NFTs

[Marras]

Originally Posted by psionl0

There is no point in repeating this claim. It is just nonsense. If NFTs were that easy to replicate then they wouldn't be useful for doggy doos let alone digital art.

You are starting to get it.

But anyway, a typical NFT has three parts:

* Unique id. A blockchain can contain only one token with any given id and it is what makes the token "non-fungible".

* Smart contract. A piece of code that no one looks at but they really should because that code can access their wallets and if there is something underhanded in the code, it can do funny things to the contents of the said wallet.

* Metadata. This is the thing that the token represents.

If you buy a piece of digital art, you get a token whose metadata says that you own the said art. For example, if I minted a new ape collection called Ugly Apes, then the metadata of a single token could look like this:

{
  "url": "http://uglyapes.com/1.jpg",
  "name": "First Ape"
}

There is a URL that points to the image and its name.

Note that this example is far too close to a real-world example than anyone sensible would like. There really are NFTs where the metadata is just a URL pointing to somewhere with absolutely no indication of what is on the other end. Those digital art NFT-minters who are at the bleeding edge of security add a hash of the image and a digital signature of the url to the metadata. Absolutely no one tries to include the actual image in the token because that would blow up the size of the token into so large that you couldn't hope to ever get it accepted in the blockchain.

When I mint that ape, I will get an NFT that looks like this:

* Unique id: REAL-UGLY-APE-1

* Smart contract: whatever

* Metadata: { "url": "http://uglyapes.com/1.jpg", "name": "First Ape" }

When I add that to the blockchain, the blockchain will keep track of it and guarantee that it exists only in one place and that it has only one owner. (Side note: the blockchain has no interest in what happens at the end of the url, if uglyapes.com goes down the blockchain will happily keep pointing to it to the end of the universe or the chain, whichever comes first).

But then comes some shady crook (BOO!) who is jealous of my success and mints a coin with the exact same metadata. And creates another NFT that looks like:

* Unique id: FAKE-UGLY-APE-1

* Smart contract: whatever, but even more nefarious

* Metadata: { "url": "http://uglyapes.com/1.jpg", "name": "First Ape" }

Note that the NFTs are different since they have different unique ids, but the actual contents (metadata) are the exact same. The crook can add it to the blockchain because the id is different.

Suppose that the crook puts their newly-minted fake token to sale on some NFT marketplace that doesn't check that the minter really has rights for the image that they put on sale. That is, on any of the existing marketplaces.

When a random customer looks at the tokens, they see that they both are the same image. How can they determine whether REAL-UGLY-APE-1 or FAKE-UGLY-APE-1 is the real one?

Well, with a lot of tokens they can't. In the better-made collections they calculate a cryptographically secure hash of the whole token (including id and smart contract) and list it on the collection website, so as long as the site stays up you can go there to check whether your token is in there or not. When the site goes down you can no longer prove that REAL-UGLY-APE-1 is the real one.

[psionl0]

Originally Posted by Marras

Note that the NFTs are different since they have different unique ids, but the actual contents (metadata) are the exact same. The crook can add it to the blockchain because the id is different.

You will have to provide references to prove this assertion. It would be impossible for NFTs to be worth anything with a security flaw like this that a child could break.

Even with code this moronic, the latter NFT that had the same metadata would obviously be a forgery.

[gnome]

Only if the forger were so courteous as to label it "fake". It's a demonstrative sample, not what a real one would look like if the person were trying to conceal its duplicative nature.

[jnelso99]

Originally Posted by psionl0

Even with code this moronic, the latter NFT that had the same metadata would obviously be a forgery.

What about a case where someone underhandedly scrapes some artist’s DeviantArt gallery and mints NFTs all of their images, then the artist decides to get into the NFT game. Now all of the artist’s NFTs are really forgeries, and their artwork is now owned by the scammer?

[plague311]

Originally Posted by jnelso99

What about a case where someone underhandedly scrapes some artist’s DeviantArt gallery and mints NFTs all of their images, then the artist decides to get into the NFT game. Now all of the artist’s NFTs are really forgeries, and their artwork is now owned by the scammer?

What's the answer with everyday art? If an artist designs something and someone copies it? What would they do at that point?

