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0 sats \ 27 replies \ @rkfg 22 Aug 2023 \ parent \ on: I was a well-paid blockchain / web3 dev for years, but became disillusioned. bitcoin
Those don't need to be NFTs, a simple database is more than enough. One can argue that NFT is "on blockchain" forever while any regular database might be gone but in reality it doesn't matter. Because for NFT to be valuable (and not just any other contract or tx output) you need to prove to other people (buyers, apparently) that it's real, and it's not possible without external sources of truth that reside outside the blockchain. Such sources might be blog posts, websites, twitter accounts, notary verified e-mails and so on, but the blockchain, any of them, can not attest the NFT all by itself.
So the only purposes of NFT are:
- scamming other people
- polluting the block space
That's it. Any other use case is fragile at best and a delusion at worst, only works until you can convince the others to buy it from you, otherwise it instantly loses any value and becomes just a random number. Which it is.
What do you say about people that see value in provision, i.e. confirmed ownership history?
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Ownership of what? You can only prove that you "own" a hash. The history doesn't have any value without, again, an external source of truth that somehow connects the addresses/keys with real persons. Otherwise you can fabricate whatever history you want just sending between your own addresses, and that's how NFTs gained perceived value for the pump&dump scheme.
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The simplest argument here is about bytes stored onchain. But it is not really an object which has value but the mere substance of it originality. All copies which may be put later onchain will be just copies that are younger and not original. Imagine that any sculpture occupies some space, now digital art occupies some specific time interval in the past.
Blockchain itself is the history and I do not talk about whatever external history you mean.
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You can't prove that your bytes are the youngest in existence. There could be slightly different younger bytes. Change a pixel and it no longer matches, good luck digging through the blockchain looking for the earlier image (if it even exists at all). This way you can copy any NFT and without an external source of truth the buyer can't make sure your copy is fake. Scan the chain, find no matches, so it must be genuine, right? It's just spam and scam with no value except extracting sats from people believing in this shit, and they're left holding the bag. Oh, and new nodes need to waste bandwidth and storage on it too, even though it's most certainly isn't of any value to them.
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No, I can prove that my bytes are the youngest onchain. That's it and that is obvious.
If you change a pixel you create a copy and this is exactly what I am talking about: among certain subset of people original and copy may have different value.
You seem to not really grasping the essence because you insist on existence of some external oracles. I talk about bytes inside blockchain lets assume legacy block and block numbers that's it.
Oh, and new nodes need to waste bandwidth and storage on it too, even though it's most certainly isn't of any value to them.
Yes, and you know STAMPS as opposed to Inscriptions store data as invalid public keys not as single chunk of data in witness part. And this is what Poelstra was talking about even before STAMPs came out from nowhere: if you against Inscriptions somebody will invent even worse way to put something onchain.
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You either don't read what I write or don't understand it yourself. You can prove that your bytes are the youngest. You can't prove that these bytes are the youngest among the similar potentially existing bytes that represent similar pictures or other media. How do you prove that there's no image on blockchain that looks almost like yours but one pixel is a little different and it was posted a year ago (or 10 minutes before yours, who knows)? For now you can "just" find all inscriptions, run some algorithm to find the similar ones. As the chain grows it becomes harder and harder.
If I only have the blockchain and no other sources of information, how do I make sure your NFT is genuine? How do I make sure you're not scamming me by selling me a mirrored/rotated/scaled/modified version of the "real" NFT that was published years ago? Remember, all I have is the blockchain, nothing else. No websites, twitter posts, blogs, opinions of my friends, no news and marketplaces. You assume no external oracles are needed so it's just you, me and the blockchain. We're trading directly, p2p. So?
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No websites, twitter posts, blogs, opinions of my friends, no news and marketplaces. You assume no external oracles are needed so it's just you, me and the blockchain. We're trading directly, p2p. So?
You manipulate definitions to your benefit.
Strictly speaking even when using such term as oracle in this context, any non-standard not supported by Core wallet type must be considered useless. Looks like a stretch.
