" is attached to a string, you can decide to take it off and attach someone else's.
Why am I insisting on this? Because it's possible that in the future, we'll start hearing about NFTs being used for some extremely different thing that doesn't have to do with art trading at all, or even with digital files or ownership. (This is similar to what happened with blockchain technology itself when NFTs first came about. For a while, everyone was using blockchains for currency, because nobody had popularized other games to play with them. But then it started finding other uses, including smart contracts, of which NFTs are one variety, and suddenly a bunch of people were like "Wait, I thought Ethereum was money, why are there all these pictures?")
I'm a big blockchain skeptic, FWIW. I'm not saying any of this to defend the people making money off of it. But it's good to keep this stuff in mind if you want to follow the news about it—the technology is bigger than the current game that's being played with it, and there will be other games in the future.
posted by nebulawindphone at 7:55 AM on January 29, 2022 [19 favorites]
Best answer: One nitpick with nebulawindphone's answer: the uniqueness of the strings is not actually enforced in any real way, AFAICT. (this is a side effect of how the decentralization is done). While some marketplaces might implement a uniqueness check (I'm not sure if they do), there are no uniqueness checks on the system as a whole. The only thing that's actually unique is the address of the token (usually a long hexadecimal number).
posted by wesleyac at 8:09 AM on January 29, 2022 [12 favorites]
posted by wesleyac at 8:09 AM on January 29, 2022 [12 favorites]
The crude but useful metaphor I read is that marriage doesn't mean your spouse isn't sleeping with anyone else they want, but you're the one on the piece of paper.
posted by nakedmolerats at 9:03 AM on January 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by nakedmolerats at 9:03 AM on January 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
Best answer: 1. An NFT is something like a deed: it states that the holder of the deed/NFT is the owner of a particular thing (typically a digital file, such as a stupid picture of a gorilla).
"Something like" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
The only guarantee that being the owner of a particular NFT actually offers is that nobody else can sell that NFT itself. What other people can or cannot do with any resource linked to or otherwise associated with that NFT is entirely beyond the scope of any NFT trading mechanism.
2. This deed is stored on The BlockChain™, which serves (among other things) as an immutable public register for recording which deeds are held by which individuals.
Exactly so. The only detail truly worth bearing in mind about this is that there exist many different blockchains. "The Blockchain" is a generic term describing the technology, not identifying any specific public ledger.
3. Each NFT is, somehow, explicitly linked to the specific digital file that it represents. (How? I assume that the NFT and the file have some kind of mathematical relationship with each other? Like, does the NFT contain a hash of the file's contents? Or something like that?)
Again, "represents" implies a stronger relationship than is warranted by the facts. NFTs frequently do contain links to other digital artifacts, though.
Often, especially in NFTs created and traded on the very popular OpenSea platform, those links are plain old http: or https: URLs such as you'd find in the address bar of any web browser, and these typically have no mathematical relationship whatsoever with the contents of their targets (see Moxie Marlinspike's splendid "At My Whim, #1" for example).
More robust, and commonly used with NFTs on slightly less stupid platforms than OpenSea, are IPFS links. These do include a hash derived from the content of what they link to, allowing that same content to be retrieved for as long as at least one instance of it still exists on some IPFS node somewhere.
4. The holder of an NFT only "owns" the stupid picture of a gorilla in the sense that other crypto enthusiasts have come to the mutual agreement that holding the NFT for a thing represents a kind of "ownership".
Pretty much. Except, again, it's only the NFT itself to which even this rather nebulous version of "ownership" actually applies.
5. No mechanism exists for enforcing this system of ownership. The concept of ownership described above is completely unrelated to our existing legal system of intellectual property rights. If someone sells prints of the stupid picture of a gorilla, and you take them to court with the argument "but I hold the NFT for this picture!", the judge is going to throw the case out for being stupid.
Currently correct.
One possible way that NFTs could actually establish some kind of genuinely defensible ownership claim over some digital work is if a digital artist creates a work, uploads it to IPFS without sharing the IPFS link with anybody else, then creates an NFT containing that link on some blockchain somewhere.
