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By popular demand NoCoin has been expanded to include NFTs.
A lot of people think it’s a way to buy a JPG but the truth is both far more complicated and less intuitive than that. You see, you’re buying the token on the blockchain.
NFTs are like digital dibs. You can “own” stuff on the blockchain. Not legally though… or in any practical sense. But in a new exciting sense.
Lets get into it…
This is sometimes called “actually owning” something. You own it in the sense that it is legally yours. Someone who has paid off their car or home owns it. I own an MPC because I bought it. I registered it online so if its stolen the serial number will identify it as belonging to me. Someone paying off a mortgage lives in a house that a bank legally owns.
With this form of ownership, you can do basically whatever you want with something. Sell it, give it away, enter a 30 year contract where someone pays you every month for access to it, have it destroyed (as long as you don’t hurt anyone or damage anything else in the process).
If someone is sleeping in your living room when you wake up one morning you call the police and have them removed via the states monopoly on violence (in some places you can use violence yourself) One of the main reasons we have governments is to protect this form of ownership.
You don’t own an NFT in this sense. No one has ever had an NFT stolen and retrieved it through the legal system. If someone takes your NFT you can’t do shit. Not your keys not your coins not your NFTs. Code is law.
Do you know of someone who retrieved a stolen NFT through the legal system? I'm not reachable unless you get my email
This is the sort of ownership someone who is paying off a car loan or a mortgage also enjoys, they don’t technically own it. But no one else is gonna pay for repairs. It’s their home, they live there there if someone else shows up they can call the police and have them forcibly removed.
I own this domain name. Sure it’s only registered to me. It doesn’t physically exist but I paid for it and I control where the domain points. I can set up DNS any which way I want. Should I be locked out I can contact customer support who knows who I am and has my name, address, and phone number. I can get in even if you take my domain somehow.
NFTs don’t give you this kind of ownership. I can take right click your monkey avatar. The token on the chain itself is secure as long as you have your key. But if you lose that key there is no one who can give you access to it again.
I own a CD of 2pac’s Me Against The World
I paid for the CD, it is in my home. Can I now chop up If I Die 2nite? and make a song of my own?
No. Of course not. I can listen to it as much as I want but legally I do not own the rights to it. Do NFTs grant you this?
No. Of Course not. Some NFTs promise this but if you read the fine print it often contradicts this. And again, no court has ever honored an NFT.
As a teenager I stole a no trespassing sign. I owned that sign. It hung on the wall in my bedroom for years. I didn’t technically own it. But it was mine for all practical purposes. Sure the government could take it from me but so what? They can take my freedom if they want to.
Say I realize I can execute code on your webserver and I gain control of the server and use it for own my purposes. Hackers call this owning (sometimes pwning) a “box”. This is the closest sort of ownership one has over an NFT. It isn’t actually yours in any legal sense and you only own it in the sense that you currently have control of it. People have been selling their botnets since before you knew what a hash was.
A jpg. Well no… a bit of json containing a link to a jpg.
It takes a lot of energy and computing power to put stuff on a block chain, so it’s hard. Thats why you pay to get data on one. The link can die and then you own a dead link.
No not in the slightest. The blockchain doesn’t know if I’m making an NFT of a link to a jpg someone else has already created. And the blockchain doesn’t ask if I actually made the thing I’m making an NFT of.
The number might go up. You ignorant fool. All of human life exists to be monetized and commodified.
I have invented the Internet Dibs Token (IDT)