A key feature of NFTs has completely broken / Web3 was supposed to make sure the original artist always got paid. Not so much anymore.

2tone@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 534 points –
A key feature of NFTs has completely broken
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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.

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.

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.

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 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.

No, that's the way the blockchain works. It's one way to do decentralisation, a very bad way based on property and absent of trust.

A much better way to do decentralisation is what you are currently participating in. Federation is based on trust and building communities, not cold maths dictating who owns a bunch of imaginary bullshit.

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.