cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/168863
Subscribe
Join the newsletter to get the latest updates.
SuccessGreat! Check your inbox and click the link.ErrorPlease enter a valid email address.
On Friday, thousands of NFTs that had once sold collectively for millions of dollars vanished from the internet and were replaced with the phrase “This content has been restricted. Using Cloudflare’s basic service in this manner is a violation of the Terms of Service.” The pictures eventually returned but their brief loss, as a result of one of the services that served the NFTs being migrated to a free account, is a reminder of the ephemeral nature of digital goods as well as the craze for crypto-backed pictures that dominated the internet for a few years.
The pictures were part of a CloneX RTFKT (pronounced “artifact”) collection, a Nike-backed NFT project done in collaboration with Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. They disappeared because the corporate overlord that acquired them was no longer investing the time or capital into the project it once had.
At around 5 a.m. EST on the morning of April 24, more than 19,000 NFTs in the CloneX RTFKT (pronounced “artifact”) collection vanished. In their place was white text on a black background that said: “This content has been restricted. Using Cloudflare’s basic service in this manner is a violation of the Terms of Service.”
From 404 Media via this RSS feed
This was always such a hilarious thing about most NFTs. They didn’t store your image on the blockchain. They stored a URL. So for your “ownership” to matter at all it required the TLD being active under ICANN, the TLD still being registered to the company that sold the NFT, the TLD still pointing to DNS servers that were active. The DNS servers pointing to working content servers. The servers routing incoming connections and serving your stupid monkey image. The servers not being overloaded with requests for your stupid monkey image. Hence why they are using CDNs. The amount of Dunning Kruger in people obsessed with cryptocurrency/nfts/whatever grift is next is hilarious. Somehow it’s the solve of all of our currency problems and yet it’s never done much beyond allow grifters to grift and money to be laundered.
ICANN add nothing to this, thank you for spelling it out in ways I never could.
I recall seeing a web3 project that was meant to gateway from ERC-721 tokens to some kind of durable distributed storage, IPFS or FileCoin or something, in order to solve this extremely obvious problem.
Nobody used it, though, because that's not the point of NFTs.
Sooner or later I guess linkrot will get them all, though frankly I can't see how it's all that much data in the first place.
Yeah lol I think I could probably store all the NFTs ever made in their 512x512 png or whatever on my SSD if I converted them to webp or something. It’s ironic that the technological approach to resiliency wasn’t pursued because as you said, that was never the point of NFTs