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by akerl_
869 days ago
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I think the flaw is that you’re misunderstanding the critique. If you’re OK with “ownership” being “I paid somebody to write down that I am the only person who owns this asset, and they won’t give it to anybody else”, you don’t need any blockchains. You can own the monkey picture in the same way that I own my domain name, or my RuneScape account. If OpenSea decides to change the deal, they can just do so, because while they’re using a blockchain, they are the sole entity that controls how it interacts with the Ethereum blockchain. So other than for the “NFT” hype, they may as well just run a MySQL DB with “item” and “owner” columns. By contrast, the thing that Ethereum actually does, for better or worse, with on-chain contracts, is that the consensus of the chain is what counts. If you hold ETH according to the chain, it’s yours. The only way for another entity to take it away from you is to have your private key, or convince 51% of the participants to agree with them. |
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So is my NFT! No one can take it away from me. There are a couple things that could happen:
- The artist can mint an additional copy; this could mean my own copy loses value, or it could mean the community doesn't care, and continues to value the original one. Similarly, the folks that issue some ERC-20 token can decide to issue a new one and abandon their old token. In fact, vitalik et al could advocate for a fork for ETH. This is just how the social layer works.
- The media file associated with the NFT could be lost or changed. This can be a problem, but can also be addressed (IPFS), and can also be art: https://publico.pob.studio/piano
Larva Labs, the pioneers behind Cryptopunks, didn't even bother to put a link into their NFT at the time: it literally is a item/owner table. They didn't forget the link, they correctly understood that what the token represents is defined at the social layer.