NFTs

[psionl0]

Originally Posted by Olmstead

It is not.

'tis.

[shemp]

"It's a cookbook!"

[Marras]

Originally Posted by psionl0

ftfy.

You didn't fix it. You just put there some wishful thinking form your part. You just can't believe how braindead the NFT market is, so you just keep asserting over and over again that it works like you want it to work.

As far as I know, there is no automatic mechanism that would automatically transfer copyrights or any other rights on an NFT transfer. If the sale doesn't mention that you get rights with the NFT, you won't get them. You seem to think otherwise, so please tell me where the transferred rights are listed.

Note that I asked this already in the message that you "fixed" without answering it. And you will dismiss this post too, because you want to believe that NFT market is sensible.

Quote:

The answer is that you get any rights to the asset that the seller is willing or able to grant to you.

And based on my cursory search on OpenSea, the sellers are either not willing or not able to give any rights to the assets at all.

The only NFT that I've clicked to on OpenSea that has listed any rights at all associated with the underlying asset is the sail-o-bots collection, and there buying the NFT doesn't give you any rights that you don't already have.

No other NFT has mentioned any rights to the images at all.

If you buy such NFT, you get the NFT on blockchain and NOTHING else.

Nothing. No rights at all. You get an NFT that contains a link to the image, but you don't get rights to use the linked image in any way. You don't even get the guarantee that the linked image stays there.

This, by the way, is one of the main reasons why many people (myself included) think that NFTs are a big scam.

It doesn't matter if someone somewhere uses NFTs in a non-scammy way, but if 99.9% of NFTs are minted and sold only for the purpose of liberating the marks from their money, NFTs in general are scams. One non-rotten apple doesn't save the bunch.

[SuburbanTurkey]

Originally Posted by Marras

You didn't fix it. You just put there some wishful thinking form your part. You just can't believe how braindead the NFT market is, so you just keep asserting over and over again that it works like you want it to work.

As far as I know, there is no automatic mechanism that would automatically transfer copyrights or any other rights on an NFT transfer. If the sale doesn't mention that you get rights with the NFT, you won't get them. You seem to think otherwise, so please tell me where the transferred rights are listed.

Note that I asked this already in the message that you "fixed" without answering it. And you will dismiss this post too, because you want to believe that NFT market is sensible.



And based on my cursory search on OpenSea, the sellers are either not willing or not able to give any rights to the assets at all.

The only NFT that I've clicked to on OpenSea that has listed any rights at all associated with the underlying asset is the sail-o-bots collection, and there buying the NFT doesn't give you any rights that you don't already have.

No other NFT has mentioned any rights to the images at all.

If you buy such NFT, you get the NFT on blockchain and NOTHING else.

Nothing. No rights at all. You get an NFT that contains a link to the image, but you don't get rights to use the linked image in any way. You don't even get the guarantee that the linked image stays there.

This, by the way, is one of the main reasons why many people (myself included) think that NFTs are a big scam.

It doesn't matter if someone somewhere uses NFTs in a non-scammy way, but if 99.9% of NFTs are minted and sold only for the purpose of liberating the marks from their money, NFTs in general are scams. One non-rotten apple doesn't save the bunch.

Indeed, there's nothing inherently linking the NFT to any copyright.

For example, if I stole your NFT, say through one of the many hacks or frauds you commonly see concerning these assets, you would still be the lawful copyright holder, no matter what the blockchain says. The public ledger may be immutable, but the courts aren't going to give a hoot.

[carlitos]

Code is law.

[psionl0]

Originally Posted by Marras

You didn't fix it. You just put there some wishful thinking form your part. You just can't believe how braindead the NFT market is, so you just keep asserting over and over again that it works like you want it to work.

