Fortnightly Issue #7
NFT and (barely) something else
Hey, everyone!
I love fancy numbers. Prime numbers, the Fibonacci sequence, powers of two... I'm eagerly awaiting the day I hit 2^5 to throw a party with people talking rationality, playing 5-dimensional chess, and doing other geeky stuff. Last Sunday, I turned 31 (which is a prime number) and I'm happy about that day. We had an antibodies-owners-only birthday event with friends, it felt great... and not only because I have forgotten how it is, to meet 8 people at once.
Three days ago I received the second dose of the COVID vaccine and I can strongly recommend it to everyone who doesn't have antibodies and has no contraindications. By the severity of my symptoms, I fall above the 90th percentile and I daresay this is nothing compared to the 90th percentile of the symptoms from the actual virus.
Last week several people asked me about NFT — because of my previous experience with blockchain, I presume — and since I only had heard of it once or twice before, I decided to make a brief foray into the topic and sum it up for you. Although there are many nice starting posts on NFT there are things almost none of them mention. I’ve dug up some of those and I want to share them with you.
Hence, a disclaimer: I've only gathered what was on the surface. I may be wrong about specifics so I will provide some links for you to dive deeper on your own.
By definition, an NFT is a unit of information that is stored on a blockchain and conveys certain value: it may be a work of digital art, a piece of research, an in-game asset, or a historical tweet. The initialism stands for “non-fungible token” which means that every such token is unique and that no token is replaceable with any other token — that is, each one shall remain unique forever. Well, this definition needs a couple of clarifications.
First, the uniqueness of a token can be enforced only within the blockchain it has been minted on. If the author (or a scammer) sold the same media several times on different blockchains, you could do nothing about it except for revealing their scheming to the public. Another possibility for malpractice is to modify the data only slightly — say, change the color of one pixel to an almost indistinguishable one — the hash for the new data will be absolutely different but the test for exclusivity will pass.
Of course, this can be solved with a unified registry for all NFTs and strict pre-minting procedures but right now, this is the wild territory, not unlike the unregulated market of ICO that was flourishing several years ago.
Then, many NFTs exist on the blockchain only in the form of metadata — a descriptive JSON file or something alike. Some cases have been reported already when a sold NFT has been rendered worthless because the media is no longer hosted by any server, or a tweet has been deleted by its author. Here are two investigations about such cases and startups whose minting process is flawed. Spoiler: some popular (and really expensive) NFTs may be stored exactly like that, with their metadata on IPFS and the actual JPEG on a server that belongs to the minting startup. Should the startup go bust, the media may be lost forever. (I'm not perfectly sure about this though so if you're interested you may want to follow this thread or either of the investigations above.)
The solution to the NFT fragility is backing up all data to a blockchain. I’ve seen that Arweave is mentioned as a provider of this solution, and there are others for sure. So, the ideal NFT minting process would be like this: the bytes comprising a media are stored on a blockchain in their entirety and are assigned to that media owner’s wallet. Startups that provide this seem to exist already. Two of them are Mintbase and hic et nunc. Though I urge you to read the threads above in case you want to find other such startups and get a bigger picture of the current NFT market. Also, there is a service that allows you to check how your non-fungible tokens are stored.
From what I glimpsed, the world of NFT is young and chaotic. I believe that some of the current players are scammers by negligence — they can be genuine in their attempt to contribute but lack the technical expertise or market understanding. When they fail, the value of the assets they have created may vanish. Still, if you get a firm grasp on how things work you can try yourself and set out on an exciting crypto adventure!
Recommendations
Right now, I have only one thing to suggest to you that has occupied my leisure time for the last week and will be doing so for another one for sure. Disco Elysium.
It’s highly probable that I will return to you with some insights on it later but for now, take my word: this is a breath of fresh air for an RPG lover.
Alright, that’s all for today. Thank you for reading, and till next time!