[ponderingturtle]

Originally Posted by plague311

What's the answer with everyday art? If an artist designs something and someone copies it? What would they do at that point?

As suicide girls found out when someone took one of their pictures off instagram and sold it for $75,000 with adding a comment on it not a whole hell of a lot.

[Marras]

Originally Posted by psionl0

You will have to provide references to prove this assertion. It would be impossible for NFTs to be worth anything with a security flaw like this that a child could break.

You are so close to enlightenment.

Having multiple copies of the content is essentially the way how digital multi-edition NFTs work. See, for example, this random tutorial that was the first hit on searching for them on google: https://exploringbits.com/how-to-min...n-opensea-nft/ .

From the practical viewpoint, it is not feasible to detect whether two tokens have functionally identical metadata. For example, I could have switched the two JSON fields around to get two different JSON strings that describe the same object. I could also have added an extra field "license" : "You own the image that the url points to" to the fake to get a different JSON object but where the essential content is still the same.

To add more problems for the comparison, the specifications allow the metadata to contain an URL from where the actual metadata is fetched. In those cases it is trivial to create a new URL that points to a new page that contains a copy of the original metadata.

The way this security problem is addressed is the way that I already told a couple of times on this thread: the issuer of the token somehow cryptographically signs the token and then provides a service that allows people to validate the signatures. For example, the bored apes have a web page that lists hash values for all 10000 apes. This works for as long as the service is up.

Quote:

Even with code this moronic, the latter NFT that had the same metadata would obviously be a forgery.

Now suppose that the identifiers of the two tokens were 6bb950c3-1f2d-4274-a305-b7e6103669f3 and a5029969-f672-4c21-8546-1ec4d7576e3c instead.

Is it as clear which one is forgery and which one isn't?

[zooterkin]

Originally Posted by psionl0

You will have to provide references to prove this assertion. It would be impossible for NFTs to be worth anything with a security flaw like this that a child could break.

Even with code this moronic, the latter NFT that had the same metadata would obviously be a forgery.

Perhaps you could explain what is wrong with the description, then? How do the way NFTs work prevent this problem?

[psionl0]

Originally Posted by zooterkin

Perhaps you could explain what is wrong with the description, then? How do the way NFTs work prevent this problem?

If NFTs were that easy to duplicate then nobody would be putting money into bored monkeys and digital art right now.

Of course, it might be possible that nobody has ever thought of forging NFTs this way before. Now that the cat's out of the bag, we can expect the bottom to fall out of the NFT market.

[gnome]

I'm not sure that the NFT market would fail immediately if such a flaw existed. There are ways outside of NFT to establish originality, as Marras described. So if it fails when those outside methods fail, that may not happen often, but it would raise the question of whether the NFT process adds any value.

But maybe there is a safeguard against such attempts. It would strengthen your case if you could describe it.

[psionl0]

Originally Posted by gnome

I'm not sure that the NFT market would fail immediately if such a flaw existed.

You're right. It would never get off the ground.

Originally Posted by gnome

But maybe there is a safeguard against such attempts. It would strengthen your case if you could describe it.

I could do a bit of half baked googling and try to make intelligent sounding statements like some others have done but there is no need.

The market is the final arbiter of the security of things. Wherever there is money to be made on the internet, swarms of hackers are also there searching for any security flaws that they can exploit.

[zooterkin]

Originally Posted by psionl0

If NFTs were that easy to duplicate then nobody would be putting money into bored monkeys and digital art right now.

Of course, it might be possible that nobody has ever thought of forging NFTs this way before. Now that the cat's out of the bag, we can expect the bottom to fall out of the NFT market.

Argument from incredulity, then?

[psionl0]

Originally Posted by zooterkin

Argument from incredulity, then?

Have you heard what goes on in the internet?

[Olmstead]

Originally Posted by psionl0

If NFTs were that easy to duplicate then nobody would be putting money into bored monkeys and digital art right now.

Of course, it might be possible that nobody has ever thought of forging NFTs this way before. Now that the cat's out of the bag, we can expect the bottom to fall out of the NFT market.

