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by KingMachiavelli 1918 days ago
If he did that, it would be hard to then sell it in the future because now you have to verify if the signature is real or fake. The frequency of art forgeries demonstrates the issue.

With an NFT, Jack just has to say that this one NFT is the original. Every subsequent transaction can verify the NFT's validity just using math.

2 comments

There's a basic problem with that argument. There is no telling whether you're actually buying an NFT from Jack himself. In fact the NFT world already seems to have a fake and forgery issue of people who claim to have rights or be authors of creations they aren't even affiliated with.[1] Crypto just shifts the goalpost of what's being faked. Which is why the Beeple NFT sale didn't happen somewhere in the nether of the internet, but through Christie's, a 300 year old seller of art, after buyer and seller had communicated personally. They buyer didn't just fork over millions to a pseudonymous wallet-address. The actual verification of the transaction happened in the real world.

Also as a sidenote, you have actually no idea whether this particular blockchain will still be around in the future. In fact given the volatility of tech that's not really that likely to be honest.

[1]https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/20/22334527/nft-scams-artist...

> There is no telling whether you're actually buying an NFT from Jack himself

It's fairly easy to verify the origins of statements here, especially since Jack is on Twitter announcing his NFT on his timeline. What more than that do you need?

Same as you verify any celebrities selling movie props on ebay or whatever, if they haven't announced the sale via some other channel where they are already verified, don't trust that it's the real deal in the marketplace.

> Which is why the Beeple NFT sale didn't happen somewhere in the nether of the internet, but through Christie's, a 300 year old seller of art, after buyer and seller had communicated personally.

This is a feature, not a drawback. You can make the sale however you want, via bank transfer, cash in hand or actually transfer Eth to a wallet. What matters in the end is who stands as the owner in the blockchain, but how it gets there, is irrelevant.

> Also as a sidenote, you have actually no idea whether this particular blockchain will still be around in the future. In fact given the volatility of tech that's not really that likely to be honest.

This is a separate issue from NFTs and applies to the whole cryptocurrency space. For now, the $1.5 trillion market is disagreeing with you that it can disappear in the future, as otherwise people wouldn't put so much money into the ecosystem.

> It's fairly easy to verify the origins of statements here, especially since Jack is on Twitter announcing his NFT on his timeline. What more than that do you need?

Now you rely on a tweet being durable. The entire blockchain history is based on something not on the blockchain that can be edited by people with root at Twitter.

Easy to solve by storing inter-chain links, signatures, immutable data structures and content addressing
And if Jack doesn't want to bother with that? Clearly he didn't do any of that this time.
Is not needed for him to do anything, most of mainstream internet is already archived via Archive.org and similar efforts
Doesn't that mean that in the future Jack can just mint a new NFT and say that the new one is in fact the canonical NFT for his first tweet? The only way to do it would be for NFTs to support non-repudation, but they don't.

The trust layer is in the physical world either based on hearsay or a physical contract with two parties. In any case, it's off-chain.

I can sell Jack's tweet right now.

That's a bigger issue than Jack being able to sell it multiple times.

You can. Is it the same? No.

Just as it's not the same if a random person tries to sell movie props from famous movies, compared to if the person actually being in that production in the first place.

What? If they sell verifiably the same physical prop, then what's the difference?

Jack's tweet doesn't become counterfeit if Hjfrf sells it, it's non-figuratively and verifiably the same exact tweet.

The NFT representing Jack's tweet is a pointer to the tweet. It's possible to create an unlimited number of pointers to the same thing.