Love, Death and Robots just ended with a little NFT QR code, and before that I saw a message for Ukraine-war NFTs. I don’t know what that last bit even means, and I’m so fed up of this bullshit.

The plan’s to make a protocol for a replacement, just to demonstrate how stupid the entire thing is.

Here are NFTs stated goals:

• show ownership of art, verified on a blockchain.
• allow transferance of ownership

Here’s why NFTs are bullshit:

• you don’t need to gind CPUs to have a blockchain.
• URLs verify an image
• none of this shows ownership.

The New Protocol

• Stick image sha256sums in a git repo, verified by gpg keys (now we have a blockchain).
• Allow a few people to verify image ownerships, gpg keys (verify other people’s stuff if you like, so it’s a standard ring-of-trust situation).
• Don’t bother with proof-of-work. Just let the shasum rest.
• Only merge images into the main branch if there’s a requested sale (otherwise it gets full of crap).
• Display ownership with exifdata.

Here’s the repo, just as an example.

Questions

• Does this cover 100% of what NFTs were supposed to cover?
• Is there an even simpler way of doing this?
• Can I add stuff with git-lfs without also downloading it (so the repo remains small, even with 10,000 images)?

Just to reiterate - this is a solution to a problem nobody has. It’s not a real suggestion, just a proof of concept to show that art-transferance could be handled better with some gaffatape and a git.