Counter point: nobody cares about that. NFTs aren't valued because they show ownership of anything, they are valued because they make something "special", like how two identical books might have different prices because one has been signed by the author.

It's when you reject the premise of a random unit of data adding any value that things start falling apart.

[psionl0]

Originally Posted by Olmstead

Counter point: nobody cares about that.

At least one poster does and is starting to get support from others.

Originally Posted by Olmstead

NFTs aren't valued because they show ownership of anything, they are valued because they make something "special", like how two identical books might have different prices because one has been signed by the author.

It's when you reject the premise of a random unit of data adding any value that things start falling apart.

That is a bit OT but regardless, NFTs would not be able to make anything "special" if their security was as flawed as is being made out here.

[Olmstead]

Originally Posted by psionl0

That is a bit OT but regardless, NFTs would not be able to make anything "special" if their security was as flawed as is being made out here.

That's not true. A signature doesn't have any real security either. All that matters is convincing the buyer that the signature is authentic. Depending on the item, this might difficult or easy, but it can also just be a good fake.

All that matters with regards to NFTs is convincing the buyer that this NFT is the special one, either because the real author minted it or for some other arbitrary reason. And then you're straight back to all the mundane ways of determining ownership, like boring old copyright, and by that point, the NFT is just a useless unit of code.

[SuburbanTurkey]

Wash trade machine go brrrrrr

Quote:

The Hottest NFT Marketplace is Mostly Users Selling to Themselves

The platform was launched in January by two anonymous co-founders -- who go by Zodd and Guts -- as an alternative to market leader OpenSea during the height of the NFT boom. The site had planned to add new features to lure NFT enthusiasts, according to a blog post at the time. Almost all of those initiatives have focused on the incentive program built around the Looks token awarded to active users of the platform.

About $18 billion of the trading volume on the platform, or about 95% of the total activity, can be attributed to what’s often referred to as wash sales, according to data compiled by NFT tracker CryptoSlam. The transactions are seen as one of the many gray areas in crypto when it comes to regulation. In this case, the sales are done to win new tokens rather than to pump up nonfungible token prices to lure unsuspecting buyers. The marketplace benefits from the fees generated by each transaction.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...-to-themselves

[psionl0]

Originally Posted by Olmstead

That's not true. A signature doesn't have any real security either. All that matters is convincing the buyer that the signature is authentic. Depending on the item, this might difficult or easy, but it can also just be a good fake.

Why is everybody suddenly trying to argue that NFT security is so flawed that a child could crack it?

[SuburbanTurkey]

Molly White, creator of the website "web3 is going great" (ironic name) is on the podcast circuit and discussing the dumpster fire that is NFTs.

She's been on TrashFuture podcast: "There’s a Casino in My Trojan Horse feat. Molly White" https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.c...t-molly-white/

This Machine Kills: "The Cynics of Web3 (ft. Molly White)" https://soundcloud.com/thismachineki...ft-molly-white

Given these are longer form, audio interviews, it's not something that can be easily discussed on this forum, but I figured some of you may be interested in this.

[psionl0]

Originally Posted by SuburbanTurkey

Molly White, creator of the website "web3 is going great" (ironic name) is on the podcast circuit and discussing the dumpster fire that is NFTs.

Yeah? Well Johnny Smith on another web site is arguing that NFTs are great and that cancels her out so there!

[SuburbanTurkey]

Originally Posted by psionl0

Yeah? Well Johnny Smith on another web site is arguing that NFTs are great and that cancels her out so there!

Yeah, but does Johnny's website have a "grift counter" function.

currently sitting at 9.2 billion in grifted value.

Quote:

What's the number in the corner with the flames?

That's the Grift Counter (™™™)! A running total of the amount of money lost so far to grifts and scams, which increments as you scroll through the page. It doesn't update with every single post that mentions a monetary loss (for example, if someone transfers money to a dead-end wallet by mistake)—just the money lost to intentional thefts and scams. If it makes more sense to you to start with the total amount of money lost to grifts and scams, and have it decrement as you scroll back in time, that's an option too! Just click the settings panel icon and pick "Start at total amount scammed and subtract as you scroll". You can also show and hide the counter or stop the animation of the flames from this panel.

https://web3isgoinggreat.com/about#grift-question

[gnome]

Originally Posted by psionl0

I could do a bit of half baked googling and try to make intelligent sounding statements like some others have done but there is no need.

