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Hackers steal NFTs worth millions. In other news, NFTs worth millions. (www.theblock.co)
submitted 2 years ago* by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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The way I read the article, the "worth millions" is the sum of the ransom demand.

The funny part is that the exploit is in the "smart" contract, ya know the thing that the blockchain keeps secure by forbidding any updates or patches.

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[–] 65 points 2 years ago (37 children)

They did. For like a week last year. Then everyone realized it was a scam.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    Love how the NFT hype was a big wealth transfer event. So many rich people, like wealthy oil Arabs, bought into the scam and moved so much money into artists pockets while they essentially got nothing in return.

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  • [–] 26 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Is there any way to confirm this? Or are there examples of artists who made a significant amount of money from NFTs? I understand its potential benefit for artists, but I mostly remember already-rich corporations (e.g. UFC) using them as another way to extract money from consumers.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    There are curated NFT auction sites where only selected artists are allowed to sell their work. And you can see for how much they sell their pieces. During the hype many sold items for thousands to tens of thousands or more. Also there is Beeple who rode the hype early from the start and he became a millionaire.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago

    That's not really what happened. Some people who had invested in companies that would make money if NFTs went up in value chummed the waters by buying NFTs for huge amounts, convincing a lot of people that NFTs were going to be great investments. Then celebrities with an interest in the scheme pumped up the value too.

    That convinced a lot of idiots to "invest" in NFTs, then eventually the bottom fell out of the market.

    As for artists, some made some money, but most of the money went into shit like "bored apes" which were algorithmically generated.

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  • [+] -7 points 2 years ago (27 children)

    I do see potential use for them, but not in the way they are currently being used. I could see uses like door keys, tickets, memberships, etc being of practical value, but not stupid little pictures.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (24 children)

    Tickets, yes, door keys, no.

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  • [+] -6 points 2 years ago (23 children)

    Besides the obvious of your door lock needing to be connected to the internet, and that could be a problem, what else do you see as being an issue with using it for door keys?

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago (18 children)

    How exactly would that work? Keep in mind that the blockchain is by necessity not secret.

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  • [+] -14 points 2 years ago (17 children)

    Right, but all the lock is doing is checking whether you own the NFT or not. If your house was in NFT, people could see that you bought a house, but not where it was as long as it was generic like house #40000

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    all the lock is doing is checking whether you own the NFT or not.

    So, you'd need a method to verify who "you" are. And once again we've come up with a way to use NFTs that actually works better without NFTs.

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  • [–] -5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Fair enough. I will say that I am not well enough versed in the topic to discuss it in depth.

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    No offense, but this is literally the problem with almost everyone who says they have a perfect usecase for NFTs. I also don't know everything about everything either, but I know do know that we don't tend to make existing systems complex just for fun.

    Every time someone wants to fix something with NFTs, they're either slapping an NFT on top of the existing system, making it more complicated, OR they want to start a new solution from the ground up, throwing out decades or centuries of experience and edge-case solutions to replace them with nothing, leading to major problems.

    This post is about the second thing happening, your example is the first.

    NFTs are a solution looking for a problem. But all the problems have already been solved without NFTs.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    Blockchain in general is a solution looking for a problem. Blockchain is just a terrible database that burns mountains of coal. In almost every case when someone suggests using blockchain for something, the simpler solution is to just use a standard database.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (12 children)

    How would that work in reality, how would the lock know that the NFT in question is the actual legal ownership of the house?

    The only way to guarantee that is to change the law that deeds of houses can only be an NFT.

    Otherwise someone could sell a house on paper, but retain the NFT to have access to the house.

    An NFT lock would also have the following problems, excluding the trust of ownership in the real world.

    Power to the lock is required, if your backup battery is dead then you might be locked out during a power cut.

    Internet access is required, during a powercut your router will probably die as well, so even if a battery backup is working, you'd still be locked out.

