Originally Posted by
jonnysensible
'Very little data is stored directly inside an NFT, though. The NFT includes information on where you can find a description of the artist’s name and the title of the work, but that information is not typically on the blockchain itself. NFTs include information on where you can find the artwork they represent, but the actual artwork is still a link away.
Traditional URLs pose real problems for NFTs. The owner of the domain could redirect the URL to point to something else (leaving you with, perhaps, a million-dollar Rickroll), or the owner of the domain could just forget to pay their hosting bill, and the whole thing disappears. The animation that Grimes sold for $389,000 is primarily sourced to a pair of traditional URLs, which could break down if either of the two different companies (Nifty Gateway, the auction site; or Cloudinary, the web host) went under. As the buyer, this is something you’d have no control over, unless you’re wealthy enough to buy out the entire domain and pay to keep it online.
To solve that problem, many NFTs turn to a system called IPFS, or InterPlanetary File System. Rather than identifying a specific file at a specific domain, IPFS addresses let you find a piece of content so long as someone somewhere on the IPFS network is hosting it. Grimes’ NFT uses this as a backup, and Beeple’s NFT uses this primarily. That means a multitude of hosts, rather than a single domain owner, could be ensuring these files remain online. This system also gives buyers control. They can pay to keep their NFT’s files online. They still have to remember to pay the hosting bill, but they can host it anywhere in the IPFS network.
"“One hard drive crashing could lead to permanent loss of the assets.”"
Still, the system has flaws. The team behind Check My NFT has been looking inside of NFTs to see if their IPFS addresses actually work, and in several cases, they’ve found files that just won’t load. The team found artworks that were temporarily missing from major artists, including Grimes, deadmau5, and Steve Aoki. The files came back online eventually, but only after the team called attention to their absence. The files have to be actively available on the network for the system to work, and unlike with a domain owner, no host has a singular responsibility to do that for files on IPFS.
“One hard drive crashing could lead to permanent loss of the assets,” '
seems mad to me