I disagree. Being able to give a common sense explanation of how the uniqueness of an NFT's connection to a physical product is ensured would be quite valuable, especially as someone advocating for its benefits. Why would you want to avoid that?

Quote:

The market is the final arbiter of the security of things. Wherever there is money to be made on the internet, swarms of hackers are also there searching for any security flaws that they can exploit.

I also see this as an argument from incredulity. Could be a good reason for your own feeling of confidence, but not a good reason to avoid finding a real answer.

[psionl0]

Originally Posted by gnome

I also see this as an argument from incredulity.

Typical.

Normally when somebody makes a claim like the security on an NFT is so weak that a child could break it it would be reasonable to ask for some sort of proof. But because I am doing the asking, it suddenly becomes an "argument from incredulity".

[plague311]

Originally Posted by psionl0

Typical.

Normally when somebody makes a claim like the security on an NFT is so weak that a child could break it it would be reasonable to ask for some sort of proof. But because I am doing the asking, it suddenly becomes an "argument from incredulity".

Kind of makes you wonder. If the security on NFTs is so extremely weak how come they're almost never hacked? They're generally socially engineered. If they were so easy to replicate and sell for the amount of the original, how come we don't have more tales of fake Yacht apes, etc. being sold as the originals?

It can't be that no one has thought about it. As some people have implied in this thread, anyone that uses NFTs or cryptos are the worst possible scum who have ever traversed this planet. Why isn't this more of an issue? Curious...

[Olmstead]

Originally Posted by psionl0

Typical.

Normally when somebody makes a claim like the security on an NFT is so weak that a child could break it it would be reasonable to ask for some sort of proof. But because I am doing the asking, it suddenly becomes an "argument from incredulity".

There is nothing wrong with the security of NFTs, at least no more than with any other crypto stuff. What does happen is people making counterfeit NFTs:

https://www.reuters.com/business/fin...em-2022-02-11/

So, the NFT you own is perfectly secure, but how do you prove it's the "real" one? Well, by proving that you have the relevant rights to the original digital asset; so what's the point of the NFT again?

Of course, the authentic NFT isn't any more authentic than the counterfeit one. It's a unit of code that is authentic because the owner of the asset says so.

[psionl0]

Originally Posted by Olmstead

What does happen is peoplemaking counterfeit NFTs: people selling unauthorised copies of other NFTs, people making NFTs of content which does not belong to them, and people selling sets of NFTs which resemble a security

ftfy.

[SuburbanTurkey]

Originally Posted by plague311

Kind of makes you wonder. If the security on NFTs is so extremely weak how come they're almost never hacked? They're generally socially engineered. If they were so easy to replicate and sell for the amount of the original, how come we don't have more tales of fake Yacht apes, etc. being sold as the originals?

Counterfeit bored apes are not unheard of.

Here's a recent tale of some guy that got ripped off thinking he was trading his real bored ape for another bored ape of similar value. Turns out the trade was for a worthless counterfeit.

Cleverly enough, the scammer included a stamp of authenticity in the jpeg itself, making the fake ape seem to have the stamp of approval from the trading platform, when in reality it had not had its authenticity verified.

Quote:

A pseudonymous user, known as “s27,” today lost roughly $570,000 worth of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) after exchanging his Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) #1584 and two Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) tokens for fraudulent NFTs deceptively disguised as genuine.

...

In reality, the “green checkmark” Swap.Kiwi uses to verify that tokens are really authentic can be easily counterfeited via a simple image editor — and that’s exactly what the scammer did. Essentially, he downloaded some “jpegs” depicting a few expensive BAYC apes and added a fake watermark so that they would appear like the real deal when displayed on Swap.Kiwi.

Of course, a deeper look into the scammer’s wallet would reveal that his tokens are anything but genuine, although a lot of crypto users oftentimes neglect such procedures, sadly.

https://cryptoslate.com/user-loses-5...fication-scam/

Someone buying a bored ape has to do the same due diligence that a non-crypto transaction of traditional art would require. They should find out if the art piece is genuine, usually by tracing its ownership back to a provably legitimate creator.

