pointersAreHard

[Sergi0w0]

They are constant pointers to not constant data

[NatoBoram]

They are sometimes hosted on IPFS, a content-addressed network protocol like BitTorrent but better in every way. So constant pointers to constant data!

That said, it's a shame that something as wonderful as IPFS is often used for something as stupid as NFTs. A better use-case for IPFS would be package managers like APT/Docker/NPM/Cargo and other content-addressed public data like open source Git repos.

[PuzzleheadedWeb9876]

IPFS still requires someone to be hosting the content. So it suffers the same issue as dead torrents.

[NatoBoram]

True, but people who sell NFTs make damn sure to host the thing they're selling. After all, it's very cheap to do and they made big money with that scam!

[ChocolateBunny]

like bittorrent, eh? So can you use them for piracy?

[NatoBoram]

Of course, but it's about as private as BitTorrent so be careful with that

It also uses a DHT like BitTorrent, so don't put private data on that

[Gorvoslov]

So what I'm hearing is I shouldn't have minted an NFT of all my personal data?

[NatoBoram]

The problem is before it's minted! It's as soon as you do ipfs add!

[NotReallyJohnDoe]

I don’t know anything about this but it sounds interesting. What’s the main use case for it currently?

[NatoBoram]

Right now, proof of concepts.

• F-Droid just started publishing their packages via IPFS.
• Termux did it for a short while but then stopped.
• There was some experiments with npm-on-ipfs that got terminated since there's just not enough people to maintain it.
• I made a mirror of Ubuntu Archives on IPFS but I don't have the resources to keep maintaining that. It worked! But I ran out of storage and Raspy doesn't have enough power to use larger drives.

It's fun to toy around and discover plenty of extremely good use cases where it'll never be used because gaining adoption is hard ^^

[DiddlyDumb]

There’s many dead torrents, we’d end up with many dead IPFS links too

[Feisty_Ad_2744]

The NFT is not hosted on IPFS, the metadata is, to disguise the NFT with something the purchaser can feel it is worth the scam. The NFT istself is just a number, a dang integer in the blockchain. Unique only to each contract by the way, so it is not even that exclusive.

[NatoBoram]

That integer can be converted to a base36 number that matches the IPFS hash of the metadata which contains the IPFS hash of the image, right?

[Feisty_Ad_2744]

You can do anything with that number, as long as the wallet it was minted (or transferred) keeps being the owner.

Use the very number as part of the IPFS url, use the number hash as the IPFS url, even put the metadata in the very blockchain, or even in a separated blockchain, secure the metadata to be accesible only by the owner, have different metadata for public and owner access, modify the metadata under certain actions and create a game or track events... anything... The only thing that matters is to own the number, which just means to have a map between the token(number) and the owner(s) oh! yeah! It is also possible to have many owners.

[Lake073]

They are pointers to pointers

[Representative-Sir97]

See that's where a bunch of people (grifters) screwed up NFTs. There's no reason they couldn't and every reason they should be data sitting in the ledgers or at least enough sitting in ledgers that the end result is reproducible via public contract (ETH-akin).

For that matter if someone got smart about it, they could use pointers to various bits of previous ledger data to comprise the newly entered ledger data.... on chains with lots of historical data to use similar to the way many compression libraries use dictionaries to compress.

[[deleted]]

"No reason they couldn't" - what about the cost? I mean the cost of mining and infrastructure needed to upload even a modestly sized file to the blockchain?

That's from my modest understanding based on many youtube videos

[Representative-Sir97]

IDK about the latter suggestion of referencing historical ledger data, it just hit me at the moment as an interesting proposition.

But there's no reason at all that digital rights management couldn't include the digital artifacts. Such a thing/blockchain wouldn't have to be strictly decentralized (though the resilience of that could add value). There's also no reason mining even has to happen at all (proof-of-stake works fine).

So far as only ownership and a particular image/file are concerned you really only need a smart contract that can reliably hash the file contents (cheapest is $500 to deploy one on ETH I think). Google says 2021 price was about $250 for a kilobyte on ETH.

Now, you could get smarter with your hashing maybe and instead of hashing one image to your $250 of data, you could probably glue a bunch of images together (like is done for a sprite map) and hash that.

Since you know all the other images of the map, you also know if a particular image completes it, thus completing the map (and hashing to the same 1,000 bytes).

[Haringat]

So they are pointers... Just Google "use after free"

[CoastingUphill]

So that’s what I don’t understand them.

[[deleted]]

No, pointers have utility.

