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A key feature of NFTs has completely broken / Web3 was supposed to make sure the original artist always got paid. Not so much anymore. (www.theverge.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 51 points 3 years ago (2 children)

I thought the whole point of NFTs and the blockchain is that it's decentralized, and you can use "smart contracts" for things like this. How is one company able to decide to change it?

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  • [–] 31 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Apparently, smart contracts are not contracts at all... they are friendly suggestions. Unsurprisingly a contract needs a mechanism to enforce it, which makes decentralized contracts redundant at best (as you still need institutions outside of the blockchain to monitor and enforce the contracts), and or worse, completely useless if there is no legal way to enforce them.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    The idea behind smart contracts is that they contain code to verify that the contract is fulfilled (that’s the “smart” part of the name).

    This of course also means that you can only use it for stuff that happens on the same blockchain, because the contract can’t verify anything outside of that.

    Which is why this isn’t relevant for the real world, it’s just eating its own tail.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    Yeah I was tempted to add a caveat, it does technically auto executive, but because it needs to interact with the real world it will always run into the oracle problem. The only solution to the oracle problem is courts and tort law, which makes the blockchain contract redundant and unnecessarily expensive.

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  • [–] 14 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    They can only change it for their instance, but they can’t impact all NFT marketplaces. This is only significant because this company is the largest broker so it will impact more people.

    Anyone can set up their own blockchain and build it however they want. Hell, they could make it centralized even.

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