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by amomo 1684 days 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
1 comments

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.

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.
With IPFS you can pay someone to pin a file (or do it yourself), and bittorrent you can just seed it yourself.

But if your NFT is a URL to some random webserver (which might not be the majority of NFTs, but is not an insignificant number according to [0]), you have no control over it unless the previous owner passes along the credentials somehow. Or, they might not pass them along, and modify or delete the file because...what are you going to do about it? Good luck getting a refund.

Either way, you have to do something to ensure your investment doesn't become unreachable.

[0]: https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1448066579611234305

I’m saying the original minter of the NFT gets the choice to choose where the URL points. Any future owner needs to do due diligence to understand what they are buying.

If the minter or original auction house can not vouch or has no contract with the content host, the investment can suffer from an unexpected content switch at any time.

If a buyer realizes this could adversely affect the content, the value could suffer.