[plague311]

Originally Posted by SuburbanTurkey

Someone buying a bored ape has to do the same due diligence that a non-crypto transaction of traditional art would require. They should find out if the art piece is genuine, usually by tracing its ownership back to a provably legitimate creator.

No doubt we'll find one-offs. That wasn't my point. My point was that if it's as easy as some are claiming here, then there would be thousands upon thousands of stories like this.

As you said, just like with real world art you have to do your work. Make sure the NFT traces back to the smart contract of the project you want to buy. If you don't understand how the process works then don't get involved. I make that choice everyday.

[SuburbanTurkey]

Originally Posted by plague311

No doubt we'll find one-offs. That wasn't my point. My point was that if it's as easy as some are claiming here, then there would be thousands upon thousands of stories like this.

Like has been pointed out here many times, stolen artwork is absolutely rampant in NFT markets. Ripping off the most well known art (the apes) is probably difficult simply because how well known these pieces are, but there's nothing special about them either.

There are 'thousands upon thousands' examples of stolen art being sold as legitimate on NFT markets. It's so easy to do that bots have automated the process.

Originally Posted by plague311

As you said, just like with real world art you have to do your work. Make sure the NFT traces back to the smart contract of the project you want to buy. If you don't understand how the process works then don't get involved. I make that choice everyday.

Sure, this isn't one of these instances where NFTs are worse than traditional art, it's just another example where NFTs provide no improvement.

The NFT as a means of selling art remains a solution in search of a problem. It does nothing about the many real problems when it comes to selling digital art (such as establishing authenticity) and in many cases is far worse than already existing means.

[psionl0]

Originally Posted by SuburbanTurkey

The NFT as a means of selling art remains a solution in search of a problem.

The same could have been (and probably was) said about the horseless carriage.

Whether NFTs have a future depends on how developments go. Maybe people will become more educated about how NFTs can be used fraudulently and avoid these traps or NFTs will undergo further developments that overcome some of the frauds that can be committed today (or NFTs go down in history as a failed experiment).

But one thing that we can be confident of is that NFTs can't be hacked by a child.

[Marras]

Originally Posted by psionl0

If NFTs were that easy to duplicate then nobody would be putting money into bored monkeys and digital art right now.

I'm saying that it is possible to mint two NFTs that have the same minter-defined metadata. You refuse to believe that it is possible. I can't understand why.

You know, there is a really easy way to prove me wrong. Show me the part of token specifications that forbids it. The specifications are online, so it is easy to link to the relevant paragraph. Do it! Do it!

But honestly, you seem to have misunderstood what I am saying. So let me put it this way.

I can today write a document where the City of Paris certifies that I own the Tower of Eiffel. My 5-year old niece can also write such a certificate today.

Does that mean that the security of real properties can be defeated by a 5-year old?

Of course not. If you want to know if I really own the Tower of Eiffel, you can take the certificate to the Bureau of Whatever in Paris and ask if they issued it. They will say no.

It works the exact same way with NFTs.

I can today mint an NFT that says that I own the Eiffel Tower. You can today mint an NFT that says that you own the Eiffel Tower.

To check if the NFT actually confers the ownership of the Eiffel Tower, you need to ask the City of Paris if they did issue that token. They will say no.

There is no great conceptual difference between the paper certificates and the NFTs. The fact that someone added an NFT to the blockchain does not guarantee that having it in your wallet gives you anything else than a few bits in your crypto wallet. It guarantees only that no one else has that exact token with that id in their wallets.

What I am saying is that you need to validate the token outside of the blockchain to know if it is legit or not. The blockchain can't do that. I am also saying that I don't trust that a random company has its act together well enough that they can validate a token 25 years after they issued it.

Quote:

Of course, it might be possible that nobody has ever thought of forging NFTs this way before. Now that the cat's out of the bag, we can expect the bottom to fall out of the NFT market.