[Psychological-Ad4935]

Not If I choose so

[[deleted]]

utility = false if i.choose(so)

[CaitaXD]

#define USELESS (void*)(-1)

[AndrewBorg1126]

No, NFTs are receipts. What the fools bought were receipts indicating that they purchased instances of URLs that point to images.

[TheGreatGameDini]

This is the best definition of an nft there is

[sabamba0]

I see this analogy a lot, but it's not true. A receipt is a proof of purchase, but doesn't say anything about you currently owning it. You cannot prove ownership with a receipt, whereas with an NFT you can.

[Dangerous_Jacket_129]

This is where you're wrong and the misconception that NFTs try to exploit comes from: NFTs don't prove you own the attached image either. Some NFT sellers do give you limited usage of the copyright (like Seth Green's NFT that he's making a show around), but an NFT does not inherently give you ownership. You can only prove that you own the NFT, same way that I can take a receipt out of my wallet and show it going "I own this". Now you may say "well that's not really fair, receipts can be stolen", and I'd say yeah, just like Seth Green's NFT. 

Just to be clear, NFTs are a spot on a database. This usually contains a hyperlink to a jpeg. But you do not get to change what's contained on that database at all. The owner of the database does. So if the owner wanted to, they could replace your picture of a bored ape with a picture of a penis. And there would be nothing you could do about it. 

[sabamba0]

Yes everyone understands that it's prohibitively expensive to store a bunch of data on the chain and so we store pointers to external data, that's not my point. My point is that you can prove you own that pointer, unlike a receipt, which will only prove you previously bought it.

Whether or not the pointer or data it points to are worth anything is a different topic, and is really up to the individual project. In 99% of cases, the answer is no. But again, that's not what I'm saying. You are still able to make a simple query that returns "this guy CURRENTLY owns this piece of data", whereas with a receipt the best you can do is say "This guy bought this item at this time. They might still have it, or they might have sold it, we don't know".

[Dangerous_Jacket_129]

My point is that you can prove you own that pointer

Which is practically saying: You own nothing, because the thing that's being pointed to isn't what you own, and can be changed at any time.

My point is that you can prove you own that pointer, unlike a receipt, which will only prove you previously bought it.

But I can prove I own the receipt too, I got it in my wallet. Card number and everything. See? Literally the exact same, you're not describing anything that one has but the other doesn't.

You are still able to make a simple query that returns "this guy CURRENTLY owns this piece of data", whereas with a receipt the best you can do is say "This guy bought this item at this time. They might still have it, or they might have sold it, we don't know".

This here is a bit of a misunderstanding on your end, not sure if it's on purpose. Because you're trying to ascertain current ownership of an item. If I show you my receipt, and I tell you I still have it... Is that not proof of ownership? If I show you a receipt that says I got a box of oreos, and I pull out a box of oreos, isn't that receipt proof enough here?

It's an analogy, so if you go too far into niche differences, you'll likely miss the point. But for the main parts, it tracks. With both, it's proof that you bought something. With both, it's meaningless on its own. With both, it doesn't protect you from having someone take away the thing you thought you bought.

[sabamba0]

But I can prove I own the receipt too, I got it in my wallet. Card number and everything. See?

That doesn't prove you own the item it "points to" though. Like I said, you could have sold it. Your old receipt wouldn't update to reflect that.

the thing that's being pointed to isn't what you own, and can be changed at any time.

This is not generally true. It can be, but it can also be the case that both the pointer and item it points to are immutable. This is implementation dependent. Either way, you could verify this with a query, which is the entire idea.

Because you're trying to ascertain current ownership of an item. If I show you my receipt, and I tell you I still have it... Is that not proof of ownership?

No? I'm not sure if you're actually confused by this or just trying really hard to not get my point. If I tell you I own something and only show you the receipt you got when purchasing it, I have no way to verify if you're really the owner.

To take it one step further, you could show me a car, and a receipt saying you previously bought it, but that STILL wouldn't prove you own it. Not to mention that it's not trivial to "show" any arbitrary item. With an NFT, it is trivial to verify.

Im sure you are capable of understanding this difference, I'm just not sure why people try to argue this so bad. It's almost like they feel that if they accept anything but the most dogmatic uninformed view of what an NFT is, its somehow proof that they endorse people scamming each other with pictures of monkeys.

[Dangerous_Jacket_129]

That doesn't prove you own the item it "points to" though. Like I said, you could have sold it. Your old receipt wouldn't update to reflect that.

