I made the mistake of diving a bit deeper into the group who bought it and found a proposal where they are talking about literally burning the book they just bought after digitizing it for … reasons I guess [0]
At this point I just hope its some sort of practical joke or whatever because this just seems a bit much.
"""Since each page of the book will require many miners (minters), we must decide on what type of NFT each minter gets. I propose the following NFT variations ordered from easiest to most complex:
1. Every minter is rewarded with an identical NFT of the page.
2. Every minter is rewarded with a fraction of the final NFT that contains the page. [...]
3. By leveraging progressive JPEG 7 tech, every minter gets a unique NFT which contains the uploaded image but with different degrees of quality. [...]"""
Holy fucking shit. This could be extremely high quality satire, but they're serious, which makes it even funnier.
> By leveraging progressive JPEG 7 tech, every minter gets a unique NFT which contains the uploaded image but with different degrees of quality.
This is both brilliant and insane at the same time. Next up, I have an MPEG stream to sell you ... where the I-frames are charged at a higher rate than the B-frames!
If you think of them as eager and well intentioned children, the whole thing is kind of sweet, tho also a big fuck up. It is like a kid driver denting a car because something something girlfriend.
What’s tragic is they could just upload the damn thing to internet archive but instead they’re going to use some bizarre storage method that will help ensure the book is actually hard for people to read.
> Because the book remains on-chain, the book does not die, but crosses the boundary of physical to digital.
It reminds me of the video game SOMA, where people upload a brain-scan of themselves to live on after some catastrophe, essentially making a digital copy of their consciousness. But because they are also still physically alive, they see the digital version of themselves as a clone, someone else. To "complete the transition", they decide they must end their lives at the exact moment the scan is complete.
It goes back at least 50 years more, to Star Trek transporters.
And the most chilling version I've seen is in Charles Stross' Glasshouse, where some soldiers fight a virus that infects the consciousness of everyone using such a transporter. They "rescue" an infected population by chopping off their heads and throwing them into a transporter hacked to remove the virus. IIRC only the heads because transporting the entire bodies would be slower and the other side is expected to reconstruct a living body anyway.
A few hundred or thousand beheaded people later, they realize that the transporter is broken and would not reconstruct anything.
For me the archetypal story of the genre is Think Like a Dinosaur:
The story postulates a transportation device (supervised by a dinosaur-like race of aliens) which can transmit an exact copy of a person's body to distant planets. The original body is disintegrated once reception at the destination is confirmed. In the story a woman is teleported to an alien planet, but the original is not disintegrated because reception cannot be confirmed at the time. Reception is later confirmed, and the original, not surprisingly, declines to "balance the equation" by re-entering the scanning and disintegrating device. This creates an ethical quandary which is viewed quite differently by the cold-blooded aliens who provided the teleportation technology, and their warm-blooded human associates.
>It goes back at least 50 years more, to Star Trek transporters.
Personally, I like to trace this stuff back to early Christian theological debates. Here's an illuminating quotation:
Origen's belief that he could be resurrected in a numerically different body is parallel to Derek Parfit's belief that he could enjoy some kind of survival short of identity, if his present body was destroyed, but the information from it was electronically beamed, so as to construct an exactly similar body and brain with exactly similar psychology at a distance, say on the planet Mars (Reasons and Persons, 199-320). Parfit, like Origen, discounts the need for bodily continuity, and discounts the idea we encountered in Philoponus that it matters whether the original body is replaced gradually, or all at once (op. cit., Appendix D).
SOMA was brilliant. That moment in particular I think was really thrilling, it made me consider some pretty fundamental questions about consciousness in a totally absurd setting. The setting I think helped isolate the core questions really well I felt.
Trying not to spoil it by discussing it, if anyone hasn't yet you really should try it, it's a really unique experience in gaming and that's hard to come by these days.
Yeah it's a bit of a shame that the parent comment spoiled the plot. I definitely enjoyed SOMA's admittedly simplistic take on the teletransportation paradox; however, for me the atmosphere was much more impactful, especially given the story. I think they executed the "last survivor on Earth" trope really well, and it was tough to get through because of that.
JPEG2000 supports lossless encoding. Even if you scan at higher than print resolution, if you compress too much with lossy compression, the original print resolution date won't be recoverable.
If they only they took a step back, they'd realize yes they can scan it, but nothing beats preserving the original book itself physically. These guys need to go out, breathe air, and talk to people outside of their bubble.
Oddly enough - the process in a library for digitising a copy of a book can be fairly destructive, as far as I understood from those doing it (at CUDL). The spine is chopped off, to make it easier to put it into a machine for scanning all the pages.
> Oddly enough - the process in a library for digitising a copy of a book can be fairly destructive, as far as I understood from those doing it (at CUDL). The spine is chopped off, to make it easier to put it into a machine for scanning all the pages.
