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by zomglings 1319 days ago
This is a bad title on the HN submission. I suspect the title is intentionally designed to capture people's attention and mislead them. The article title is much better: Does OpenSea Shared Storefront have a backdoor?

The submission title does not specify who can take anybody's tokens. Anyone who reads the article can see that the author claims that Open Sea administrators can seize anybody's tokens, and questions whether it is legal for them to retain this ability. This is much more of a nuanced situation than "omg open sea has a backdoor all your nfts are belong to us". The author also says that they will write more about this in a follow-up post.

I believe the author is correct. This is behaviour pertinent to Open Sea's ERC1155 contract (called the Open Sea Shared Storefront), and not their marketplace as a whole.

2 comments

I'm not sure if it's intentional, but the title is written in such as way that it is very easy to misparse as something like "Backdoor in OpenSea allows anybody to take tokens..."

That actually is how I first read it. Not saying that doesn't make this a bad thing, but the HN title should really be reverted to the article title.

This title rewrite is really bad. One interpretation of it is basically slandering opensea. I suspect OP (the person who decided to make up a title instead of using the article title) is not a native English speaker, and there are two ways to interpret their title and intentions:

1. they meant it as a question "does backdoor in opensea allow to take anyone's tokens?".

2. they meant it as a statement "backdoor in opensea allows you to take anyone's tokens"

Obviously #2 is a lot worse. Hopefully they just forgot the question mark and weren't intentionally being malicious.

The original title is bad as well, because it is clickbaity.

Best title for submission would be: OpenSea administrators can take any tokens minted on the OpenSea Shared Storefront

Ok, done. (Submitted title was "Backdoor in OpenSea allows to take anybody's tokens".) Thanks!