An iota of research will show that NFTs are exactly what I said they are:

Quote:

NFTs are tokens that we can use to represent ownership of unique items. They let us tokenise things like art, collectibles, even real estate. They can only have one official owner at a time and they're secured by the Ethereum blockchain – no one can modify the record of ownership or copy/paste a new NFT into existence.

https://ethereum.org/en/nft/

Originally Posted by Marras

As far as I know, there is no automatic mechanism that would automatically transfer copyrights or any other rights on an NFT transfer. If the sale doesn't mention that you get rights with the NFT, you won't get them. You seem to think otherwise, so please tell me where the transferred rights are listed.

Wrong to the highlighted. I have always been at pains to point out that NFTs do not give any legal rights to the asset in question and it would be unlikely that they would be recognized in a court of law.

How a court would view evidence in the form of an NFT in a civil case is yet to be tested (AFAIK). In the case of a car or a house, you obviously could not establish ownership with an NFT. With other types of assets, the case is not so clear cut.

[Marras]

Originally Posted by psionl0

An iota of research will show that NFTs are exactly what I said they are:

Note the word there, "can".

I hope you agree on that it is possible for an NFT to not represent ownership of an asset. For example, I could today mint an NFT whose metadata is "Marras is God". Nothing (except common sense and wish to not give money to grifters) prevents me doing that, and that NFT would not claim to have anything to do with owning anything.

What I'm saying is that the absolutely vast majority of NFTs that are right now being sold on the major marketplaces don't confer ownership of the underlying asset in any meaningful sense. That they could do it had they been done properly means nothing. What matters is how they are actually done.

Property law is well established all around the world. Intellectual property law is also well established. A marketing blurb from the ethereum website does not override existing laws. "But this is crypto" does not change how the laws work. Things do not suddenly start to work differently just because you throw some new tech buzzwords in.

Quote:

Wrong to the highlighted. I have always been at pains to point out that NFTs do not give any legal rights to the asset in question and it would be unlikely that they would be recognized in a court of law.

If you don't get any legal rights to the asset, you don't really own it.

[psionl0]

Originally Posted by Marras

I hope you agree on that it is possible for an NFT to not represent ownership of an asset.

At least you are not saying "NFTs absolutely do not represent an asset".

Originally Posted by Marras

If you don't get any legal rights to the asset, you don't really own it.

In many cases, mere possession is all that is required.

[Marras]

Originally Posted by psionl0

In many cases, mere possession is all that is required.

And with approximately 100% of the NFTs that are currently on sale, the buyer doesn't possess the asset.

The asset is a digital file that has been uploaded to some random server in a cloud and the buyer has zero control over it. The person who has the password for the server is in the control and is the possessor of the file.

Well scratch that, given the amount of wash trading going on with people buying NFTs from themselves, quite a few NFT buyers are also the possessors of the assets, but that's only because they are scammers doing illegal things.

[psionl0]

Originally Posted by Marras

And with approximately 100% of the NFTs that are currently on sale, the buyer doesn't possess the asset.

The asset is a digital file that has been uploaded to some random server in a cloud and the buyer has zero control over it. The person who has the password for the server is in the control and is the possessor of the file.

Well scratch that, given the amount of wash trading going on with people buying NFTs from themselves, quite a few NFT buyers are also the possessors of the assets, but that's only because they are scammers doing illegal things.

I have already discussed the limitations of NFTs when it comes to "ownership" at length and have nothing further to add.

If you would rather claim that all NFTs are scams then I'm sure that somebody from the peanut gallery will come along to give you support.

[Marras]

Originally Posted by psionl0

I have already discussed the limitations of NFTs when it comes to "ownership" at length and have nothing further to add.

So, did we finally get to an agreement that if you today buy a "digital art" NFT from any of the major NFT sites, you will almost certainly get just the NFT and nothing else?

Quote:

If you would rather claim that all NFTs are scams then I'm sure that somebody from the peanut gallery will come along to give you support.

As I said before, one non-rotten apple doesn't unspoil the bunch.

The vast majority of NFTs that are on sale right now are scams.

[carlitos]

Originally Posted by Olmstead

Okay, you do purchase something when you buy an NFT, but it's not the digital asset itself. What you are really buying is the right to utilize the digital asset as an NFT. No other rights are inherent in the purchase. This is the accurate way to present such a transaction, but that's not what most sellers are doing.

