PieFedNFTs That Cost Millions Replaced With Error Message After Project Downgraded to Free Cloudflare Plan
Agent Karyowww.404media.co/nfts-that-cost-millions-replace…
cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/168863
Subscribe
Join the newsletter to get the latest updates.
SuccessGreat! Check your inbox and click the link.ErrorPlease enter a valid email address.
On Friday, thousands of NFTs that had once sold collectively for millions of dollars vanished from the internet and were replaced with the phrase “This content has been restricted. Using Cloudflare’s basic service in this manner is a violation of the Terms of Service.” The pictures eventually returned but their brief loss, as a result of one of the services that served the NFTs being migrated to a free account, is a reminder of the ephemeral nature of digital goods as well as the craze for crypto-backed pictures that dominated the internet for a few years.
The pictures were part of a CloneX RTFKT (pronounced “artifact”) collection, a Nike-backed NFT project done in collaboration with Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. They disappeared because the corporate overlord that acquired them was no longer investing the time or capital into the project it once had.
At around 5 a.m. EST on the morning of April 24, more than 19,000 NFTs in the CloneX RTFKT (pronounced “artifact”) collection vanished. In their place was white text on a black background that said: “This content has been restricted. Using Cloudflare’s basic service in this manner is a violation of the Terms of Service.”
From 404 Media via this RSS feed
6 Comments
Comments from other communities
And nothing of value was lost.
BlackLaZoRAlmost, and hear me out here, but almost as if there was nothing, and I know this may not be what everyone wants to hear, of value there in the first place.
Ogmiosis a reminder of the ephemeral nature of digital goods
If it's ephemeral, its literally not a good NFT.
Properly implemented NFTs will only die out if the entire blockchain running them shits the bed and people no longer can agree on what is the "real" blockchain for that system.
IE if somehow years from now Ethereum is never used, most people forgot about it, and theres multiple copies of the ethereum blockchain in existence that refute each other (basically bogus copies of the entire chain), and no one can remember or agree on which one is the real one.
Then would a properly implemented NFT become "lost"
If something as simple as a cloudflare account is all it takes for your "NFT"s to disappear, then they were never a well implemented NFT in the first place and should have never been trusted.
AllNewTypeFaceLol.
OTOH, given that the NFT wasn’t the actual freely downloadable JPEG but a record in an inefficient database that one is truly the owner* of said JPEG, not being able to download the image from Cloudflare is arguably not in any way a shortcoming of the system. The database still says you own your shitty monkey drawing or whatever it is. If you didn’t have the foresight to right-click on it and save a copy, maybe ask someone who did?
This.
As much as I hate the overall concept of NFT backed images (people who call the image itself an NFT are out of touch with what an NFT is), the core principle of them was your ownership was literally baked into the very much not ephemeral blockchain db.
All you have to do is produce your copy of the file and demonstrate the SHA256 hash or whatever of that image matches the one in the DB, and you can "prove" ownership. Forever.
Which shouldnt actually matter to anyone, but it is a pretty neat tech demo, but not a super useful use case. It's annoying that of all things that is what we now associate with NFTs, and not something actually useful like, I dunno, royalties on digital properties like music or whatever.
NFTs might be the stupidest use of crypto.
and memecoins too, but at least its sorta amusing how something like dogecoin has a higher market cap than something like monero
This was always such a hilarious thing about most NFTs. They didn’t store your image on the blockchain. They stored a URL. So for your “ownership” to matter at all it required the TLD being active under ICANN, the TLD still being registered to the company that sold the NFT, the TLD still pointing to DNS servers that were active. The DNS servers pointing to working content servers. The servers routing incoming connections and serving your stupid monkey image. The servers not being overloaded with requests for your stupid monkey image. Hence why they are using CDNs. The amount of Dunning Kruger in people obsessed with cryptocurrency/nfts/whatever grift is next is hilarious. Somehow it’s the solve of all of our currency problems and yet it’s never done much beyond allow grifters to grift and money to be laundered.
ICANN add nothing to this, thank you for spelling it out in ways I never could.
I recall seeing a web3 project that was meant to gateway from ERC-721 tokens to some kind of durable distributed storage, IPFS or FileCoin or something, in order to solve this extremely obvious problem.
Nobody used it, though, because that's not the point of NFTs.
Sooner or later I guess linkrot will get them all, though frankly I can't see how it's all that much data in the first place.
Yeah lol I think I could probably store all the NFTs ever made in their 512x512 png or whatever on my SSD if I converted them to webp or something. It’s ironic that the technological approach to resiliency wasn’t pursued because as you said, that was never the point of NFTs
I appreciate the phrasing "NFTs that cost millions" instead of "NFTs worth millions".
I would not have pronounced that as Artifact is all I'm saying. Not nearly as apt given that the actual evidence of this project seems to have vanished in exchange for saving the grifters some money.
Rat fucked is still an apt name, to be sure.