this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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I thought the royalty payments were enforced by the contract?
Turns out that the smart contract is a post-it note stapled to the NFT and the marketplace can just ignore what the post-it note says because it's not legally binding.
What they can't do is trade with marketplaces that do enforce the contract. Originally it was enforced because if one marketplace stopped enforcing it the marketplace would be cut off from the Echo system but turns out that the 5 big marketplaces just need to agree to drop it and everything is fine.
Well that's just bad design, then.
There is no good design for this. The only design that works is external regulation and laws wich is why we use that for real things that aren't scams.
Why? It could be enforced in the same way that a BTC transaction is validated, just adding a rule that a wallet, specified as the author, should get a percentage of the trade.
You can easily end up with A gifting B a million and then B sending A the NFT for free, potentially with a trusted escrow service in between to make sure both of these actually happen. The NFT marketplaces are essentially already acting as escrow, so this isn't weird.
Only thing you could probably enforce is that moving something from one key to another requires a fee to be paid to the original artist, but that'd also trigger if A wants to move their assets to a different key (eg in or out of some hardware wallet, online wallet or marketplace). And if A and B trust each other strongly they can simply share the key.
Or they set up a multisig wallet, each creating one keypair directly on approved (tamper resistant) hardware wallet models, transfer it to the multisig wallet, and now control of the collection of multisig wallets means you control the token.
So now you trade it by trading the set of hardware wallets. Validated by each original participant including results from an audit of the key generation procedure with the hardware wallet.
No trace on the blockchain, and the trust model is more robust than simply taking the word for it as one of them share the private key claiming they did not keep their own copy.
The protocol doesn't support covenants like that in smart contracts. It has been discussed a lot but not implemented.
It gets complicated fast.
Because the second the rule becomes inconvenient there will be a fork or some kind of bullshit that removes the rule. This has already been done a couple of times when money got stolen from big investors. The thefts followed the rules set up on the blockchain and nothing in those transactions were different from a normal transaction but humans looked at them and said that they weren't valid and did whatever technical bullshit they needed to do to reverse them.
Apparently ultimately this involves hitting the person hiding the encryption keys with a $4 wrench until they provide the keys.
I know that reference.
I disagree, forks can be made but in reality nobody cares, 99.999% still follow the 'main' repo. Sometimes shit like that happens (looking at you, Buterik!), but that kinda misses the point that the validation is not implemented optimally.
I hope you are aware that you went from "this can't be broken" to "I trust that people wouldn't break it" to "sometimes they do break it but it's not that often" in a very short comment.
No, the nuance is in the number of people who confirm the change, they must be 50% +1.
So if 50%+1 of people decide that they don't want to pay artists they can just stop doing that. Sounds iron clad to me.
That's simply the way real decentralization works, I'm afraid.
That's what I am fucking saying! You cant design around greedy fucks. Also this whole discussion I participated in the delusion that those 50% were individual people. We both know that they are not because there is nothing to identify individuals so the system is entirely decided by wealth so it isn't even decentralized. It's all just a scam that regularly collapses by design because that is how the rich people extract real money from it.
Nah the actual limitation is that providing people a way to transfer the token without paying a royalty is essential if you want to give people the option to freely transfer it between their wallets without selling it and paying a royalty. You could write a smart contract that does enforce this but then you would lose the ability to have that free transfer.
Royalties were not part of the original design.
You have to see it in context and only makes sense for people who don't wholly trust companies and governments to do the right thing either.
This is vs. "immutable because it's in X company's database". Neither a database nor a blockchain can themselves enforce contracts.
Your comment seemed anti blockchain in general and so I was replying on that level not particularly about the contracts.
Your claims all make perfect sense if you think or current system is acceptable, with some billionaires and others that can't eat and police making sure it stays this way. The blockchain is about making the future better by enabling trustless transactions to occur without those things.
Current contracts are often held by corporarations and enforced by police. I'm a realistic person that believes climate scientists. I'm pretty sure if we have capitalism, corporations, and police (all things we need to enforce contracts) in 20 years it will be in a fascist, dystopian, ecological collapse context and I hope to not be around to experience it.
I'm much more interested in how to build a better world that doesn't need these authoritarian forces, and the blockchain is a technology useful in this endeavor. I don't claim that it is without flaw or can prevent crime.
