Blockchain can’t really store an entire image (it could, but that would be a loooooot of space), so you’re just buying a URL. Imagine paying for a URL of an image of an ape.
So, I get what you mean. Think about it more like this. Gold is expensive, right? People want gold because it’s valuable. But what if gold was way more inconvenient to move around. Like if it was way bigger. That’s not desirable. You want it to be valuable, but not expensive to manage. (Security aside, because obviously you want to protect your valuable things. But even if gold was inconvenient to work with and you had a lot you’d still want security.)
Cryptocurrency Blockchains give the miners rewards for working, but there are also transaction fees. The miners get that too. If the amount of data you’re storing in the Blockchain is bigger, then the fee would be bigger. Which isn’t good.
I hope that clears it up lol, I don’t know if I made sense.
What you’re buying is a non fungible token on a specific contract. This contact may link to an external resource for the image. It should be IPFS but some contracts link to a specific IPFS gateway. Either way [with IPFS] the link contains a cryptography secure ID of the image. Sometimes the contract just links to a private website.
The owner of the NFT does not own the image and certainly not its copyright. They own a number inside a specific “smart” contract.
The copyright owner can also legally make another NFT for the same image set. In fact I think anyone can because the links to the images on IPFS aren’t copyrightable. Although [regular] contracts and defamation law might mess with that. Although they can’t then change the original smart contract outside its logic.
He gets the “rights” to “ownership” of the image. Whatever those two words may mean to the buyer, seller and everyone else.
It’s no different from how your landlord owns the house you live in, really. You’re in posession of it (live in it), but he’s written in some registrar the county keeps that says who owns what.
NFTs are similar in that regard. They’re like a land deed - they " both prove" you “own” something. However, land deeds are common in society (and courts take them into account, police throw out “squatters”, etc).
With NFTs? It might become the same as a land deed, where you do “own” the stupid image referenced in it as you own the house referenced in your land deed. All ownership is like this - you don’t need to “have physically” in order to “own”.
Will NFTs be the next land deed? Probably not. But they’re conceptually quite close. What makes the difference is wethersociety upholds them or not.
Just think of money: $50 canadian in cash is worthless in a US Walmart. You can’t use it to pay. With a card, it’s a different story.
And about that card: it’s also a similar situation. It doesn’t hold cash. It identifies your bank account and then the POS machine does some magic so your bank promises the money you paid will be taken from you and given to the store. Again, whatever that may mean (and entail).
So by the landlord analogy, if you were to “steal” the image and save a copy, you’d be the equivalent of squatters?
Except the comparison between “stealing” an NFT and squatting is the same as between pirating and movie and stealing a car, in that the owner of the digital object doesn’t actually lose anything like the physical one does.
The fact a land deed and an NFT do the same thing (serve as a proof of ownership) doesn’t mean a photo is land.
Ownership comes in different forms, and each is specific in a multitude of regards, including crimes against them. Land, vehicles, phones, money, art, IP,… Each slightly different from the rest. I nowhere made the equivalence you did. I merely said an NFT is like a land deed in that it “proves” “ownership”, whatever that may mean. Nothing more, nothing less.
Anyone who ever did a squat at the gym is a criminal by your logic.
A bunch of art in museums and galleries does not belong to the museum or the gallery, but rather to private parties. These parties own the art and have a document proving it, but anybody can visit the museum/gallery and photograph the art, or even purchase reproductions of the art.
Quick aside: Always irks me when someone says “Blockchain” singular, like it’s a proper noun entity cargo cult god. “A blockchain” is a particular type of data structure akin to a decentralized linked list, or in the context of one particular cryptocurrency you’d say “the blockchain”. I know that the crypto VCs use the word in that singular proper noun way, but they’re doing that intentionally to cultivate a misplaced reverence and we shouldn’t ape them.
Anyway bitcoin core v30, which just released, expands the maximum data size of a non-monetary transaction parameter called the “OP_RETURN” from 80B to 100kB, meaning that normal bitcoin transactions really can now store plain old jpgs with basically zero extra encoding. It was a wildly controversial change within the dev community, some people probably being paid under the table to push it through etc, but yeah it can do that now. I assume that some blackhat has already put CSAM onto the blockchain in protest.
