HACKER Q&A
📣 PaulHoule

What stops me from making an “NFT” with PayPal?


Seems to me I could do the following: stand up a web site where people can register and then buy the "rights" to an image on the site.

If people want to trade an image they might agree that A pays B $200. I make A pay $230, pay $200 to B, pay $15 to the payment processor, etc.

That updates the record in mysql or DynamoDB and now B has bragging rights that they own the image. I am sure the cost of running that database conventionally is less than doing it on Etherium.

Why not?

  👤 muzani Accepted Answer ✓
I'm not an expert on this, but it sounds like the selling point of NFT is decentralization. If your DB goes down, then everyone's ownership is lost. There's also no guarantee that the ownership can't be changed by the owner.

If you buy artwork from an online site, then you can prove ownership by having a physical representation of that artwork at home. Same for a house or car, there's physical documentation to back the database. Banks are interesting, because they had physical ledgers for a long time before going fully digital.

And you have the startups whose value proposition is being an authority - they can't screw you over without imploding. But some do implode, within the crypto scene and outside it. When they do implode, that takes down all the databases with it.

👤 randomran01234
The point of NFT is that it is a standards-compliant asset that is not upheld by a single authority. It achieves this by combining the following two ideas:

- The token and current state of its ownership is updated with transactions in a distributed ledger. Only the owner can transfer ownership to a new address.

- The media is stored on a peer-to-peer hosting system like IPFS, allowing anybody to replicate and host it.

The "standards-compliant" aspect of ERC-721 is also very important as it makes these assets composable across a whole ecosystem of independent platforms and sites. This allows you to buy a token from one source, and auction it off on another unrelated platform.

👤 bitxbitxbitcoin
If you remove the image and the blockchain (or even with it sometimes) you have a ponzi and fraud is what will cause the payment processor to boot you. Ethereum is a “payment processor” that won’t boot you. Hence why you would want to use a Blockchain - doesn’t have to be Ethereum either.

Also, intentionally Misspelling ethereum let’s everyone know how troll of a post this is.

👤 dropnerd
if you decide that you don't like a picture, you can delete my record.

if you lose interest and turn off the db, the record is gone.

if your site goes down, i can't transact anymore.

the ethereum blockchain is hard to censor, hard to delete, and will hold records regardless of your continuing interest in the space.

👤 tus666
NFTs can exist on most blockchains.

However only the big ones mean anything.

Your DB means about as much as a NFT on Luna.

👤 dtagames
What should stop you from doing an NFT is a conscience.