The general consensus among modern librarians came around on that subject, and now this kind of destructive processes is rare and generally frowned upon. A librarian friend once explained to me there was always two "schools" among librarians:
1. Those who only value the content of books. For those, copying/digitalizing a rare book is all that is needed in order to preserve said book.
2. Those who also value the physical object of the book as a historical artifact. For those keeping rare books in good condition is also necessary for preservation.
In the middle 1900s with the mass adoption of the microfilm, the first school gained the upper hand, and many libraries conducted mass projects of microfilming and destroying historical archives. Those were mostly motivated by a false belief that books were super fragile and wouldn't last anyway (I mean, if you believe the book will fall apart on its own, then you would be less reticent about using destructive methods to make the best copy possible).
In the last few decades the tides changed, librarians realized that books are not that fragile, and can be kept pretty much indefinitely if closed and protected from humidity (and fire). Also they realized that microfilm is crap, and that copying/digitizing is a error prone process, so a lot of stuff was lost because someone skipped a page, or the film was damaged, and the original was destroyed. So the movement to keep originals grew in strength, being almost a consensus now a days, and modern digitizing processes/machines are specially designed to be gentle and non destructive.
Nice. I suppose it also depends on how rare the item being scanned is. For a recent printed work, with multiple copies it's less important, while scanning a fragment from a Genizah or a notebook is much more careful process.
The first time I encountered a digital facsimile was when I studied medieval literature in Germany.
There is the great "Codex Manesse" [1] (I once had the opportunity to see the real one in an exhibition) that is one of a kind.
It is irreplaceable and there are but a selected few people who are even allowed to touch it (with gloves). It could not be damaged, but was digitized without harm nonetheless [2].
So I actually never thought of digitalisation as a destructive process.
Well ideally digitisation would not be destructive, I suppose. With any preservation or analysis of historical artefacts there is some risk/reward calculation. Like some books are so delicate that there is an approach to scan them while still closed:
>Oddly enough - the process in a library for digitising a copy of a book can be fairly destructive
Not that long ago, there was a very destructive push to convert old books to microfilm. I worry that not enough lessons were learned. Here's an interesting review of a book about the subject:
> Oddly enough - the process in a library for digitising a copy of a book can be fairly destructive, as far as I understood from those doing it (at CUDL). The spine is chopped off, to make it easier to put it into a machine for scanning all the pages.
I don't think it necessarily has to be that way. I recall seeing a photo or video of a book-scanner that would project laser grid-lines onto the book, to non-destructively correct for the deformations caused by the binding in software.
Let’s suspend disbelief for a moment and pretend everything worked as they say, in what world is giving access to the book to the few people that pay for the nft, “democratising”?
The dude in the linked forum post goes on to say this:
> Here is where we make the dreams of the Harkonnen become true. [...]
I'm finding it really very difficult to imagine that someone's read/watched Dune and come away thinking the the Harkonnen are the good guys. So I can't imagine that intellectual honesty is one of their strong points.
> The little prince was still not satisfied. "If I own a scarf, I can tie it around my neck and take it away. If I own a flower, I can pick it and take it away. But you can't pick the stars!" "No, but I can put them in the bank." "What does that mean?" "That means that I write the number of my stars on a slip of paper. And then I lock that slip of paper in a drawer." "And that's all?" "That's enough!"
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry satirized NFTs 70 years before they were invented!
Forget the idea that owning the token represents something. Buying an NFT just means you bought the NFT itself; it does not mean you bought the image, have access to the image, bought any rights to the image. It just means you bought the NFT.
Kinda missing the point of NFTs there, it's a collector's item and I can't spend $2.6m to buy the actual physical book, but I could spend $2.6k to buy an NFT with 1000 editions which was minted by the owner of the physical book. I don't care about Jorodowsky's Dune, but if I was a fan I could then show off my NFT on twitter, or <<the metaverse>> or just print it out and frame it.
FAQS
- Can't someone else just download the image and pretend they own it? Yes, just as someone can buy a fake LV bag and show it off. Other collectors will still know, and don't care about the fakes. As the tech becomes more mainstream, sites like twitter will show whether you actually own the NFT you claim to.
- Can't someone else mint their own NFT? Yes, but like with real collectors items, provenance matters. Just like one can forge a perfect Picasso but without any plausible proof of origin it would not be worth much.
- Can't they decide to mint more "fragments" after the fact, therefore diluting the price of each of the 1000 editions. No, the smart contract that governs the NFT can't be changed.
- Won't the link inside my NFT die? No, the link is usually just a SHA256 hash of the content; with the content being hosted on IPFS. It's all p2p so as long as a host somewhere in the world has a copy, you can always find the content by hash, even if the underlying technology changes with time.
