Nfts legitimately confuse me.
“Why can’t you put the whole image in an nft?”
“It’s too big”
“Why is it too big?”
“It’d take too long to generate.”
“Okay, but why?”
“Because nfts can’t hold that much information.”
“Okay, but why?”
“Because it’d take too long to generate.”
“Okay, but why would it take too long to generate???”
“Fuck you, stop wasting my time.”
“Oooookay. I really don’t understand but okay, fuck you too I guess.”
Does anyone know why nfts are so small? Everything I’ve read says that they’re fucking tiny, but nothing explains why they can’t be larger, why being larger would be too slow, and so on. They honestly seem like a decent answer to the digital ownership problem of “I want to resell this game like I could 20yrs ago but I can’t because it didn’t come on a disc”, however I get sent in a circle whenever I try to figure out what makes nfts so unwieldy and impractical.
(Not that I think anyone should be able to own a digital good; I pay for digital things because I want to support people, not because I think digital ownership is a legitimate concept. Imo, because digital things can be copied as many times as you want, you can’t truly own a digital item, and nor should anyone be allowed to try and revoke said item unless said item is illegal for other reasons. However… As long as we live in a capitalist society hell-bent on applying the concept of ownership to a system that’s only limited by your hardware, I think people should have the ability to actually “own” their digital goods (in a traditional sense), which includes things like the right to not have a company take them away whenever it feels like it and the ability to sell digital goods like an IRL market.)
Does anyone know why nfts are so small?
Because storage space on “The Blockchain” is very expensive.
The blockchain is a complete list of all transaction made with a cryptocurrency. You have heard of miners. What they do is collect transactions and append them to the blockchain. Every miner must have a complete copy of the whole chain. So whenever a new NFT is created, lots of copies have to be stored and kept forever. It’s just not a good solution from an engineering standpoint. But for the popular currencies, that’s the smaller problem.
Every miner wants a fee for their services. That fee depends on the value of the cryptocurrency. There is no relation to the actual storage cost.
Besides, crypto does not offer any kind of DRM. If it did, the copyright industry would be all over it. Anyone can download anything on the blockchain.
The reason you can’t resell games is, because the publishers don’t allow it. For example, Steam has a marketplace. It would be no technical problem to make games transferrable between users. The rights-owners don’t want that.