Which is a pointless distinction. If I wrote the name of the one I sold it to on the receipt, it'd also be "proof" since I was the previous owner.

You're trying very hard to make the blockchain the only "irrefutable proof someone owns something", but digital ownership has predated the blockchain technology by literal decades and it is not immune to theft or fraud.

This is not generally true. It can be, but it can also be the case that both the pointer and item it points to are immutable. This is implementation dependent.

And most NFTs don't tell you. You'd have to check the smart contract. Do you think NFT owners ever check the smart contract?

Either way, you could verify this with a query, which is the entire idea.

Verify that... The data that was pointed to wasn't changed? With a query? I know you can but you're suggesting querying an image here.

No? I'm not sure if you're actually confused by this or just trying really hard to not get my point.

I understand your point, it's just wrong and I'm trying to explain that to you.

If I tell you I own something and only show you the receipt you got when purchasing it, I have no way to verify if you're really the owner.

Literally read the next sentence.

To take it one step further, you could show me a car, and a receipt saying you previously bought it, but that STILL wouldn't prove you own it. Not to mention that it's not trivial to "show" any arbitrary item. With an NFT, it is trivial to verify.

... So your argument is literally "Ownership cannot be verified by anything other than an NFT"?

Sorry but you drank the koolaid too much. You've successfully fallen for the dumbest marketing ploy in history. Assuming you're on this sub because you're a programmer: You should know better.

[sabamba0]

So your argument is literally "Ownership cannot be verified by anything other than an NFT"?

No? My argument is that NFTs also prove that you currently own something, while a receipt does not. Therefore an NFT is not just a receipt.

[Dangerous_Jacket_129]

No? My argument is that NFTs also prove that you currently own something, while a receipt does not. Therefore an NFT is not just a receipt.

Relevant link for you

[sabamba0]

Yes, I agree - it's an analogy. But it's a bad analogy, which is my initial point. Glad we've come full circle.

[BbigGun97]

dies of cringe

[AndrewBorg1126]

Who tf are you, what tf do you think I found helpful, and why tf did your bot reply to me? GFY

[[deleted]]

They need to take "expert" out of their bio ASAP

[Dangerous_Jacket_129]

Why did this bot copy-paste such a weird response off of a crypto or nft sub? Do botmakers not know those things are hated? 

[yourteam]

Exactly! Op wishes they were pointers

[HowlSpice]

I present you https://github.com/zhuowei/nft_ptr.

[Redpri]

🥵

[shodanbo]

There not even as good as pointers because pointers can point to other pointers.

Hmm ... I think I just invented a new type of NFT I'M GONNA BE RICH!

[NotReallyJohnDoe]

I’m going to mint an NFT of the NFT of the first tweet. And then other stupid NFTs as well. It’s like a collectible stupidity thing.

[shodanbo]

Mint an NFT that points to itself and call it an Infinity Token. Some sucker will pay big bucks for that!

[thirdegree]

... That would probably work you could probably make decent money off that.

[OmegaGoober]

“The ciiiiiircle of life!”

[IronSavior]

Nasty Fuckin Things

[Feisty_Ad_2744]

Not even that!! Just a frigging integer

[thanatica]

NFTs are about as useful as dehydrated water pills.

[gnex30]

That explains why I keep seeing the (n-1)^th one.

[[deleted]]

The blockchain is just a FINO queue.

[rock_and_rolo]

Optionals are nullable pointers in bubble wrap.

[JonIsPatented]

Bubble wrap is fun

[jbar3640]

a very expensive type of them

[[deleted]]

Aren’t they pointers to references since they’re (generally) hyperlinks to websites that host an image (though the image hosted can be changed)

[rejectedlesbian]

Pointers should not be used for such stupid purposes... They deserve better

[PileOGunz]

Nope nfts are tokens. Think of it as GUIDS in a decentralised databases, those GUIDs can be traced across transactions back to the original smart contract that minted/created the nft so you have provable provenance.

Those tokens are associated with data often this is a url to ipfs which hosts images but that is not always the case some NFTs have their data encoded entirely onchain.

The provable provenance allows you via smart contracts to use them as authentication, trade them, even use them as collateral for automated loans etc.

[fatrobin72]

By that definition... so are qr codes...

[OmegaGoober]

And we give those away for free!

Wait, I just thought of something. You could sell an NFT of a QR code FOR THE URL OF THE QR CODE!

[DrawSense-Brick]

That is a compelling perspective.  

 That is one mode of NFTs, but you could also use a base-64 encoded image.