However at this time you only have to pay < 0.2 sats/Byte to almost guarantee your transaction goes into the next block, so absent miners showing discretion and refusing to mint big OP_RETURNs, that 100kB transaction would actually only cost about 20,000 satoshi, or ~22 USD.
It was a wildly controversial change within the dev community
Sounds like it would be, isn’t the reason to keep storage expensive that everything included in a transaction needs to be stored forever by every single network participant running a full node?
Yeah that’s the dominant perspective, and the way I see it. The core devs seem to have the perspective that if they don’t allow storage of arbitrary data, they’ll only encourage the abuse of other transaction parameters to work around it, or encourage anticompetitive side channels where users pay miners directly to include their zany data. And that by opening the floodgates, they allow market competition to decide how much that data is actually worth.
The blockspace has not exploded to capacity with OP_RETURN data in the past week, so the whole controversy could just end up being what politicians these days call a “nothingburger”, without even the demand to reveal who was right now that the NFT craze has mostly ended. And if that’s the case, the core devs technically made the right choice. We’ll see.
What I was talking about is the storage requirement for holding a blockchain containing every NFT ever minted on that chain. That’s a lot of storage if it’s the actual images.
Oh yea you’d be trying to store essentially a whole image hosting site, it’d be absurd and only data centers would do it. In the case of bitcoin the block size limit is roughly 4MB and they rarely if ever hit that. Whole chain going back to 2009 is less than 800GB.
I’ve heard Bitcoin on-chain CSAM allegations for years but could never verify it. It would be interesting if a pruned copy was safer than an archival copy, forcing users onto Tor if they’re unwilling to trust anyone.
Blockchain can’t really store an entire image (it could, but that would be a loooooot of space), so you’re just buying a URL. Imagine paying for a URL of an image of an ape.
It would cost tens of thousands of dollars per megabyte or something
but isn’t that their point? i was always confused by this
So, I get what you mean. Think about it more like this. Gold is expensive, right? People want gold because it’s valuable. But what if gold was way more inconvenient to move around. Like if it was way bigger. That’s not desirable. You want it to be valuable, but not expensive to manage. (Security aside, because obviously you want to protect your valuable things. But even if gold was inconvenient to work with and you had a lot you’d still want security.)
Cryptocurrency Blockchains give the miners rewards for working, but there are also transaction fees. The miners get that too. If the amount of data you’re storing in the Blockchain is bigger, then the fee would be bigger. Which isn’t good.
I hope that clears it up lol, I don’t know if I made sense.
No.
What you’re buying is a non fungible token on a specific contract. This contact may link to an external resource for the image. It should be IPFS but some contracts link to a specific IPFS gateway. Either way [with IPFS] the link contains a cryptography secure ID of the image. Sometimes the contract just links to a private website.
The owner of the NFT does not own the image and certainly not its copyright. They own a number inside a specific “smart” contract.
The copyright owner can also legally make another NFT for the same image set. In fact I think anyone can because the links to the images on IPFS aren’t copyrightable. Although [regular] contracts and defamation law might mess with that. Although they can’t then change the original smart contract outside its logic.
What exactly are the terms on that contract? The
suckerbuyer pays money and receives…?He gets the “rights” to “ownership” of the image. Whatever those two words may mean to the buyer, seller and everyone else.
It’s no different from how your landlord owns the house you live in, really. You’re in posession of it (live in it), but he’s written in some registrar the county keeps that says who owns what.
NFTs are similar in that regard. They’re like a land deed - they " both prove" you “own” something. However, land deeds are common in society (and courts take them into account, police throw out “squatters”, etc).
With NFTs? It might become the same as a land deed, where you do “own” the stupid image referenced in it as you own the house referenced in your land deed. All ownership is like this - you don’t need to “have physically” in order to “own”.
Will NFTs be the next land deed? Probably not. But they’re conceptually quite close. What makes the difference is wethersociety upholds them or not.