So NFT's are just a way to introduce artificial scarcity for what is otherwise a reproducible digital good? A way for people to flex money on things that don't exist? They're like DLC skins in a video game - worth nothing, other than showing off that you spent $x dollars?
Kinda? Most things are reproducible. Limited edition sneakers are reproducible, and yet scarcity makes them worth thousands of dollars.
Is it stupid to pay $10k for some hard to find sneakers? maybe, but people do it because they have the money and they're collectors, or they want to flex. Is it more real because there's a physical item which costs maybe $20 to manufacture?
It's not like your example with the DLC skins, DLC skins are not limited in any way, the game company can create more and more of them. An NFT collection is limited, there will never be more than the amount the contract specifies (unless the contract leaves that open-ended intentionally). The creator can't simply sell new ones, because using a new contract would make the new ones lose all inherent value.
It's exactly the same as how certain sneakers are worth $10k and others that are from the same brand, same designers, same materials are worth $100 – provenance matters, and knowing it was released in an extremely limited way makes something more valuable.
As far as I understand it, NFTs usually represent the title for the copyright, etc for the piece of art or whatever other non fungible item it is supposed to represent. Honestly NFTs should be pointing to a legal document showing that it's acting that way in addition to a copy of the image asset. 2 urls. Maybe NFTs do or should have an addendum part for transactions, so you can add URL or hash updates as hosting goes down.
When you transfer an NFT from one address to another, you have transferred title to whoever owns the private keys for it.
You’d need a separate legal contract that was valid in whatever jurisdiction saying the owner of an NFT owned the copyright. At which point the NFT is basically superfluous, because the contract is doing all the work and at that point you may as well just have the contract itself.
An NFT is more like an autographed photocopy of something. Except apparently a lot of NFTs on popular platforms are created from stolen digital art, so you get the fun of not even being completely sure if the autograph is actually by the creator of the art (but it’s verifiable that is is by the creator of the token).
You can't really put content on the blockchain, that costs a surprising amount because of all the proof-of-waste. What happens is people put the content on a host and the URL on the blockchain. I suppose in theory it could be kept in IPFS, but few NFTs seem to bother with that.
The idea that people put the URL in the blockchain is misleading and people keep repeating it as a mantra.
Yes, you put a URL on the blockchain but it's almost always a URL to the ipfs protocol e.g. ipfs://QmVc6zuAneKJzicnJpfrqCH9gSy6bz54JhcypfJYhGUFQu
This identifier is a base58 encoding of a sha256 hash that points to the content. It doesn't actually tell you what host to use to find the content, that's completely left to the client app; so you could use an ipfs gateway like cloudflare-ipfs.com or ipfs.io or you could, imagining a future in which ipfs is not used anymore, use any other kind of p2p network to find the content.
Just like gnutella, or torrents, as long as someone out there is hosting the content it's usually possible to find it.
Except ipfs content disappears if no one is pinning it. And you can find IPs of hosts which are pinning it. Yes there is FileCoin but there are minimum and maximum file size and contract duration limits. So someone has to periodically check pins, contracts and keep purchasing new FileCoin contracts to keep it online.
Yes, true, I don't think ipfs is meant to be censorship-resistant though, so finding the IP of hosts doesn't seem like a big deal for the project goals.
My point was more that the NFT metadata itself could still be usable x years in the future when another protocol has replaced ipfs – it would just have to make the files findable by the existing hash.
The biggest potential risk would be if sha256 becomes broken and finding collisions is trivial.
What blockchain? Some newer ones are not expensive (but also are not decentralized enough yet). They dismiss ipfs straight away in the responses already for it and actually say they will put the actual imagine on the blockchain. This will cost something (possibly a lot) depending on which chain, but they have $4m+ left to burn on ‘the good cause’. This all stinks but I must agree, if you want something for eternity (well, in their minds), putting the content on a big (btc/eth) chain would be the only way; seems the rest is far more brittle.
Jikes, that's even worse than I thought. So then they will probably just go for another coin and store it there. Not sure how else. Or maybe they'll raise a few billion after this victory /s
Unfortunately, things like that actually happen even though everyone here would consider it a joke.
A handful of words can be copyrightable. The idea of copyrighted content being stored on a blockchain that thousands of nodes duplicate and offer freely is an interesting conundrum that your reply entirely sidesteps. I’m guessing it has happened already but I too am interested in the legal implications of this.
Legally it's not complicated: is it a copy? Is it permitted by the copyright owner? No? Then it's an infringing copy.
Actually doing something about it is a problem, as shown throughout the post-Napster era, but every node that serves an infringing copy is potentially liable.
* Is the material copyrightable? A novel is copyrightable, but a recipe is not. The layout format of a telephone book is copyrightable, but the contents of it are not.