,,,,,

Originally Posted by Marras

So, did we finally get to an agreement that if you today buy a "digital art" NFT from any of the major NFT sites, you will almost certainly get just the NFT and nothing else?

This was literally written into the terms of service of the NBA "moments" NFTs. Your purchase of the NFT means that you "own" the NFT for use on the Flow network. You might also list your ownership of that NFT on an NFT marketplace like OpenSea. That's it. You don't own the art, the website, the app, or the right to do anything with the art outside of their NFT network and to list / buy / sell the NFT (not the underlying art) on NFT marketplaces. (Also, they reserve the right to cancel your ownership at their discretion and if you don't like it, you can try to go to arbitration at your own expense in British Columbia, Canada.)

[FatherLukeduke]

Well, of course NFTs can be used to represent ownership of items. But so can post-it notes, brightly coloured sea shells and messages written in the sand with a stick. So that claim must be answered with a big fat "so what?"

The questions that sceptics have is "What problem does this solve?" and "What new problems does it introduce?" In terms of the first question: it claims to solve the problem of digital asset ownership and exploitation, with further claims that it could do the same for physical assets. NFTs themselves seem to fail at this, however a bunch of third party organisations, like OpenSea, claim to solve it. It seems they do this by essentially nullifying the apparent benefits of NFTs/blockchain (they are trustless and decentralised) by introducing centralisation and a requirement to trust said organisation (how much you should trust companies like OpenSea is hugely debatable).

NFTs also introduces a bunch of new problems, which I won't go into here as they've already been attested to in this thread.

I will leave a quote from those Luddites over at TheRegister, reporting on an NFT conference. I've bolded the bit which seems to get to the heart of NFTs current pointlessness:

Quote:

Almost the entire discussion was dominated by the first two panelists. After about half an hour of hearing how fabulous the system is despite the inability of columnists on IT news websites to appreciate it, the previously silent academic leant forward to his mic and interrupted the flow.

"Let me play devil's advocate…" he interjected.

This is not a good sign. When people say this, it's usually so they can speak to you like an absolute idiot safe in the knowledge that you can't object since they don't really mean what they're saying: they're just playing the role of an absolute idiot in order to liven up a debate.

"… 'Non-fungible' only means you can't change the media associated to the token. It does not stop a buyer of your art from trying to extract copies of it and selling them on attached to new NFTs."

Much shifting of bottoms on seats could be heard in the auditorium as the artists in the audience began to squirm. So NFT isn't copy protection? they were thinking. What does this NFT thing do, then?

Don't worry your pretty little heads, answered the dev boss. Use a platform such as ours and we'll add layers of security. Besides, there are copyright security systems crawling around the interwebs to hunt for NFT and crypto scams...

"…Instances of which have risen by more than 500 percent over the last year," added the boffin. "But because the crypto industry is so fervently anti-regulation, there isn't any. So if your NFT gets ripped off, you're on your own."

Cue more shifting of bottoms, this time among the buyers. Hang on, they were thinking, I bought some "exclusive" NFTs and now you're saying there may be millions of identical duplicates out there and I'll have to hire cyber security firms and lawyers to track them all down?

"…And what if your NFT security platform falls over or you go out of business?" continued the professor, warming to his devil's advocate role so much that he could charge by the quarter-hour. "How would NFT owners then get access to the artwork they purchased?"

The whole audience is writhing by now. Where exactly are these NFTs I've been selling/buying? they were now asking themselves. What are they? Where do they go? Do they even exist? Holy cow, what have I done?

"…And are NFTs sold using cryptocurrencies really the sort of thing the art world should be encouraging? Where are your environmental ethics? Bitcoin, for example, consumes as much energy every day as the whole of Sweden, simply to exist."

Ah, that old trope, joked the dev boss. It used to be Ireland but these days it's funkier to refer to Scandinavian countries…

"The problem with the trope is that, give or take a few megawatts, it's true."