You ask why the world is not flooded with fake apes already? Well, it kinda is. If you look at https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ , you'll notice the story from April 4 where someone was scammed to exchange three genuine apes into three fake ones. This happened in a small marketplace. This doesn't happen in a large site because the large sites actively protect the Big Money NFT brands. If you try to impersonate bored apes on the OpenSea, you get banned and your tokens will be blacklisted fast. They don't offer similar level of protection to random artists from DeviantArts, they do it only for the 400 pound gorillas of the NFT world. But if you go some random small NFT exchange, you can be quite certain that none of the bored apes that are on sale there will open the doors of the ape discord.

If you look further in the web3isgoinggreat page, you'll see that there are a great number of NFT scams going on all the time. Another very illustrative text on the weaknesses of the NFT world are Moxie Marlinspike's first ventures to web3 (https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-fi...pressions.html).

[Captain_Swoop]

The UK Government has told the Royal Mint to create an NFT to be "issued by the summer."

[gnome]

Originally Posted by psionl0

Typical.

Normally when somebody makes a claim like the security on an NFT is so weak that a child could break it it would be reasonable to ask for some sort of proof. But because I am doing the asking, it suddenly becomes an "argument from incredulity".

I think Marras has described a way that the security could be circumvented, at least whatever security is inherent in the NFT. You disagree, fine. Time for a rebuttal. Let's hear it, how do NFTs actually work to where that method would fail?

It should not be that difficult to explain. In fact, you were able once to give a fairly detailed explanation of how the Bitcoin system handles orphaned blocks, that I thought was pretty solid. Isn't there an answer for this question too?

[xjx388]

Originally Posted by Marras

I'm saying that it is possible to mint two NFTs that have the same minter-defined metadata. You refuse to believe that it is possible. I can't understand why.

You know, there is a really easy way to prove me wrong. Show me the part of token specifications that forbids it. The specifications are online, so it is easy to link to the relevant paragraph. Do it! Do it!

But honestly, you seem to have misunderstood what I am saying. So let me put it this way.

I can today write a document where the City of Paris certifies that I own the Tower of Eiffel. My 5-year old niece can also write such a certificate today.

Does that mean that the security of real properties can be defeated by a 5-year old?

Of course not. If you want to know if I really own the Tower of Eiffel, you can take the certificate to the Bureau of Whatever in Paris and ask if they issued it. They will say no.

It works the exact same way with NFTs.

I can today mint an NFT that says that I own the Eiffel Tower. You can today mint an NFT that says that you own the Eiffel Tower.

To check if the NFT actually confers the ownership of the Eiffel Tower, you need to ask the City of Paris if they did issue that token. They will say no.

There is no great conceptual difference between the paper certificates and the NFTs. The fact that someone added an NFT to the blockchain does not guarantee that having it in your wallet gives you anything else than a few bits in your crypto wallet. It guarantees only that no one else has that exact token with that id in their wallets.

What I am saying is that you need to validate the token outside of the blockchain to know if it is legit or not. The blockchain can't do that. I am also saying that I don't trust that a random company has its act together well enough that they can validate a token 25 years after they issued it.



You ask why the world is not flooded with fake apes already? Well, it kinda is. If you look at https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ , you'll notice the story from April 4 where someone was scammed to exchange three genuine apes into three fake ones. This happened in a small marketplace. This doesn't happen in a large site because the large sites actively protect the Big Money NFT brands. If you try to impersonate bored apes on the OpenSea, you get banned and your tokens will be blacklisted fast. They don't offer similar level of protection to random artists from DeviantArts, they do it only for the 400 pound gorillas of the NFT world. But if you go some random small NFT exchange, you can be quite certain that none of the bored apes that are on sale there will open the doors of the ape discord.

If you look further in the web3isgoinggreat page, you'll see that there are a great number of NFT scams going on all the time. Another very illustrative text on the weaknesses of the NFT world are Moxie Marlinspike's first ventures to web3 (https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-fi...pressions.html).

I think I understand what you are getting at. I can mint a NFT that is a fake duplicate of a valuable Bored Ape, using the image and a fake watermark. I can scam someone into buying it or trading me for it. This has happened.

There is nothing in the specs that forbids this, but it is illegal.