* Is the copyright still in effect? Unfortunately, this is a less relevant question now, as anything written within living memory is under copyright, but it is still a required step.
* Is permission from the copyright holder required? If I am sold a copy of a computer program, I'm allowed to make whatever copies are necessary (e.g. copying from the hard drive to RAM) that are necessary to execute the program, without the permission of the copyright holder.
* What is being done with the copy? If I buy a work, the copyright owner has no right to prevent me from selling it, nor are they entitled to any portion of the proceeds. Re-sale of authorized copies, regardless of permission, are not infringements.
Well, they won't. All NFTs are hosted on hilariously centralized services like googleusercontent.com and similar.
Browse through https://opensea.io/, the most prominent NFT marketplace at the moment. Digging through the DOM of their website will reveal a lot of links to quite standard content storage solutions. They usually go through a bit of trouble to prevent people from simply clicking "view image in new tab" to reveal the actual location, but it's not difficult to get around.
Almost all NFTs are hosted on IPFS. Opensea shows a CACHED version of the image, because pulling them directly from IPFS puts unnecessary strain on the network and is comparatively slow.
The contract for the NFT generally just points to an IPFS identifier (a sha256 hash of the content), and it's up to the viewer (a website like opensea) to decide what ipfs gateway to use. Even if the ipfs network died you could still use other p2p methods to find the content, as long as someone was still hosting it.
The amount of artwork NFTs that has "Metadata: Centralized" in their details appear very high, although it's difficult to get any exact numbers. As far as I can tell, OpenSea doesn't provide an option to filter based on this field.
Some high value collections like BAYC have frozen metadata, so it can never be changed. I do know some other big collections serve images from AWS or their own domains, this happens because it's extremely expensive at current gas prices to do partial reveals or any kind of metadata changes on-chain
It's a problem, it used to be the grand majority of collections were fully decentralised and frozen but nowadays it's a mixed bag – I think it will change once the gas problem is solved, but it's also partly because the audience has changed and newcomers into NFTs don't care so much about their tokens being fully decentralised.
Did you actually read the post? They propose to put it on-chain, and even say
> [O]ur NFT collection could very possibly become the largest on-chain collection ever in the history of Ethereum. Time would only be on our side because as gas becomes more expensive, the window of opportunity to bypass our on-chain NFT collection would fade away.
Remember that this is from the people that believe buying a book gives them the IP rights to the work (should have bought a Harry Potter book). They may not have thought it all the way through.
To give an idea of the storage costs associated, I dug up this old stackexchange-answer about storage costs on Ethereum [0], which estimates that it costs about 76.000 USD / GB stored. Note that this is 5 year old answer, so the price will probably have multiplied like the price of ETH since then.
Edit: Here's [1] a newer, updated price estimate that takes current prices into account : 309.9 Million / GB. LoL!
> Here's what happens when you add a file to IPFS — whether you're storing that file on your own local node or one operated by a pinning service or IPFS-enabled app.
Notice that wording: “Add a file to IPFS”.
It’s likewise fine to say, then, that you “put something on ipfs”.
That's odd, since the TP in HTTP stands for transfer protocol, but the FS in IPFS stands for file system. You'd expect to be able to store data on a file system. That's what I use my file system for anyway.
[Q] Do we really want to be perceived as book burners?
[A] Tbh I don’t care too much what a bunch of normies that
probably didn’t even know the book existed think. The book
would still exist but digitized and in the blockchain.
[Q] Why not just use Arweave, IPFS, and a variety of other
long-term digital preservation strategies? All of them are
less expensive and resource-intensive.
IPFS is not permanent. If it stops being hosted it
disappears. Arweave cannot compare to something like
Ethereum which is a truly decentralized network. But
upmost I would say that cost of uploading is a feat, not a
problem. It would make our collection even more special.
These are a bunch of seriously sociopathic, inconsiderate and reckless thugs. I'm happy to see them fleecing each other.
Sure but ipfs hosting etc rely on one or a few hosts; if you use a blockchain like btc, at least it is vast and that means someone will be hosting at least until btc reaches $0.
not necessarily. BTC has UTXO (unspent transaction output), whereas ETH has proper accounts and the money is a property of the account.
so if any of these chains only want to focus on sending/storing money (or simply address the evergrowing size of the chain), then they can start purging the old transactions from the ledger.
(yes, ETH has smart contracts, but it's not impossible to imagine that ETH will start charging gas for upkeep of that data, and when the smart contract runs out of upkeep it gets deleted.)
Yes, but most other way of storage are even easier to purge. Also these people are not exactly sane, so I can see them spend millions on ‘securing the documents on chain’.
At this point I just hope its some sort of practical joke or whatever because this just seems a bit much.
[0] https://forum.spicedao.xyz/t/nft-of-the-book-w-proof-of-jpeg...