At this point, the person chairing the discussion felt obliged to remind the prof that, as the blockchain expert on the panel, he was supposed to be there to tell us how great blockchain is, not insult it.

"Oh yes, er, sorry. Just playing devil's advocate, you know…"

url: theregister.com/2022/04/16/something_for_the_weekend/

[carlitos]

Originally Posted by FatherLukeduke

url: theregister.com/2022/04/16/something_for_the_weekend/

Live link of this URL here

[psionl0]

Originally Posted by FatherLukeduke

The questions that sceptics have is "What problem does this solve?" and "What new problems does it introduce?"

ISF skeptics tend not to work that way. They fervently try to talk new ideas like this down instead of adopting a "wait and see" attitude. They don't care if their arguments have merit or are downright silly as long as the arguments are negative.

The real questions should be "have they got any applications?", "could they replace or supplement existing systems?", "how can they be improved?" etc.

It is too early to get any definitive answers yet but if speculators want to give NFTs a big soak test (in the belief that they are on to a get rich quick scheme) then that is all the better for the rest of us. We will know all the sooner whether we need to pay any attention to NFTs.

[carlitos]

Yes, we should wait until even more billions of dollars are scammed from the general public before passing judgement on NFTs. Wait and see. Great plan.

[SuburbanTurkey]

Originally Posted by carlitos

Yes, we should wait until even more billions of dollars are scammed from the general public before passing judgement on NFTs. Wait and see. Great plan.

If I recall correctly, we're still waiting to see if Bitcoin has any particular use beyond a wildly volatile speculative vehicle. Over a decade later and untold fortunes lost and gained and it's still too soon to say.

[carlitos]

Warming the planet is a form of utility.

[Olmstead]

Originally Posted by psionl0

ISF skeptics tend not to work that way. They fervently try to talk new ideas like this down instead of adopting a "wait and see" attitude. They don't care if their arguments have merit or are downright silly as long as the arguments are negative.

The real questions should be "have they got any applications?", "could they replace or supplement existing systems?", "how can they be improved?" etc.

It is too early to get any definitive answers yet but if speculators want to give NFTs a big soak test (in the belief that they are on to a get rich quick scheme) then that is all the better for the rest of us. We will know all the sooner whether we need to pay any attention to NFTs.

Funny, since one side actually knows what NFTs are, while the other side seems to believe in crypto magic. It's not some arcane process from a cyberpunk novel that will make you own a piece of the Matrix. We know what it does.

Multiple people have tried to explain it to you, from the actual mechanics of the code to the legal context, but you still think it can magically fashion both DRM and legal ownership from thin air.

[FatherLukeduke]

Originally Posted by psionl0

The real questions should be "have they got any applications?", "could they replace or supplement existing systems?", "how can they be improved?" etc.

Or "Is it inherently flawed?" or "Even if it can be made to work, is this something that has societal or economic benefit?"

These are perfectly valid questions for discussion.

Quote:

It is too early to get any definitive answers

It is?

[theprestige]

Let me see if I understand:

The "bit" in bitcoin is a unique number - string of bits - resulting from a specific calculation. The nature of the calculation is such that the number is not known until the calculation is run. (Called "mining".)

What is known is that there must exist a family of such numbers, all resulting from a specific form of calculation. Thus anyone who is aware of the form of the calculation can begin discovering each of the numbers in the family.

(The calculations get increasingly more difficult as more numbers in the family are discovered by a particular calculator, but this is not relevant here.)

Nothing stops two different calculators from running the calculations and finding the same numbers.

Enter blockchain.

Blockchain is essentially a transaction ledger. Each number is associated in the ledger with its transaction history, from the calculator who first added it to the ledger, down to who is the most recent "owner", and all the transactions in between.

Blockchain is distributed - it's not just one ledger, it's an arbitrary number of copies of the same ledger. Each unique number that has been calculated is coupled with its complete transaction history in a single unified package. This - the unique number plus its unique transaction history - is the "bitcoin" as such.

