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Moxie Marlinspike, Founder Signalapp expressed:  I created an NFT, but the image renders differently based on who’s looking at it.

For instance, it looks different on OpenSea Vs. on Rarible Vs. if you own it it currently renders as a large emoji in your wallet. How this works:

NFT image data is not on-chain (too costly). Instead, what’s on-chain is just a URL that *points* to the image. But surprisingly, there is no hash commitment in the NFT for the image at the URL. This means whoever controls the URL host can change the NFT image at any time.

Looking at popular NFTs, there are tokens trading for crazy $$ where the NFT image comes from a random VPS running Apache. The VPS admin, or anyone who controls the domain name, can change the NFT image/name to render as (or whatever) at any point w/o owning the token.

My NFT simply does this by default. It renders differently based on the IP/UA of the request, so the NFT image data isn’t ever consistent, and what you bid on isn’t what you get. This is how ERC721 is setup, though, not something unique to this NFT Good luck to all bidders!

Community response:  Thanks for pointing out how absurd NFTs are. People paying crazy money for a tiny url link that will likely be dead within the decade.

This isn’t universally true. Many nfts are stored on ipfs.

Interesting, IP string passed as svg data? Or maybe much more than that. So cool.  This isn’t cool, this is just how websites work since basically forever.

So NFTs are basically a crappy, costly blockchain which tries to convince everyone, that a certain URL/domain is owned by somebody? Should we tell them about DNS, certificates and PKI?

The narrative is it’s going to get better and more decentralized, this is just the teething stage. Don’t mess with the pixel resolution!

So, in reality people bid on “owning” what’s given back by a request to an url. What if we change the image to something evil after we sold our NFT.

Thanks for wading into the world of NFT crap to demonstrate what is obvious to many technically literate people.

What a beautiful way to wash dirty money, such an artist.