Yes, a buyer does have to do due diligence when buying/selling/trading NFTs. In the case of Bored Apes, there were only 10,000 minted and the NFT associated with each one is public knowledge because it was minted by a certain entity and you can trace the trades/sales all the way back to that entity. It’s possible for a buyer/trader to independently verify whether or not the “Ape” they want to acquire is a real Ape.

So what you are describing is just a scam, plain and simple. It happens all the time outside crypto. You can find people who sell you an iPad on the street that turns out to be a real iPad box with a big rock inside -same thing.

I’m not excusing the scammer, but when you are dealing with valuable items, the buyer must beware. Do due diligence.

IOW, you haven’t described a problem uniquely inherent to NFTs; it’s a tale as old as time.

[gnome]

Originally Posted by xjx388

So what you are describing is just a scam, plain and simple. It happens all the time outside crypto. You can find people who sell you an iPad on the street that turns out to be a real iPad box with a big rock inside -same thing.

I’m not excusing the scammer, but when you are dealing with valuable items, the buyer must beware. Do due diligence.

IOW, you haven’t described a problem uniquely inherent to NFTs; it’s a tale as old as time.

I think the point is if the due diligence has to be done outside the NFT system, then is the NFT really ensuring anything at all?

[Marras]

Originally Posted by xjx388

I think I understand what you are getting at. I can mint a NFT that is a fake duplicate of a valuable Bored Ape, using the image and a fake watermark. I can scam someone into buying it or trading me for it. This has happened.

This subthread didn't start from the possibility that someone sells me a fake ape.

It started from the offhand statement that it would be possible in the future to link the ownership of every physical thing with NFTs.

The scenario is that I buy something expensive, get a genuine NFT that controls its ownership, and then 25 years later someone else comes with an NFT and claims that their NFT is the real one and mine is faked.

They are both NFTs, they may have been minted into the blockchain at the same time and theirs might even be earlier if the minter anticipated what the real token will look like.

The company that made thing has gone defunct 10 years ago. Are there still good-enough records surviving that lets us conclusively prove that my token is the real one? If there is no one left to say: "Yup, this is the token that we made", then all we have is two tokens in the blockchain that both say the same thing.

This is one reason why I think that NFTs cannot become the sole arbiter of who owns some physical thing.

Another reason is that there are lots of cases where responsibilities come from owning a thing. If you own real property, you have to pay the property taxes, things like that. Having an anonymous wallet be the owner will not work.

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I’m not excusing the scammer, but when you are dealing with valuable items, the buyer must beware. Do due diligence.

Note that in case of NFTs the due diligence extends to reading the source code of the smart contract to see that it doesn't do things like sending all your crypto to a scammer in Nigeria. Note also that the sending the crypto to Nigeria part can be hidden in the code in a way that it is not obvious that it will do it and you need to check it really well to notice it.

Have you done that with your NFTs? If not, you should have, because if one day you get an NFT that messes up your wallet, that's all the advice that you will get from the crypto community.

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IOW, you haven’t described a problem uniquely inherent to NFTs; it’s a tale as old as time.

However, it is a lot easier to mint a fake token than to smuggle a fake paper deed into governmental archives.

[xjx388]

Originally Posted by gnome

I think the point is if the due diligence has to be done outside the NFT system, then is the NFT really ensuring anything at all?

Right off the bat, everything needs to have verifiability independent of the system in which it was generated. Aside from that . . . Given a few things:

1) Wallets holding NFTs can be made almost perfectly secure -no one can transfer an NFT to their own wallets by hacking or whatever
2) The NFT is unique and traceable through the blockchain
3) The underlying asset exists and is inextricably tied to the NFT -no one else can have the asset, whatever it is

Then I think NFTs are ensuring the asset in a way that is more difficult to achieve through other means.

The asset is maybe not what we might expect, however. We tend to think of the asset as something concrete -a piece of art, for example. I don’t think this idea works at all. I can download a copy of every Bored Ape quite easily. But I can’t access the underlying infrastructure that owners of the Ape NFTs can. Now, we can argue about whether or not that infrastructure is worth anything.

But consider the NFTs sold by the band Kings of Leon I mentioned earlier: an album, artwork AND the right to a front row seat, meet and greet, etc to one KOL concert per tour. I can freely download the art and music, but I cannot freely partake of the VIP concert tickets. The NFT concept makes ownership and exchange of such an asset (the ticket privilege), extremely easy and much more secure. And that’s just one early possibility being used now in the infancy of NFTs.