In theory, it's possible to edit ledger entries on the copy in your possession. You could thus counterfeit the transaction history of a bitcoin, and become the owner of record.

However, the blockchain ledger includes a reconciliation mechanism, whereby conflicts between ledgers are resolved according to some sort of consensus between other ledgers. Thus bogus branches are pruned from the transaction history "tree" of each bitcoin.

This is greatly aided by the fact that the bitcoin blockchain has been around for a while, and there are already many copies extant that have converged on a single "truth" for most of the coins already in circulation. It would be almost impossible to successfully introduce a counterfeit blockchain entry at this point, and have it supersede the legitimate entries.

(One opportunity for fraud, in theory, would be to hack the blockchain for a new cryptocurrency very early on, so that you could control those early transaction records and establish them as the source of truth for all future copies of the ledger. But this is probably impractical. And it's way too late to try this with any of the well-established crypto currencies.)

It might be said that the real innovation here is not the crypto-currency itself, but the innovation of the blockchain: A secure, distributed, reliable transaction ledger for any kind of transaction you care to keep records of.

A digital currency, which exists as an infinitely-reproducible and transferable string of bits, seems like an obvious application of such a ledger. Physical money is (increasingly) difficult to counterfeit, just by nature of being physical. A digital currency needs something like blockchain to make any sense at all.

Thus, a transaction record in a blockchain become a "non-fungible token", or NFT. It's not exactly clear to me why "non-fungible" became the term of choice. It seems like the basic idea is that because it's very difficult to create bogus transaction records, a blockchain NFT becomes a reliable source of truth for who owns whatever thing has been transacted via the blockchain.

For example, a copyright or other use license for some object or idea.

One application of all this has been the creation of digital artworks, with some form of "ownership" transfer being recorded in the blockchain ledger. This record in the blockchain, to track "ownership" of a specific digital artwork, is what is commonly meant by "NFT" right now.

The two main issues with this kind of "NFT" are:

1. What the buyer actually "owns" as a result of a transaction isn't clear. Is it absolute copyright and other licenses to use the artwork in question? Is it simply the "right" to claim to be the "owner" of the NFT record itself? This is not clear, and probably varies widely from product to product. It seems many, if not most such products do not include any meaningful transfer of copyright or other licenses with transfer of the NFT.

2. The digital artwork is still trivially reproducible and transferable. Copyright or not, there is no technical barrier to me copying a Bored Ape image and using it as my avatar, or putting it on a t-shirt, or making a wrap of it for my car.

It's not like it's the Mona Lisa, where I'd actually have to go to the Louvre, steal the original, and then (perhaps) painstakingly crate a forgery of it.

Whoever created the Bored Ape artworks has the copyright to them automatically, in accordance with well-established copyright law. They can transfer that copyright, and make a legal record of the transfer, by a variety of mechanisms. I assume that many journalists and media outlets have paper or electronic documents on file somewhere, establishing who has the copyright to published articles.

The creators of "NFTs" could absolutely use a blockchain ledger to keep a formal and reliable record of who currently owns the copyright to each of the digital objects they've created. But again, it's not clear how many of them - if any of them at all - are actually doing this.

Is that about right?

[Olmstead]

Originally Posted by theprestige

[...]

The creators of "NFTs" could absolutely use a blockchain ledger to keep a formal and reliable record of who currently owns the copyright to each of the digital objects they've created. But again, it's not clear how many of them - if any of them at all - are actually doing this.

I have my doubts about that. I don't think anyone has demonstrated how a creator is supposed to "tie" an NFT to the copyright of a digital asset, and I don't think anyone has ever done it. There doesn't seem to be any mechanism that could make that work.

I guess you could put it in a contract, but that seems like a lot of trouble for a little record-keeping, since everyone will still need to go through the legal rigmarole anyway (and now there's extra legalese).