That blockchain entry, which immutably ties a cryptographic hash of the work itself to the digital identity of the first entity to have access to that hash, then marks the point in time at which the existence of the work becomes known to anybody but the creator.
If a work is known to have been made available in this way, tracing its provenance then becomes a matter of searching all extant NFT-supporting blockchains to identify all transactions involving NFTs containing the work's IPFS hash. A genuine ownership claim would then need to rest on demonstrating that the NFT in one's possession is in fact the same one that first appeared on any public blockchain.
Demonstrating that any given NFT of this kind was not originally posted by a work's creator requires identifying a place where it can be shown to have existed at a time earlier than that of the creation of the earliest NFT that links to it. Perhaps a Wayback Machine snapshot of DeviantArt, for example.
However, since the primary use of NFTs is as speculative vehicles, in fact the weak "ownership" conferred by being the only entity able to sell any given NFT is quite enough for most such "owners" regardless of IP law. There's plenty of lucrative speculation going on in NFTs linked to images lifted from DeviantArt without permission.
posted by flabdablet at 9:15 AM on January 29, 2022 [5 favorites]
"Something like" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
The only guarantee that being the owner of a particular NFT actually offers is that nobody else can sell that NFT itself. What other people can or cannot do with any resource linked to or otherwise associated with that NFT is entirely beyond the scope of any NFT trading mechanism.
2. This deed is stored on The BlockChain™, which serves (among other things) as an immutable public register for recording which deeds are held by which individuals.
Exactly so. The only detail truly worth bearing in mind about this is that there exist many different blockchains. "The Blockchain" is a generic term describing the technology, not identifying any specific public ledger.
3. Each NFT is, somehow, explicitly linked to the specific digital file that it represents. (How? I assume that the NFT and the file have some kind of mathematical relationship with each other? Like, does the NFT contain a hash of the file's contents? Or something like that?)
Again, "represents" implies a stronger relationship than is warranted by the facts. NFTs frequently do contain links to other digital artifacts, though.
Often, especially in NFTs created and traded on the very popular OpenSea platform, those links are plain old http: or https: URLs such as you'd find in the address bar of any web browser, and these typically have no mathematical relationship whatsoever with the contents of their targets (see Moxie Marlinspike's splendid "At My Whim, #1" for example).
More robust, and commonly used with NFTs on slightly less stupid platforms than OpenSea, are IPFS links. These do include a hash derived from the content of what they link to, allowing that same content to be retrieved for as long as at least one instance of it still exists on some IPFS node somewhere.
4. The holder of an NFT only "owns" the stupid picture of a gorilla in the sense that other crypto enthusiasts have come to the mutual agreement that holding the NFT for a thing represents a kind of "ownership".
Pretty much. Except, again, it's only the NFT itself to which even this rather nebulous version of "ownership" actually applies.
5. No mechanism exists for enforcing this system of ownership. The concept of ownership described above is completely unrelated to our existing legal system of intellectual property rights. If someone sells prints of the stupid picture of a gorilla, and you take them to court with the argument "but I hold the NFT for this picture!", the judge is going to throw the case out for being stupid.
Currently correct.
One possible way that NFTs could actually establish some kind of genuinely defensible ownership claim over some digital work is if a digital artist creates a work, uploads it to IPFS without sharing the IPFS link with anybody else, then creates an NFT containing that link on some blockchain somewhere.
That blockchain entry, which immutably ties a cryptographic hash of the work itself to the digital identity of the first entity to have access to that hash, then marks the point in time at which the existence of the work becomes known to anybody but the creator.
If a work is known to have been made available in this way, tracing its provenance then becomes a matter of searching all extant NFT-supporting blockchains to identify all transactions involving NFTs containing the work's IPFS hash. A genuine ownership claim would then need to rest on demonstrating that the NFT in one's possession is in fact the same one that first appeared on any public blockchain.
Demonstrating that any given NFT of this kind was not originally posted by a work's creator requires identifying a place where it can be shown to have existed at a time earlier than that of the creation of the earliest NFT that links to it. Perhaps a Wayback Machine snapshot of DeviantArt, for example.
