Love, Death and Robots just ended with a little NFT QR code, and before that I saw a message for Ukraine-war NFTs. I don’t know what that last bit even means, and I’m so fed up of this bullshit.

The plan’s to make a protocol for a replacement, just to demonstrate how stupid the entire thing is.

Here are NFTs stated goals:

  • show ownership of art, verified on a blockchain.
  • allow transferance of ownership

Here’s why NFTs are bullshit:

  • you don’t need to gind CPUs to have a blockchain.
  • URLs verify an image
  • none of this shows ownership.

The New Protocol

  • Stick image sha256sums in a git repo, verified by gpg keys (now we have a blockchain).
  • Allow a few people to verify image ownerships, gpg keys (verify other people’s stuff if you like, so it’s a standard ring-of-trust situation).
  • Don’t bother with proof-of-work. Just let the shasum rest.
  • Only merge images into the main branch if there’s a requested sale (otherwise it gets full of crap).
  • Display ownership with exifdata.

Here’s the repo, just as an example.

Questions

  • Does this cover 100% of what NFTs were supposed to cover?
  • Is there an even simpler way of doing this?
  • Can I add stuff with git-lfs without also downloading it (so the repo remains small, even with 10,000 images)?

Just to reiterate - this is a solution to a problem nobody has. It’s not a real suggestion, just a proof of concept to show that art-transferance could be handled better with some gaffatape and a git.

    • GhastOP
      2·
      2 years ago

      Looks like we’ve solved a few issues raised there: there’s no double-spending, as only the first on the block-chain counts (I guess one could also write a script to verify that, and reject merges which show a double-spend).

      I don’t see why anyone cares about the transaction price, unless you’re into selling things just to sell on, so that sounds like a non-problem for people who simply want to verify ownership of art.