[bruto]

Originally Posted by psionl0

An iota of research will show that NFTs are exactly what I said they are:

https://ethereum.org/en/nft/



Wrong to the highlighted. I have always been at pains to point out that NFTs do not give any legal rights to the asset in question and it would be unlikely that they would be recognized in a court of law.

How a court would view evidence in the form of an NFT in a civil case is yet to be tested (AFAIK). In the case of a car or a house, you obviously could not establish ownership with an NFT. With other types of assets, the case is not so clear cut.

And yet you keep conflating the NFT with the ownership of a car or a house. When you buy a house you get a default set of rights, unless some are explicitly excluded, and the sale IS recognized in a court of law. The deed, generated as a result of the sale of the house, confirms this. You bought the house and got a deed to prove, not the purchase of the deed, but the purchase of the house. You did not buy a deed and get the house.

[psionl0]

Originally Posted by bruto

And yet you keep conflating the NFT with the ownership of a car or a house.

Typical. Address a claim that is the exact opposite of what you quoted.

[psionl0]

Originally Posted by SuburbanTurkey

If I recall correctly, we're still waiting to see if Bitcoin has any particular use beyond a wildly volatile speculative vehicle.

No we're not.

[psionl0]

Originally Posted by Olmstead

Funny, since one side actually knows what NFTs are, while the other side seems to believe in crypto magic. It's not some arcane process from a cyberpunk novel that will make you own a piece of the Matrix. We know what it does.

Multiple people have tried to explain it to you, from the actual mechanics of the code to the legal context, but you still think it can magically fashion both DRM and legal ownership from thin air.

Somebody else who addresses a claim that is the exact opposite of what they quoted.

[bruto]

Originally Posted by psionl0

Typical. Address a claim that is the exact opposite of what you quoted.

Precisely. The statement I quoted is inconsistent with the claims you have made in the past.

[psionl0]

Originally Posted by bruto

Precisely. The statement I quoted is inconsistent with the claims you have made in the past.

Since you won't find a single post of mine that says that NFTs generate legal ownership of an asset "from thin air" (or any other way), all you can do is say it and hope that nobody checks it out.

[SuburbanTurkey]

Originally Posted by carlitos

Code is law.

My favorite social media interactions is when these NFT dweebs go to cry that their apes got stolen, then trolls reply in the comments to stop using the stolen ape as their profile pic because the blockchain clearly says they don't own it anymore. Many times they comply, because code is law.

I suppose you have to respect that, it's integrity in its own very stupid way. Much better than these losers running off to the cops after they get ripped off in the Libertarian utopia.

[SuburbanTurkey]

Has writing computer code lost that special something? Need a challenge to breathe new life into your old passion?

Introducing crypto Smart Contracts, the fun new way to write code. Make a mistake and it's forever! Maybe a bit of risk is exactly what you need to spice things up!

Quote:

AkuDreams dev team locks up $33M due to smart contract bug
A highly anticipated NFT project has been hit with an exploit and a smart contract bug, causing a disruption to its auction and leaving the team with $33 million unable to be accessed.

...

In a Saturday Twitter thread explaining the whopping $33 million bug, 0xInuarashi, a developer of multiple NFT projects, explained Akutars’ smart contract was coded so that refunds to bidders had to be processed first before the team could withdraw any funds.

The contract had a caveat that a minimum number of bids had to be made before it would allow for the team to withdraw, but the minimum number of bids was set to equal the amount of NFTs available for auction.

Unfortunately, due to some buyers minting multiple NFTs within the same bid, the terms of the contract mean it will never unlock, sealing away the nearly $33 million in ETH forever.

Cointelegraph contacted the Akutars team for comment but did not immediately get a response.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/akudr...t-contract-bug

Fortunately the person exploiting this bug was just doing so as a demonstration, and eventually relented to unfreeze the funds.

[NewtonTrino]

I have no idea whether or not NFTs are a long term thing that is going to be better than sliced bread or not (probably not). But my general approach to such things mirrors that of those who setup shop during the various gold rushes selling picks and shovels. Instead of buying a bunch of gear and going out to the mines there are still plenty of ways to capitalize on the white hot market.