However, since the primary use of NFTs is as speculative vehicles, in fact the weak "ownership" conferred by being the only entity able to sell any given NFT is quite enough for most such "owners" regardless of IP law. There's plenty of lucrative speculation going on in NFTs linked to images lifted from DeviantArt without permission.
posted by flabdablet at 9:15 AM on January 29, 2022 [5 favorites]
4. The holder of an NFT only "owns" the stupid picture of a gorilla in the sense that other crypto enthusiasts have come to the mutual agreement that holding the NFT for a thing represents a kind of "ownership".
5. No mechanism exists for enforcing this system of ownership. The concept of ownership described above is completely unrelated to our existing legal system of intellectual property rights. If someone sells prints of the stupid picture of a gorilla, and you take them to court with the argument "but I hold the NFT for this picture!", the judge is going to throw the case out for being stupid.
Not quite right. IP rights as defined and administrated on a blockchain can be legally enforceable, depending on the specific contract, context, domain/territory, etc. Not saying that all the gorilla pic NFTs out there have attributed rights/licenses that are enforceable - but that it's really not so clear-cut, and really depends on the contract, entities involved, etc etc. (Some of what wesleyac mentions is also relevant in this sense - basically, the conditions and terms under which the contract and NFT come into being.)
This is similar to what happened with blockchain technology itself when NFTs first came about. For a while, everyone was using blockchains for currency, because nobody had popularized other games to play with them. But then it started finding other uses, including smart contracts, of which NFTs are one variety, and suddenly a bunch of people were like "Wait, I thought Ethereum was money, why are there all these pictures?"
So.. this isn't quite what happened. At least in my field (digital content licensing, IP legislation development wrt digital/digitalized assets), people have been talking about blockchain applications, use-cases and implications for the past... 8+ years or so. But yes, in terms of mainstream awareness/reception, the NFT craze has been recent. It's probably relevant to note that NFTs can also be associated with other types of digital files beyond static graphics, although graphic files are what most people now think of when they refer to NFTs.
posted by aielen at 9:35 AM on January 29, 2022
5. No mechanism exists for enforcing this system of ownership. The concept of ownership described above is completely unrelated to our existing legal system of intellectual property rights. If someone sells prints of the stupid picture of a gorilla, and you take them to court with the argument "but I hold the NFT for this picture!", the judge is going to throw the case out for being stupid.
Not quite right. IP rights as defined and administrated on a blockchain can be legally enforceable, depending on the specific contract, context, domain/territory, etc. Not saying that all the gorilla pic NFTs out there have attributed rights/licenses that are enforceable - but that it's really not so clear-cut, and really depends on the contract, entities involved, etc etc. (Some of what wesleyac mentions is also relevant in this sense - basically, the conditions and terms under which the contract and NFT come into being.)
This is similar to what happened with blockchain technology itself when NFTs first came about. For a while, everyone was using blockchains for currency, because nobody had popularized other games to play with them. But then it started finding other uses, including smart contracts, of which NFTs are one variety, and suddenly a bunch of people were like "Wait, I thought Ethereum was money, why are there all these pictures?"
So.. this isn't quite what happened. At least in my field (digital content licensing, IP legislation development wrt digital/digitalized assets), people have been talking about blockchain applications, use-cases and implications for the past... 8+ years or so. But yes, in terms of mainstream awareness/reception, the NFT craze has been recent. It's probably relevant to note that NFTs can also be associated with other types of digital files beyond static graphics, although graphic files are what most people now think of when they refer to NFTs.
posted by aielen at 9:35 AM on January 29, 2022
By the way, when I speak of "selling" NFTs above I'm including all other means of transferring their ownership away from you. As well as actually selling them, you can give them away ("airdrop" them) to somebody else for no payment in return, if you want.
In fact, scammers are doing this right now with NFTs linked to SVG images containing embedded JavaScript malware which, as part of the process of having the browser render the image, also makes it launch a social-engineering attack that surreptitiously induces the recipient to authorize the transfer of everything in their own digital wallet to an account operated by the scammer.