I’m just saying that I’m not willing to write off the idea of NFTs as inherently stupid and scammy at this point in time. I may be completely wrong but I think the idea has merit, IF the security issues can be resolved and IF the laws evolve to support and embrace them.

[xjx388]

Originally Posted by Marras

This subthread didn't start from the possibility that someone sells me a fake ape.

It started from the offhand statement that it would be possible in the future to link the ownership of every physical thing with NFTs.

It may be possible, given advances in security. I don’t know that it would ever be desirable or necessary to do so, though.

Quote:

The scenario is that I buy something expensive, get a genuine NFT that controls its ownership, and then 25 years later someone else comes with an NFT and claims that their NFT is the real one and mine is faked.

They are both NFTs, they may have been minted into the blockchain at the same time and theirs might even be earlier if the minter anticipated what the real token will look like.

The company that made thing has gone defunct 10 years ago. Are there still good-enough records surviving that lets us conclusively prove that my token is the real one? If there is no one left to say: "Yup, this is the token that we made", then all we have is two tokens in the blockchain that both say the same thing.

Ok, sure. This is one of those security problems that needs to be solved. There needs to be some kind of Grand Registrar of NFTs or something. I think it can be solved, though.

Whether or not it’s worth solving remains to be seen.

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This is one reason why I think that NFTs cannot become the sole arbiter of who owns some physical thing.

Right. I don’t think it’s possible to have any one system that is the sole arbiter of ownership of a physical asset.

Another reason is that there are lots of cases where responsibilities come from owning a thing. If you own real property, you have to pay the property taxes, things like that. Having an anonymous wallet be the owner will not work.

Quote:

Note that in case of NFTs the due diligence extends to reading the source code of the smart contract to see that it doesn't do things like sending all your crypto to a scammer in Nigeria. Note also that the sending the crypto to Nigeria part can be hidden in the code in a way that it is not obvious that it will do it and you need to check it really well to notice it.

Have you done that with your NFTs? If not, you should have, because if one day you get an NFT that messes up your wallet, that's all the advice that you will get from the crypto community.

I don’t own NFTs. I am just not willing to write it all off as complete nonsense/scam.

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However, it is a lot easier to mint a fake token than to smuggle a fake paper deed into governmental archives.

I don’t think the primary use case will be for physical assets like land or even art. I think development will focus of digital assets and rights.

[ponderingturtle]

Originally Posted by xjx388

I think I understand what you are getting at. I can mint a NFT that is a fake duplicate of a valuable Bored Ape, using the image and a fake watermark. I can scam someone into buying it or trading me for it. This has happened.

There is nothing in the specs that forbids this, but it is illegal.

Is it? In the DOA take over case all rules where followed and so the "theft" of all the assets was all legal. It all depends on how they were presenting things and if they claimed that some specific group issued the NFT or just that it was and NFT of the thing.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgd5...als-everything


I mean selling reproductions of things is fine after all, what is the legal obligation to make a point that this is a reproduction of a lazy ape NFT vs and official lazy ape NFT?

[SuburbanTurkey]

Whoops there's no secondary market

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‘Jack Dorsey’s First Tweet’ NFT Went on Sale for $48M. It Ended With a Top Bid of Just $280
Crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi bought Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s first-ever tweet as an NFT for $2.9 million last year. He listed the NFT for sale again at $48 million last week.

Iranian-born crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi purchased the NFT for $2.9 million in March 2021. Last Thursday, he announced on Twitter that he wished to sell the NFT, and pledged 50% of its proceeds (which he thought would exceed $25 million) to charity. The auction closed Wednesday, with just seven total offers ranging from 0.09 ETH ($277 at current prices) to 0.0019 ETH (almost $6).
“The deadline I set was over, but if I get a good offer, I might accept it, I might never sell it,” Estavi told CoinDesk via a WhatsApp message on Wednesday.
Estavi has two days to accept the bid, or it will expire.

https://www.coindesk.com/business/20...d-of-just-280/