[carlitos]

If you have no morals, sure.

[SuburbanTurkey]

Bored Ape Yacht Club had their instagram account taken over by a bad actor that managed to scam millions of dollars worth of NFTs by posting malicious links:

Quote:

Bored Ape Yacht Club Instagram Hacked, NFTs Worth Millions Stolen
Hackers tricked victims into giving control of their wallets to them with a fake ad for an upcoming NFT project.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/88gp...illions-stolen

My apes, they're gone!

[ponderingturtle]

Originally Posted by SuburbanTurkey

Bored Ape Yacht Club had their instagram account taken over by a bad actor that managed to scam millions of dollars worth of NFTs by posting malicious links:




https://www.vice.com/en/article/88gp...illions-stolen

My apes, they're gone!

Worth millions or worth "millions"?

[SuburbanTurkey]

Originally Posted by ponderingturtle

Worth millions or worth "millions"?

hard to say. Reporting of their worth is all over the place.

I would assume any such hacker would sell off these assets right away, so you can probably put some specific cash value to it.

[carlitos]

They sold them and transferred just over $2.2 million out of the wallet, so millions in this case. There are automated bots on OpenSea that buy anything listed below floor price, so that's probably how they all got sold before the account was banned. I believe (but am not sure) that everything else is stuck in limbo if it hasn't been sold yet.

Best quote on the ongoing scam **** show that is NFTs from Vice - It’s like watching a bunch of people run into a burning building with free money spray painted on it.

ETA - the geniuses worth billions over at Bored Ape Yacht Club just now enabled two-factor authentication for the Instagram account.

[Marras]

Originally Posted by SuburbanTurkey

Introducing crypto Smart Contracts, the fun new way to write code. Make a mistake and it's forever! Maybe a bit of risk is exactly what you need to spice things up!

Smart contracts are so unbelievably bad idea. By design they are Turing complete which means that they can do anything to your wallet if you give one permission to run. And the philosophy and desired state for cryptobros is "code is law", which translates to: "If the smart contract does bad things, it's your fault for allowing it to run. You should have known better".

From theoretical viewpoint there's the Rice's Theorem that states that it is impossible in general to know what a program does. So there's no way to be completely certain what an arbitrary smart contract says. In practice Rice's Theorem is not an important limitation because it is possible to check specific classes of programs to see what they do and reject all programs that can't be analyzed as potentially dangerous.

However, the big problem in analyzing smart contracts is that they run in an extremely distributed environment. Distributed systems are notoriously difficult to get correct, and there have been many cases where a bug in a contract has let attackers to completely empty wallets. Or a "bug" since some of the cases may well have been intentional backdoors left by the developers so that they can rob the crypto from the fools that trust them.

I've been programming for living for over 20 years. I've spent some of that time writing distributed algorithms, but I know that I'm not good enough with distributed systems to spot all potential problems in a smart contract. I'm willing to guarantee that at least 90% of people buying NFTs know less than I do. They have absolutely no chance of noticing an underhanded smart contract in advance.

[carlitos]

The fact that so many other computer programmers and coders are eagerly participating in the crypto and NFT space leads me to leave that this is a feature and not a bug, so to speak. They know how bad it is, but figure that they are smart enough to extract some value somehow.

[BowlOfRed]

~30 minutes long, but Steve Mould did a video on NFTs.

YouTube Video This video is not hosted by the ISF. The ISF can not be held responsible for the suitability or legality of this material. By clicking the link below you agree to view content from an external website.

I AGREE

[Mongrel]

Originally Posted by BowlOfRed

~30 minutes long, but Steve Mould did a video on NFTs.

He also pops up in Legal Eagles take on the legality of NFTs (TL: DW - Yikes!)

YouTube Video This video is not hosted by the ISF. The ISF can not be held responsible for the suitability or legality of this material. By clicking the link below you agree to view content from an external website.

I AGREE