What recourse would be available in the dollar system that doesn't mean somebody isn't paying to make another whole? If someone stole my cash, or stole from my bank because I lost my ATM, who is making me whole at 0 cost?"
Also immutable doesn't mean not able to be modified, it just means you can't modify the past (lie about what happened). If you want to change something, it's a forward change, with past states still visible.
That's because it doesn't, it wasn't meant to. Crypto is not meant to be THE all-in-one solution that solves all of our problems. It solves a tiny subset of our problems, namely, how do we share a database without trusting each other. Other questions such as the enforcement of contracts is outside the scope of blockchain technology as it should be.
Nice, agree, though I'm of the opinion that the transition time will be significant as culture adapts, and until then, blockchain could help, especially between groups.
This depends on the specific chain/coin. As I understand Eth just made or is in the midst of a change that makes energy use hardly a concern. It's not like the dollar doesn't take any energy. Think about all the bank computer DBs etc in massive global datacenters, branch offices, and the people that need to manage them, etc.
Blockchain is a tool, nearly any tool can be used for cool things or shitty things. A database is fundamental type tool, and one that can run without need to trust others you don't know seems like it could be useful too. I'm anarchist but not under the impression that within my lifetime I would be able to trust someone on the other side of the world to not mess with a DB for profit (remember the transition time will be full of people who grew up in an exploitative world). I'm pretty sure the long-term anarchist future is like you said, federation, decentralization, etc. Within my group of 500 or so, sure, no need to track anything. Between groups, there may be some need. And enforcement would be along the lines of deciding not to work with those who demonstrate maliciousness.
btw, thanks for the civil intelligent conversation!
Are you familiar with Beau of the Fifth Column? He speaks of international relations as akin to "a poker game where everyone is cheating". Trade agreements work by relying on each other and I agree there is some level of trust but I'm pretty sure they still use documentation (blockchain is a form of trustless documentation), there are still contracts and threats of force. Between nations you arguably have anarchism as there is no higher power (unless you consider the EU/NATO etc, but that's more like a group of anarcho-bullies).
Not sure I understand the difference between tech and tools. I don't really think that ANY tool can be used for good or ill. I think that is true of most tools, but I see capitalism as a tool, but it's one that's only useful to a certain type of person and only useful to take advantage of others. I can see how you could see the blockchain the same way, especially based on it's historical use so far. But I don't think it's inherent in the blockchain tool like with capitalism. Blockchain to me is like money or any other tracking technology like a spreadsheet. Not things I want to see in my anarchist utopia (as money in any form facilitates resource hoarding) but things I see useful and 100% inherently evil for the time being.
Interesting. I have an uncommon or unpopular opinion here. I think that if real and lasting anarchism is ever gonna happen, it's going to have to happen globally simultaneously to some degree (and I think it's in-progress now). Global powers will have to all be degrading. I just don't see major countries allowing a significant anarchist region to exist, especially one like the U.S. that has nuclear weapons and a massive military. The remnants of NATO aren't going to just tolerate what to them are a bunch of yahoos with the world's best weapons. Also, I think anarchism only really makes sense globally. If any state, especially any capitalist state remains, they will destroy the world and pull us down with them.
Exactly, I see world trade as reduced, regularly eating a fruit that's ripe on the other side of the world just doesn't seem sustainable.
Been wanting to read this one, still on The Dawn Of Everything.
I like that, I'm particularly interested in how to prepare materially and culturally in an attempt to minimize the collateral damage.
Great talking to you comrade, you're seem a wise one.
You’re thinking too rationally now. The thing with NFTs is that it’s not rational at all. Try again.
Basically the transfer function on an erc721 interface (nft) cannot have enforced royalty payment otherwise it wouldn't support people transferring the token outside of a sale. Theoretically you could use some kind of interface standard or write up a different contract where users are forced to pay a royalty on any kind of transfer but then there wouldn't be a way to transfer it without paying the royalty and basically no nft trading platforms would support it because under the hood you have to transfer them the token so they can sell it on your behalf once a buyer is found.
FYI not trying to shill funny pictures but I do know a bit of solidity so maybe someone here is actually curious about the limitation.
Thank you. This is what I wanted to know!