Ik the technology is useful, but selling shit I can screen shot is fucking pointless. If you want to buy shit from the artist, just buy their shit.
What you’re buying when you purchase an NFT is a link to a website. That link shows the image. If the link ever breaks because the website goes down or out of business, it’s pretty worthless. I would have thought the implementation would be based on something more enduring like the actual content and not a link.
Storing a full JPEG on the blockchain would be way too expensive. It’s not a bulk data storage system.
There are alternatives like storing a hash of some sort
A hash still isn’t the file itself. I think that the ones that use ipfs even have a hash in the URL.
I thought the whole point of NFTs and the blockchain is that it’s decentralized, and you can use “smart contracts” for things like this. How is one company able to decide to change it?
Apparently, smart contracts are not contracts at all… they are friendly suggestions. Unsurprisingly a contract needs a mechanism to enforce it, which makes decentralized contracts redundant at best (as you still need institutions outside of the blockchain to monitor and enforce the contracts), and or worse, completely useless if there is no legal way to enforce them.
The idea behind smart contracts is that they contain code to verify that the contract is fulfilled (that’s the “smart” part of the name).
This of course also means that you can only use it for stuff that happens on the same blockchain, because the contract can’t verify anything outside of that.
Which is why this isn’t relevant for the real world, it’s just eating its own tail.
How is this Web3 scam still a thing? I thought I would finally stop hearing it after the crash but it just keeps coming back. The only people who will get rich from this are the scammers themselves.
It’s a mindset. Once you know that the solution is Blockchain, all you need to do is to find a question that fits this answer to get filthily rich.
Casinos are also a known scam, but that hasn’t stopped them.
To me that whole royalties spiel was always just marketing to bait non-technical people into adopting the NFT system.
I’ve never seen anyone build and use an enforcable mechanism for a multi transaction chain to pay out to one original address repeatedly. I think at the very least you would always have to hold the NFT in a multi sig wallet between the artist and the current owner, for the artist to have a mechanism to keep enforcing their royalty claims. That would also require involvement of the artist in every further transaction.
Maybe I’m missing something like a smart contract that can fabricate new multi sig transactions on demand with pre-approval of the artist somehow… If anyone knows of something like that I’d be interested in the technical details.