You can also destroy any NFT you currently own, whether it's one you made yourself or bought or had airdropped to you, by giving it away to any of several well-known "burn" accounts. These have a public address, which is all they need to let them accept transfers from other accounts, but no corresponding private address. So once a digital asset (be that NFT or cryptocurrency) has been transferred to a burn account, there's simply no way to transfer it out again and it effectively ceases to exist.
posted by flabdablet at 9:41 AM on January 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
In fact, scammers are doing this right now with NFTs linked to SVG images containing embedded JavaScript malware which, as part of the process of having the browser render the image, also makes it launch a social-engineering attack that surreptitiously induces the recipient to authorize the transfer of everything in their own digital wallet to an account operated by the scammer.
You can also destroy any NFT you currently own, whether it's one you made yourself or bought or had airdropped to you, by giving it away to any of several well-known "burn" accounts. These have a public address, which is all they need to let them accept transfers from other accounts, but no corresponding private address. So once a digital asset (be that NFT or cryptocurrency) has been transferred to a burn account, there's simply no way to transfer it out again and it effectively ceases to exist.
posted by flabdablet at 9:41 AM on January 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
(The only difference is that your certificate is guaranteed to be the only one in existence. No one else can "adopt" the same thing.)Since you said you wanted to know the mechanics, I have to point out this is incorrect. There is nothing preventing someone from creating another NFT pointing at the same thing. However, if you change “no one” to “anyone,” I believe it the statement is true.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 7:39 PM on January 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
There is nothing preventing someone from creating another NFT pointing at the same thing.
There is, however, no way for anybody to create a second NFT pointing at any given thing and have it appear in any blockchain before the first appearance of the original in its blockchain. And all these things are readily, publicly searchable by design.
Even so, all of this just reinforces the point that NFTs do not and cannot, in and of themselves, represent anything other than themselves.
That inclusion of a link inside an NFT to a resource outside it amounts to the NFT representing the resource is an agreement or convention amongst those who trade the NFTs, not a property inherent in the NFTs themselves. As such, it's only ever going to be enforceable by law, not by code.
The only way to get around this would be to incorporate within the NFT itself whatever it purports to represent. But this strategy is unlikely to see widespread adoption, given the potentially unlimited sizes of digital artifacts; even as things stand today, one of the genuine problems that blockchains have as a technology is that massive replication of an append-only data structure consumes huge and increasing amounts of storage space.
And yeah, sure, Moore's Law bla bla bla... but even right now maintaining a complete copy of the Ethereum blockchain requires something of the order of 100TB, which already scotches any reasonable claim that it could be in any way a genuinely peer-to-peer technology. If the most popular items traded on a blockchain were to start consuming tens of megabytes per NFT instead of the tens of bytes they do today, that blockchain would run for months at best before dying for want of storage space.
posted by flabdablet at 9:12 PM on January 30, 2022
There is, however, no way for anybody to create a second NFT pointing at any given thing and have it appear in any blockchain before the first appearance of the original in its blockchain. And all these things are readily, publicly searchable by design.
Even so, all of this just reinforces the point that NFTs do not and cannot, in and of themselves, represent anything other than themselves.
That inclusion of a link inside an NFT to a resource outside it amounts to the NFT representing the resource is an agreement or convention amongst those who trade the NFTs, not a property inherent in the NFTs themselves. As such, it's only ever going to be enforceable by law, not by code.
The only way to get around this would be to incorporate within the NFT itself whatever it purports to represent. But this strategy is unlikely to see widespread adoption, given the potentially unlimited sizes of digital artifacts; even as things stand today, one of the genuine problems that blockchains have as a technology is that massive replication of an append-only data structure consumes huge and increasing amounts of storage space.
And yeah, sure, Moore's Law bla bla bla... but even right now maintaining a complete copy of the Ethereum blockchain requires something of the order of 100TB, which already scotches any reasonable claim that it could be in any way a genuinely peer-to-peer technology. If the most popular items traded on a blockchain were to start consuming tens of megabytes per NFT instead of the tens of bytes they do today, that blockchain would run for months at best before dying for want of storage space.
posted by flabdablet at 9:12 PM on January 30, 2022
Best answer: What you've put in the post is nearly right, except that NFTs make even less sense than this!