But even with that you have no power over people who decide to put (non)random bytes onchain because they like
0011 0011 0011 0011 or something else.reply
I only define things so that we exclude the non-blockchain things. Because if we include them, we can't rely on the blockchain anymore and can store all that outside of it as well. And it's true, if all you have is the blockchain you still can use it for monetary purposes because it validates itself without relying on the outside world. But not for anything else. You can duplicate NFTs, no sweat, but you can't duplicate sats.
Like I said, I can't (and shouldn't be able to) stop people from sending non-standard txs. But promoting their usage is encouraging spam and raising fees for no real (=useful) reason. Bitcoin is a monetary system, not an image store. While you still can do it, I will consider this spam and you, my enemy. Bitcoin is for enemies after all. That's all that I mean and I think I explained sufficiently why it is spam and why it doesn't belong in blockchain. Feel free to use IPFS or any other storage and MySQL/Postgres to track ownership of these useless images that will be forgotten in a couple of years. But don't pollute the most important global database that will last for centuries. Unless you're a bad actor that wants to slower the Bitcoin adoption which you might be.
You can't prove that these bytes are the youngest among the similar potentially existing bytes that represent similar pictures or other media.
It is basic image classification task. If there are people who value originality they will value such service. Not like it is absolutely new. There is whole industry around this in physical art.
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These systems can be tricked and then again, if I monitor the mempool I can post a similar or a tx with the same image (or other payload) that will get into the same block. That way I can inflate the NFTs and without an oracle you wouldn't be able to tell which one is "genuine".
The physical art is the same scam mostly (imaginary value), except it's still easier to tell the age of a physical thing because it ages naturally unlike the numbers that age artificially and can be manipulated (as I described above).
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how public/private key cryptography works if your comment above is any indication.
You can absolutely prove that you own a hash, it's deterministically generated as a result of the interaction between your key and the contract with which the token is from.
(edit: I jumped the gun a bit and misread your comment above as saying that you could not prove that you "own" a hash, so my bad...but my comment below still stands as it is accurate regardless. The external source of truth you speak of IS the blockchain. The same way that it works on bitcoin....just because you're sending NFTs which can contain any kind of arbitrary data within them doesn't make it any different than people sending sats to one another. Same goes for people inscribing ordinals on bitcoin, too. Fundamentally the same thing, at it's core.)
Also, you ignored the very real use case I gave earlier (because it doesn't suit your narrative that NFTs are all 100% scams, which is bullshit). Sure, you could use a database instead of having the fan club membership I spoke of function as NFTs. But in doing so, you'd miss out on the following features:
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Token gating for access to their Discord server, a special website, ticketing purchases access (all of this with numerous levels of complexity beyond what you'd find in a standard database)
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The ability for people to freely transact their membership pass (NFT) by listing it for sale or purchasing it on a secondary marketplace, at any time. If that right there doesn't align with the ethos of decentralization and self-ownership that many bitcoiners have embraced and constantly champion to others, I don't know what would...
Your comment about it being a "pump and dump scheme" is moot, as this is a world-famous band who have sold millions of albums, and plays sold-out arena tours all over the globe with bands like Metallica...they're certainly not hurting for cash and the value (though such a thing is subjective, of course) that the fans who hold said memberships is gained via a one-time payment.
You seem to want to be getting deep into the weeds and having some weird conversation about what denotes value or what constitutes ownership of something...there is absolutely nothing that is required to confirm that you own the membership pass (or any other NFT for that matter) aside from a computer with the right software and an internet connection.
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Explain to me why should I store this garbage for eternity to let other nodes perform IBD? These tokens only concern a small number of people, why should this information be globally available if it's completely worthless for 99.999% (add more nines to your taste) of people? It's not money, it can't work as money, why do you need a global consensus for some discord entry tokens that would go to zero in 100% of cases after discord inevitably shuts down? Why should we store dead information forever? I know about node pruning, point is if everyone prunes no one can do IBD + even with pruned nodes you still have to download the entire blockchain.
The rest of your arguments follow, this information that virtually nobody is interested in, and which becomes more useless every passing month, should not be a part of the global consensus. On the opposite, transaction history becomes more valuable every block because it builds a chain that links the today's UTXO with the block it was mined in, proving that these sats are real and were not created out of nothing/doublespent.
