GameStop has notified customers that it's shutting down its NFT market, effective February 2. The marketplace launched in July 2022. GameStop also shut down its year-old crypto wallet in November, citing "regulatory uncertainty."
But the NFT prototype we created in a one-night hackathon had some shortcomings. You couldn’t store the actual digital artwork in a blockchain; because of technical limits, records in most blockchains are too small to hold an entire image. Many people suggested that rather than trying to shoehorn the whole artwork into the blockchain, one could just include the web address of an image, or perhaps a mathematical compression of the work, and use it to reference the artwork elsewhere.
We took that shortcut because we were running out of time. Seven years later, all of today’s popular NFT platforms still use the same shortcut. This means that when someone buys an NFT, they’re not buying the actual digital artwork; they’re buying a link to it. And worse, they’re buying a link that, in many cases, lives on the website of a new start-up that’s likely to fail within a few years. Decades from now, how will anyone verify whether the linked artwork is the original?
Anil Dash helped create the first NFT spec in a coding jam, and it had serious limitations. The bit-limitation is huge. NFT’s still only contain a URL. What happens if the website hosting that URL goes down? Well now your NFT points to nothing because it’s actually just a fucking link, not an actual image.
But sure, this somehow has actual utility in a world where data can be copied infinitely at no cost and that’s a good thing. We should be fighting to remove paywalls to access information, not adding fucking digital ones.
Because I just can’t wait for every college textbook to be an NFT to try to stop textbook piracy. What a joke. That shit just makes me want to pirate things and break digital locks more.Yarr Harr Fiddle Dee Dee!
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/nfts-werent-supposed-end-like/618488/
Anil Dash helped create the first NFT spec in a coding jam, and it had serious limitations. The bit-limitation is huge. NFT’s still only contain a URL. What happens if the website hosting that URL goes down? Well now your NFT points to nothing because it’s actually just a fucking link, not an actual image.
But sure, this somehow has actual utility in a world where data can be copied infinitely at no cost and that’s a good thing. We should be fighting to remove paywalls to access information, not adding fucking digital ones.
Because I just can’t wait for every college textbook to be an NFT to try to stop textbook piracy. What a joke. That shit just makes me want to pirate things and break digital locks more. Yarr Harr Fiddle Dee Dee!