50 sats \ 3 replies \ @dieselbaby 23 Aug 2023 \ parent \ on: I was a well-paid blockchain / web3 dev for years, but became disillusioned. bitcoin
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how public/private key cryptography works if your comment above is any indication.
You can absolutely prove that you own a hash, it's deterministically generated as a result of the interaction between your key and the contract with which the token is from.
(edit: I jumped the gun a bit and misread your comment above as saying that you could not prove that you "own" a hash, so my bad...but my comment below still stands as it is accurate regardless. The external source of truth you speak of IS the blockchain. The same way that it works on bitcoin....just because you're sending NFTs which can contain any kind of arbitrary data within them doesn't make it any different than people sending sats to one another. Same goes for people inscribing ordinals on bitcoin, too. Fundamentally the same thing, at it's core.)
Also, you ignored the very real use case I gave earlier (because it doesn't suit your narrative that NFTs are all 100% scams, which is bullshit). Sure, you could use a database instead of having the fan club membership I spoke of function as NFTs. But in doing so, you'd miss out on the following features:
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Token gating for access to their Discord server, a special website, ticketing purchases access (all of this with numerous levels of complexity beyond what you'd find in a standard database)
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The ability for people to freely transact their membership pass (NFT) by listing it for sale or purchasing it on a secondary marketplace, at any time. If that right there doesn't align with the ethos of decentralization and self-ownership that many bitcoiners have embraced and constantly champion to others, I don't know what would...
Your comment about it being a "pump and dump scheme" is moot, as this is a world-famous band who have sold millions of albums, and plays sold-out arena tours all over the globe with bands like Metallica...they're certainly not hurting for cash and the value (though such a thing is subjective, of course) that the fans who hold said memberships is gained via a one-time payment.
You seem to want to be getting deep into the weeds and having some weird conversation about what denotes value or what constitutes ownership of something...there is absolutely nothing that is required to confirm that you own the membership pass (or any other NFT for that matter) aside from a computer with the right software and an internet connection.
Explain to me why should I store this garbage for eternity to let other nodes perform IBD? These tokens only concern a small number of people, why should this information be globally available if it's completely worthless for 99.999% (add more nines to your taste) of people? It's not money, it can't work as money, why do you need a global consensus for some discord entry tokens that would go to zero in 100% of cases after discord inevitably shuts down? Why should we store dead information forever? I know about node pruning, point is if everyone prunes no one can do IBD + even with pruned nodes you still have to download the entire blockchain.
The rest of your arguments follow, this information that virtually nobody is interested in, and which becomes more useless every passing month, should not be a part of the global consensus. On the opposite, transaction history becomes more valuable every block because it builds a chain that links the today's UTXO with the block it was mined in, proving that these sats are real and were not created out of nothing/doublespent.
You can store such useless information as any NFT, but it is simply spam, (and usually scam too). Anecdotal evidence that some famous people participated in a scam (whether willingly or accidentally) doesn't prove anything, because it's anecdotal. You can't validate a concept by saying that some well known people did it. It's completely irrelevant. Famous people bought monkeys for millions, now they're not worth crap, how's that not pump&dump? The fad passes quickly, fortunately. Those poor people who believed in the blockchain-future narrative are gonna get broke, not sure if they deserve it but I'm at least trying to warn the others.
absolutely nothing that is required to confirm that you own the membership pass (or any other NFT for that matter) aside from a computer with the right software and an internet connection.
False, you need something outside of the blockchain that confirms that this membership is genuine. Be it a hash, a date/block when it was minted, doesn't matter. Without that anyone can create a duplicate NFT, maybe even in the same block if they monitor the mempool closely, and who's gonna tell you which one of them is "genuine"? The answer is: both (because in fact there's no difference, random information isn't scarce) and neither (because both pretend to be something they're not).
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False, you need something outside of the blockchain that confirms that this membership is genuine. Be it a hash, a date/block when it was minted, doesn't matter.
If we're talking about the Ethereum blockchain (which i suspect we are not) then of course you only need the actual blockchain as well as your private key to confirm ownership of anything on-chain.
... anyone can create a duplicate NFT, maybe even in the same block if they monitor the mempool closely, and who's gonna tell you which one of them is "genuine"?
You are referring to a very real problem here (front-running, using bots to find mempool transactions and replace them by paying higher fees to be included first). Ethereum is a dark forest. However, this issue has been solved. Flash-bots is an organization that helped immensely. The tech is complicated, but the problem you refer to can be solved by submitting your smart contract (i guess in this case, for an NFT) to their open-source endpoints (you can also run one yourself, of course, it's just an ethereum node with extra features) to have your transaction bundled with many others before it is included, thus invisible to arbitrage bots.
I hate to be in the position of defending Ethereum btw, but I gotta defend truth!
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you only need the actual blockchain as well as your private key to confirm ownership of anything on-chain
You're missing the point. You can confirm the ownership of an address or some hash (though the concept of ownership becomes very vague in this case). You can't confirm the genuiness of that object, again, because "genuiness" is vague when you're talking about easily duplicated arbitrary data. You bring back complex methods of analyzing the previous data, looking for potential duplicates and not-exact copies.
When someone sells you an image they don't care if it's "genuine". It's the buyer's burden to verify it's not a copy, and it was always like that with anything, including money. The party accepting the money needs to verify it's not a counterfeit, not the payer. So the fact that you can prove that you own these bytes means basically nothing, if tx goes into a block it's already verified by the software. But you assume that the cost of this sat is much higher than 1 sat because it's somehow tied to a previous tx with an arbitrary payload, and this payload may be genuine (created by a certain real life person) or not (created by another person that's not famous). This is the missing link between the blockchain and real life, and just the blockchain can't tell you who exactly created this payload. You need a website that says "Barack Obama created this NFT in this transaction: <hash>", and you also need to verify the website itself is genuine, again, using Google or Twitter or asking your friends.
And over time these websites go offline, tweets get deleted, accounts get suspended, and then scammers create a similarly looking website with a different address that references an NFT that was copied, slightly modified (so that 1:1 match doesn't work) and posted a few days after the "original" (yes, they were patient enough to wait until they get an opportunity), and you can no longer tell if it's "real" or not. You have no truth anchors and the blockchain can't help you.
Your anti-flashbot scheme is laughable. If you need this 100% centralized scheme for it to work, you don't need Bitcoin. Moreover, these bots can themselves collude and post a slightly modified NFT for the future scam to profit off (the scheme is described above). If you need centralization to make your idea work in a decentralized setting, your idea isn't decentralized at all. Put to a database where it belongs and stop polluting the global decentralized ledger.
So in the end you're back to shitcoining: unreliable, extremely complex schemes of verification, inherently centralized, fragile and used only to extract value early. This is completely against the Bitcoin ethos which tells you to not trust but verify, and Bitcoin lets you verify cheaply, instantly and using blockchain only, without other websites, tweets and friends to call. Any other imaginary use case is spam at best and an attack at worst.
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