You can store such useless information as any NFT, but it is simply spam, (and usually scam too). Anecdotal evidence that some famous people participated in a scam (whether willingly or accidentally) doesn't prove anything, because it's anecdotal. You can't validate a concept by saying that some well known people did it. It's completely irrelevant. Famous people bought monkeys for millions, now they're not worth crap, how's that not pump&dump? The fad passes quickly, fortunately. Those poor people who believed in the blockchain-future narrative are gonna get broke, not sure if they deserve it but I'm at least trying to warn the others.
absolutely nothing that is required to confirm that you own the membership pass (or any other NFT for that matter) aside from a computer with the right software and an internet connection.
False, you need something outside of the blockchain that confirms that this membership is genuine. Be it a hash, a date/block when it was minted, doesn't matter. Without that anyone can create a duplicate NFT, maybe even in the same block if they monitor the mempool closely, and who's gonna tell you which one of them is "genuine"? The answer is: both (because in fact there's no difference, random information isn't scarce) and neither (because both pretend to be something they're not).
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False, you need something outside of the blockchain that confirms that this membership is genuine. Be it a hash, a date/block when it was minted, doesn't matter.
If we're talking about the Ethereum blockchain (which i suspect we are not) then of course you only need the actual blockchain as well as your private key to confirm ownership of anything on-chain.
... anyone can create a duplicate NFT, maybe even in the same block if they monitor the mempool closely, and who's gonna tell you which one of them is "genuine"?
You are referring to a very real problem here (front-running, using bots to find mempool transactions and replace them by paying higher fees to be included first). Ethereum is a dark forest. However, this issue has been solved. Flash-bots is an organization that helped immensely. The tech is complicated, but the problem you refer to can be solved by submitting your smart contract (i guess in this case, for an NFT) to their open-source endpoints (you can also run one yourself, of course, it's just an ethereum node with extra features) to have your transaction bundled with many others before it is included, thus invisible to arbitrage bots.
I hate to be in the position of defending Ethereum btw, but I gotta defend truth!
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you only need the actual blockchain as well as your private key to confirm ownership of anything on-chain
You're missing the point. You can confirm the ownership of an address or some hash (though the concept of ownership becomes very vague in this case). You can't confirm the genuiness of that object, again, because "genuiness" is vague when you're talking about easily duplicated arbitrary data. You bring back complex methods of analyzing the previous data, looking for potential duplicates and not-exact copies.
When someone sells you an image they don't care if it's "genuine". It's the buyer's burden to verify it's not a copy, and it was always like that with anything, including money. The party accepting the money needs to verify it's not a counterfeit, not the payer. So the fact that you can prove that you own these bytes means basically nothing, if tx goes into a block it's already verified by the software. But you assume that the cost of this sat is much higher than 1 sat because it's somehow tied to a previous tx with an arbitrary payload, and this payload may be genuine (created by a certain real life person) or not (created by another person that's not famous). This is the missing link between the blockchain and real life, and just the blockchain can't tell you who exactly created this payload. You need a website that says "Barack Obama created this NFT in this transaction: <hash>", and you also need to verify the website itself is genuine, again, using Google or Twitter or asking your friends.
And over time these websites go offline, tweets get deleted, accounts get suspended, and then scammers create a similarly looking website with a different address that references an NFT that was copied, slightly modified (so that 1:1 match doesn't work) and posted a few days after the "original" (yes, they were patient enough to wait until they get an opportunity), and you can no longer tell if it's "real" or not. You have no truth anchors and the blockchain can't help you.
Your anti-flashbot scheme is laughable. If you need this 100% centralized scheme for it to work, you don't need Bitcoin. Moreover, these bots can themselves collude and post a slightly modified NFT for the future scam to profit off (the scheme is described above). If you need centralization to make your idea work in a decentralized setting, your idea isn't decentralized at all. Put to a database where it belongs and stop polluting the global decentralized ledger.
So in the end you're back to shitcoining: unreliable, extremely complex schemes of verification, inherently centralized, fragile and used only to extract value early. This is completely against the Bitcoin ethos which tells you to not trust but verify, and Bitcoin lets you verify cheaply, instantly and using blockchain only, without other websites, tweets and friends to call. Any other imaginary use case is spam at best and an attack at worst.
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