There’s just a pointer to some off-chain data if someone succeeds in changing whatever that pointer points to, it will point to something else. But there’s nothing in the NFT saying what that data should be there’s nothing saying if an NFT is for a Bored Ape Yacht Club or a Pudgy Penguin. This is different from the misunderstanding around the right-click-save meme, where some people seem to think that the NFT is the actual image, when in fact the NFT is a certificate of sorts, proving the authenticity and ownership of this image. Depending on where that data is stored, anyone with access to that storage system can change the data, regardless of whether or not they own the actual token.įurthermore, with Marlinspike’s words, there is nothing in the NFT specification that tells the owner what the data, like an image, should be, or even allows the owner to confirm whether something is the correct data. Instead of storing the data on-chain, in most cases, NFTs contains a pointer to the data. To Moxie Marlinspike the situation is even worse with NFT, partly due to the way the NFT standard (EIP-721) is designed, and partly because of the centralizing power of the OpenSea marketplace and its API. So much work, energy and time has gone into creating a trustless distributed consensus mechanism, but virtually all clients that wish to access it do so by simply trusting the outputs from these two companies without any further verification”, Marlinspike writes. “In fact, even when you connect a wallet like MetaMask to a dApp, and the dApp interacts with the blockchain via your wallet, MetaMask is just making calls to Infura,” Marlinspike writes, echoing critique that’s been heard many times over the history of Ethereum.
The reason is these APIs make life easier for dApp developers. However, this is a centralizing choke point since, in practice, there are only two of these API providers: Infura and Alchemy, and almost all dApps use one or the other to interact with the blockchain. One thing that Marlinspike finds strange about “the cryptocurrency world is the lack of attention to the client/server interface”, and that “blockchains are designed to be a network of peers, but not designed such that it’s really possible for your mobile device or your browser to be one of those peers.” The point Marlinspike makes is that, normally, wallets don’t connect directly to the blockchain, but does so via API:s provided by node operators.
Moxier wallet full#
“After 30+ years, email is still unencrypted meanwhile WhatsApp went from unencrypted to full e2ee in a year”, e2ee meaning end-to-end encryption. The main reason why the originally decentralized Web1 became the centralized Web2 is because “people don’t want to run their own servers, and never will” and “a protocol moves much more slowly than a platform.” As an example of the latter, Marlinspike points to email. Though Web3 being a somewhat ambiguous term, it should, according to Marlinspike, boil down to giving its users the “richness” of Web2, but in a decentralized way. People don’t want to run their own servers However skeptical, Moxie Marlinspike decided to give Web3 a try by creating two Web3 applications (dApps) called Autonomous Art, which lets anyone mint a token for an NFT by making a visual contribution to it, and First Derivative that allows users to create, discover, and exchange NFT derivatives which track an underlying NFT. “Also – cards on the table here – I don’t share the same generational excitement for moving all aspects of life into an instrumented economy,” Marlinspike writes. Marlinspike begins his post admitting he, despite considering himself a cryptographer, hasn’t found himself particularly drawn to “crypto“, and that he hasn’t yet managed to become a believer. In a blog post published on Jan 07, Moxie Marlinspike, creator and maintainer of the Signal messaging app, expressed concerns about Web3 and in particular its claim to be a new and decentralized future alternative to the platform behemoths of Web 2.0.