1. The NFT itself doesn't say anything about who owns it: it's the network of blockchain miners and validators that promises that someone (meaning a particular cryptographic key) "owns" the NFT (where "ownership" means that the network promises to take actions like transferring the NFT if it gets an instruction signed by the cryptographic key: you can see what the network promises to do by reading the ERC-721 specification). Moreover, the NFT has no meaning outside the network: if people want to use it to indicate ownership (in the real world) of an asset, then they have to agree separately about how to interpret the NFT: the blockchain itself has no way of enforcing such an agreement.
2. Correct.
3. The NFT contains some data which is "immutable" (meaning that the network of blockchain verifiers promises not to modify it). The ERC-721 standard assigns no meaning to this data: you could in theory store a media file, but the expense of running the blockchain is so ridiculously large that people can't afford to do this. Instead it is typically used to store a URL! (You could, and some people do, store a hash of the data pointed to by the URL, but many people don't bother: this is a clue as to their attitude.)
4. Correct. The "owner" of the NFT only "owns" the NFT itself (and only in the sense of "ownership" controlled by the network of verifiers). Anything else requires interpreting the NFT and giving it a meaning in the real world, and there's nothing to stop two people or organizations interpreting the same data in different ways.
5. Correct.
posted by cyanistes at 1:24 AM on January 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
1. The NFT itself doesn't say anything about who owns it: it's the network of blockchain miners and validators that promises that someone (meaning a particular cryptographic key) "owns" the NFT (where "ownership" means that the network promises to take actions like transferring the NFT if it gets an instruction signed by the cryptographic key: you can see what the network promises to do by reading the ERC-721 specification). Moreover, the NFT has no meaning outside the network: if people want to use it to indicate ownership (in the real world) of an asset, then they have to agree separately about how to interpret the NFT: the blockchain itself has no way of enforcing such an agreement.
2. Correct.
3. The NFT contains some data which is "immutable" (meaning that the network of blockchain verifiers promises not to modify it). The ERC-721 standard assigns no meaning to this data: you could in theory store a media file, but the expense of running the blockchain is so ridiculously large that people can't afford to do this. Instead it is typically used to store a URL! (You could, and some people do, store a hash of the data pointed to by the URL, but many people don't bother: this is a clue as to their attitude.)
4. Correct. The "owner" of the NFT only "owns" the NFT itself (and only in the sense of "ownership" controlled by the network of verifiers). Anything else requires interpreting the NFT and giving it a meaning in the real world, and there's nothing to stop two people or organizations interpreting the same data in different ways.
5. Correct.
posted by cyanistes at 1:24 AM on January 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
IP rights as defined and administrated on a blockchain can be legally enforceable, depending on the specific contract, context, domain/territory, [and] on the contract, entities involved
Any attempt to make blockchains into records of real-world rights is going to run into difficulty with fraud and hacking. By design, blockchains have no mechanism for reversing fraudulent and invalid transactions. If someone cons you into signing a transaction that you did not intend to sign, or if someone exploits a bug to execute a transaction without approval, and this is invalidated (say) by a court judgment, then the blockchain has no way of recording that judgment.
posted by cyanistes at 2:28 AM on February 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
Any attempt to make blockchains into records of real-world rights is going to run into difficulty with fraud and hacking. By design, blockchains have no mechanism for reversing fraudulent and invalid transactions. If someone cons you into signing a transaction that you did not intend to sign, or if someone exploits a bug to execute a transaction without approval, and this is invalidated (say) by a court judgment, then the blockchain has no way of recording that judgment.
posted by cyanistes at 2:28 AM on February 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
My understanding is that what’s recorded is a link to where the digital file is, and not anything more directly related to the file. So if the website hosting the stupid gorilla pictures ever goes down, the NFT’s are pointing at nothing, and are therefore useless.
posted by scorbet at 4:55 AM on January 29, 2022 [13 favorites]