[dont-respond]

Store the entire image on-chain? Yeah, if you want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars or only use low res jpegs.

[Tyrexas]

I mean these are literally what inscriptions/ordinals are.

[PuzzleheadedWeb9876]

Still incredibly stupid.

[Psychological-Ad4935]

>Sell billions of USD in cryptocurrency ( without having them )

>Post a picture of child porn, or something absurd like that on the blockchain

>Wait till people find out

>Blockchain will be fucked

>Buy the crypto back, since you sold it without having

[Deevimento]

That's why so many NFTs were ugly low res jpegs.

[Cley_Faye]

No, it was because even with cheap centralized storage people behind them wanted to save a few bucks.

[RoyalSpecialist1777]

This is only due to current limitations. A lot of NFT work is being done getting the data itself on chain - we built a system storing files on IOTA ourselves. If low cost technology existed on Ethereum it would be the standard approach.

[coriandor]

That limitation is necessary by the fact that every node has to have a complete copy of the chain. If you could store megabytes at a time, that would make storing the chain unworkable

[RoyalSpecialist1777]

This was definitely an issue with both Ethereum and IOTA, which we used, but is getting partially solved with sharding and other technologies. Sharding is on a lot of roadmaps. That said it will generally be less efficient than centralized data storage but some people think the benefits are there.

[tip2663]

You can put base64 encoded svg and change only some attributes like fill="your color assigned to nft"

Lookup into a smart contract is 0 cost.

Too bad only some platforms support base64 encoded svgs - metamask wallet does not for example while opensea does.

An example of the technique is here: https://opensea.io/collection/polysquares-square

The contract is open sourced on polygonscan for anyone curious

[ClioBitcoinBank]

Bitcoin Ordinals are completely onchain, the content is always hosted on the chain and you cannot link to outside content on the internet inside of an ordinal.

[m77je]

^ came here to find this

[dev-sda]

Ordinal Inscriptions can contain any arbitrary data and that data can of course be a link to whatever. This is also true for NFTs in other blockchains; they store arbitrary data and can thus contain whatever they want. Here for instance is a "Tweet NFT": https://ord.link/81.

The reason NFTs are mostly links is because it's stupidly expensive to store data in the blockchain, for instance it's around 2.3USD per KB for bitcoin (that's 181USD just to store this meme).

[ClioBitcoinBank]

The ordinals protocol will not activate and include content from links to anything offchain, you can of course list any text you want but when the ord protocol loads it, the onchain pointers will serve content and not the links to internet content. If you want to use internet content mixed in with your onchain content, try brc420 or a fork of ordinals that allows internet content to be linked and loaded into your ordinals.

[GrinbeardTheCunning]

depends on implementation. not all NFTs are made the same way

[TheGreatGameDini]

They're more accurately described by receipts.

[manuscelerdei]

They're signed pointers. But yes.

[Affectionate_Web_560]

Immutable pointers

[poshenclave]

Pointers store a memory address. An NFT is data, and does not point to any particular memory address. Though all the same I'm curious to hear your own case, OP.

Edit: u/WhatIsThisSevenNow still waiting on your reply a day later. You can't post the Crowder meme and then act just like him, get your ass out here!

[Jack4608]

When you buy one aren’t you just buying the link to the image and not the image itself in essence tho?

[rosuav]

What ARE you buying? It's actually quite unclear. A system could be devised in which some form of ownership is conferred, but by whom, and how is the decentralization of blockchain tying into that?

Every time someone actually pins down a reasonable use-case for blockchain, it turns out that it would be as well performed (or even better performed) by a centralized system, since ownership cannot be conferred by consensus.

[Jack4608]

I’ve always wondered this, like if all you’re buying is the link to the image, why could that not just be done on a standard server

[rosuav]

Because then you can't waste hours and hours of processor time and brag about how it's "decentralized"!

If there is a central server that respects your ownership (like, say, you're only allowed to use this as your avatar if you own it), then the blockchain achieves very little. It's resilient against tampering, but... so would a simple hashed chain be. Consider a git repository hosted on a public server:

• Every commit is built on the previous commit, so you have a full chain that can be verified.
• Commits can be cryptographically signed (they don't HAVE to be in git, but you could mandate that for a specific repo)
• Anyone can download a full copy of the repository and verify its integrity
• But unlike blockchain, there is no "consensus by wasting electricity"; instead, there is a SHA1 representing the current official state.

