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.
No see it’s a lot more sophisticated than that. The post-it note is immutable because of maths or something, so what that means is that it’s capital-P Property. And because Property is a magic spell that binds even the old ones, and this spell is unbreakable, I own all these apes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No see it’s a lot more sophisticated than that. The post-it note is immutable because of maths or something, so what that means is that it’s capital-P Property. And because Property is a magic spell that binds even the old ones, and this spell is unbreakable, I own all these apes.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Royalties were not part of the original design.
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!