    Your ISP could have service interruptions, no internet, no access to the latest blockchain updates, meaning that the lock can't trust that you actually have ownership/access, that would be an insanely easy way to hack the lock.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (9 children)

    The only way to guarantee that is to change the law that deeds of houses can only be an NFT.

    Which means that sovereign states would have to agree to no longer be the authority of who owned property, instead they'd just have to hand over all that authority to some distributed database. What's in it for them? What's in it for the people?

    If the authority on who owns a home is a blockchain, then what happens if someone shows up at the police station, bruised and bleeding, and claims that they were tortured until they agreed to sign over the deed to their house. In the real world, the police (or at least the courts) would have authority over that deal, and if their investigation proved that someone was in fact tortured, it would mean it's not a legitimate sale, and the ownership reverts to the original person. But, if "blockchain", the police and courts have no authority. What's on the blockchain is law.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (8 children)

    Well, just because a company holds the ledger of who owns what doesn't make it impossible to police, governments order companies to do stuff all the time, that wouldn't stop, but it would make it more difficult to police.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (7 children)

    Ok, so who's the government going to order to change the blockchain?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (6 children)

    You seem to misstakenly believe that I support this, I don't, I just argued against a dumb reason as to why it wouldn't work.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (5 children)

    And what's your argument?

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    I recomment that you read my earlier comment to read my argument.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (3 children)

    You claim that "governments order companies to do stuff all the time", but how does that apply to an entry in the blockchain, which we've agreed is the authority on who owns property. The hint is: a company couldn't change an entry in the blockchain, even if the government ordered them to do it.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Why would they change an entry on the blockchain?

    To make the dumb idea of tracking peoperties on the blockchain there needs to be admin tools to restore the NFT to the proper owner.

    If the NFT gets transfered to someone else illegally, there needs to be tools to add another entry to the chain with a note saying that the NFT was stolen, and this new change restores the ownership to the lawful owner.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    there needs to be admin tools to restore the NFT to the proper owner.

    The whole point of the blockchain technologies is that they're (supposedly) immune to state interference. What's on the blockchain is the "truth". The state wouldn't have any power to restore the proper owner of the NFT / house because they chose to trust blockchain instead of having control over the database.

    If states can "restore ownership to the lawful owner", they can also seize people's cryptocurrencies.

    That's why no state would ever have house registries on a blockchain that they didn't control. And if they did control it, there's no point in using a blockchain when they could just use a traditional database.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I can't really address the first part about selling the house on paper and not transferring the NFT.

    I figure this thing would have cellular access as well as Wi-Fi. So if your Wi-Fi was to go down, then the cell network would be used instead. And those generally use different ISPs for fiber and often get restored first or dont go down at all since they are commercial contracts. In the event of a total internet cut, it is well known that a house does not change ownership very often, so the lock could be programmed to not accept any new keys for a period like a day. The lock would accept only the old key during that time like a cooldown period

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    Ok, lets disregard the regulatory issues, are you really asking people to sign up for a completely different ISP just to unlock their house with an NFT key?

    As for a delay to update ownership, fine that would add some leniency and is not an unresonable feature.

    But I just can't see what problem an NFT key would solve, we don't usually lock/unlock our front door with the deed of the home, what would the advantage be of doing that?

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Another question is: why would you need it for a key?

    Long-established public/private keys and signatures are used in this way all the time to control access to servers around the world. No blockchain needed. Blockchain is helpful when we all need to agree on a series of events.

    Homes are a nice example of where you can have an isolated system which knows what it needs to about you (e.g. a public key) without sharing or cross-checking anything with the world.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Just like with everything else, all those things you suggested are already done much more reliably without NFTs.

    If you still want to see a more "pratical" use of it, look no further than Decentraland, where it's used as "ownership" of digital "land" and other "goods".

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  • [+] -15 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Im sure you dont keep up, but NFT market cap still pretty big rn at 5.5bn

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