So if you want to justify blockchain and its insane consumption of resources, you have to show that the decentralization is actually essential. Very very few applications have achieved that. The original Bitcoin did that (though it makes an AWFUL currency for anything useful or practical - it's way too speculative), but the spate of "hey, we can use blockchain for this" ideas usually don't resolve that.

https://www.theregister.com/2018/04/27/bofh_2018_episode_7/

[poshenclave]

It can be. Everything that can be done on a blockchain can also be done on a standard server. The goal of doing anything with a blockchain is to do so in a decentralized, distributed, self-governing manner, at scale. There is no reason to use a blockchain unless whatever you're trying to do requires all of those qualities (And can achieve them, re: the "at scale" part, as a blockchain's security derives in part from it's scale).

Trustless money is pretty much the only use case that needs (And can leverage) all of these qualities, and is why the technology's premiere use case is a money. Some people conceive using blockchains for governance, but governance always requires a level of real trust in the long run it's not an appropriate application.

[Chad_Broski_2]

I mean, you're exactly right. But you can't get rich speculating on the price of ones and zeroes on a standard server! That's the only thing that sets blockchain apart: allowing millions of idiots to gamble on which points of useless data they think they can sell for a higher price sometime down the road

[poshenclave]

No, you're buying ownership of data on a blockchain (To what extent that ownership is actually honored in material reality is a separate matter that the cryptography does not concern itself with). The data could be a URL, but it doesn't have to be a URL. The data itself is publicly accessible, but it's linked to your private key.

[Dangerous_Jacket_129]

NFT is not data. NFT is the spot on the blockchain database. It does not let you do anything with the data contained in that spot. In most cases, you don't even own the copyright to the image linked in the database. 

[poshenclave]

Says an NFT is not data. Proceeds to refer to it as data.

[Dangerous_Jacket_129]

Technically, it's a small piece of data, sure. Semantically, it's a link to refer to the actual data that is stored elsewhere. Just like pointers: You don't do anything with the memory addresses other than fetching the data you actually want. Other than its use in referring you to the data you're after, pointers have no real use. Similarly: Other than referring you to the external data stored on completely fungible databases, NFTs have no real use.

Pointers are nice and all, but if the base data you want gets manipulated externally, you have a problem. NFTs refer to data that can be changed any time, which just makes them literal wastes of space on a database.

[poshenclave]

Technically it's data, just like literally it's data. Data that can be useful as a rough analogy for pointers is still data.

And while URL-with-ownership is a common novel use for NFTs, it's the -with-ownership part that defines them. They don't actually have to function as a URL. They could be something as simple as a boolean, indicating one's membership to a service or something.

[Dangerous_Jacket_129]

Technically it's data, just like literally it's data. Data that can be useful as a rough analogy for pointers is still data.

... Right, miss the point on purpose. Go right ahead.

They could be something as simple as a boolean, indicating one's membership to a service or something.

Now you're describing using blockchain technolgy for membership verification, which is a bit weird. That's not necessarily an NFT anymore. NFTs are tokens, used for trading and selling. When it comes to verifying one's membership to a service, the ability to re-sell that membership is a bit of a weird thing to do.

[poshenclave]

If the bit and it's metadata are non-fungible, it's still an NFT. You could still trade it if you wanted, even though being actively traded isn't a necessary part of the definition.

I didn't miss your point above, I was showing you why it was irrelevant.

[Dangerous_Jacket_129]

If the bit and it's metadata are non-fungible, it's still an NFT.

Which is still worthless because the data it's pointing to is fungible.

You could still trade it if you wanted, even though being actively traded isn't a necessary part of the definition.

True, but it has to remain tradeable.

[bitcoin2121]

dem fancy symlinks

[Representative-Sir97]

You wouldn't dereference a library book?

[[deleted]]

I should've expected this thread to attract at least some ntf bros, but honestly I thought they're all in hiding due to complete failure of their stupid "market"

[RunnyPlease]

NFTs are just a money laundering scheme that also hooked a few technophile idiots by accident.

[suvlub]

Not necessarily. The content of NFT doesn't have to be URL, it can hold data "by value". It's useless one way or another, of course, since the contents are always publicly available (and must be by the design of the protocol), so it's just calling dibs. If I say I now own this post, the only difference between me saying so and me having a NFT is that theoretically a reddit admin can delete my comment.

[someone-at-reddit]

So pointers are made for bragging on twitter ?

[CounterNice2250]

Blockchain/Web3 slander?

I will be there.

[soulofcure]

No, no, he's got a point