Just think of money: $50 canadian in cash is worthless in a US Walmart. You can’t use it to pay. With a card, it’s a different story.
And about that card: it’s also a similar situation. It doesn’t hold cash. It identifies your bank account and then the POS machine does some magic so your bank promises the money you paid will be taken from you and given to the store. Again, whatever that may mean (and entail).
No. As I said the buyer does not own the image. They known the token.
So by the landlord analogy, if you were to “steal” the image and save a copy, you’d be the equivalent of squatters?
Except the comparison between “stealing” an NFT and squatting is the same as between pirating and movie and stealing a car, in that the owner of the digital object doesn’t actually lose anything like the physical one does.
The fact a land deed and an NFT do the same thing (serve as a proof of ownership) doesn’t mean a photo is land.
Ownership comes in different forms, and each is specific in a multitude of regards, including crimes against them. Land, vehicles, phones, money, art, IP,… Each slightly different from the rest. I nowhere made the equivalence you did. I merely said an NFT is like a land deed in that it “proves” “ownership”, whatever that may mean. Nothing more, nothing less.
Anyone who ever did a squat at the gym is a criminal by your logic.
No, indeed you didn’t. It was my attempt at understanding just what ownership means in this case. Clearly, I didn’t. I’m still not sure I do.
I think a better analogy is with IRL art.
A bunch of art in museums and galleries does not belong to the museum or the gallery, but rather to private parties. These parties own the art and have a document proving it, but anybody can visit the museum/gallery and photograph the art, or even purchase reproductions of the art.
NFT is the document proving ownership.
Thank you for the explanation!
Quick aside: Always irks me when someone says “Blockchain” singular, like it’s a proper noun entity cargo cult god. “A blockchain” is a particular type of data structure akin to a decentralized linked list, or in the context of one particular cryptocurrency you’d say “the blockchain”. I know that the crypto VCs use the word in that singular proper noun way, but they’re doing that intentionally to cultivate a misplaced reverence and we shouldn’t ape them.
Anyway bitcoin core v30, which just released, expands the maximum data size of a non-monetary transaction parameter called the “OP_RETURN” from 80B to 100kB, meaning that normal bitcoin transactions really can now store plain old jpgs with basically zero extra encoding. It was a wildly controversial change within the dev community, some people probably being paid under the table to push it through etc, but yeah it can do that now. I assume that some blackhat has already put CSAM onto the blockchain in protest.
However at this time you only have to pay < 0.2 sats/Byte to almost guarantee your transaction goes into the next block, so absent miners showing discretion and refusing to mint big OP_RETURNs, that 100kB transaction would actually only cost about 20,000 satoshi, or ~22 USD.
Sounds like it would be, isn’t the reason to keep storage expensive that everything included in a transaction needs to be stored forever by every single network participant running a full node?
Yeah that’s the dominant perspective, and the way I see it. The core devs seem to have the perspective that if they don’t allow storage of arbitrary data, they’ll only encourage the abuse of other transaction parameters to work around it, or encourage anticompetitive side channels where users pay miners directly to include their zany data. And that by opening the floodgates, they allow market competition to decide how much that data is actually worth.
The blockspace has not exploded to capacity with OP_RETURN data in the past week, so the whole controversy could just end up being what politicians these days call a “nothingburger”, without even the demand to reveal who was right now that the NFT craze has mostly ended. And if that’s the case, the core devs technically made the right choice. We’ll see.
What I was talking about is the storage requirement for holding a blockchain containing every NFT ever minted on that chain. That’s a lot of storage if it’s the actual images.
Oh yea you’d be trying to store essentially a whole image hosting site, it’d be absurd and only data centers would do it. In the case of bitcoin the block size limit is roughly 4MB and they rarely if ever hit that. Whole chain going back to 2009 is less than 800GB.
I’ve heard Bitcoin on-chain CSAM allegations for years but could never verify it. It would be interesting if a pruned copy was safer than an archival copy, forcing users onto Tor if they’re unwilling to trust anyone.
Pruned copy would indeed be safe, it omits OP_RETURN data completely.