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Piracy Data Storage

'The NFT Bay' Shares Multi-Terabyte Archive of 'Pirated' NFTs (torrentfreak.com) 88

NFTs are unique blockchain entries through which people can prove that they own something. However, the underlying images can be copied with a single click. This point is illustrated by The NFT Bay which links to a 19.5 Terabyte collection of 'all NFTs' on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains. (UPDATE: One NFT startup is claiming that the collection is mostly just zeroes, and does not in fact contain all of the NFTs.)

But the archive also delivered an important warning message too. TorrentFreak reports: "The Billion Dollar Torrent," as it's called, reportedly includes all the NFTs on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains. These files are bundled in a massive torrent that points to roughly 15 terabytes of data. Unpacked, this adds up to almost 20 terabytes. Australian developer Geoff is the brains behind the platform, which he describes as an art project. Speaking with TorrentFreak, he says that The Pirate Bay was used as inspiration for nostalgic reasons, which needs further explanation.

The NFT Bay is not just any random art project. It does come with a message, perhaps a wake-up call, for people who jump on the NFT bandwagon without fully realizing what they're spending their crypto profits on. "Purchasing NFT art right now is nothing more than directions on how to access or download an image. The image is not stored on the blockchain and the majority of images I've seen are hosted on Web 2.0 storage which is likely to end up as 404 meaning the NFT has even less value." The same warning is more sharply articulated in the torrent's release notes which are styled in true pirate fashion. "[T]his handy torrent contains all of the NFT's so that future generations can study this generation's tulip mania and collectively go..." it reads.

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'The NFT Bay' Shares Multi-Terabyte Archive of 'Pirated' NFTs

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  • True point (Score:4, Interesting)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Thursday November 18, 2021 @05:48PM (#62000409) Journal

    The image is not stored on the blockchain and the majority of images I've seen are hosted on Web 2.0 storage which is likely to end up as 404 meaning the NFT has even less value.

    This is very true.

    • but its also not the point of NFTs. Having a copy of the image isn't the point, but owning the signature on the blockchain is the point. You can't make valid copies of these since its on an immutable chain. I can make 1000 copies of the Ethereum chain, but it means nothing if no one supports it. The longest chain wins!
      • Re:True point (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Talla ( 95956 ) on Thursday November 18, 2021 @06:48PM (#62000559)

        Congratulations, you are the sole owner of a specific number on a specific computer network.

        • I have a star to sell you...

        • Congratulations you own a specific set of paints that have been applied to a specific canvas by a specific person at a specific time and then that went through a bunch of unique circumstances that made people care about it enough to call that specific "one" valuable and yet nearly every other one entirely worthless and forgot or lost to time. Who decided which of those "signatures" from the past remained valuable and which ones were worthless and why?

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          It all depends what that number is worth. Clearly Bitcoins have some value, you can exchange them for fiat currency or for goods and services.

          I'm not saying NFTs are worth anything like what people pay for them, although it's worth noting that most of the purchases are in crypto currencies anyway so it's all just meme coins that will probably be worth nothing in a few months anyway. Point is that an entry on a blockchain can have real-world value.

      • That is entirely the value of an NFT. There's an Ethereum token with a special number that you have the key to. You hope that people will especially want that particular number in the future, but it's just a number.

      • Then why have pictures at all?

        "but owning the signature on the blockchain is the point."

        ALMOST NO ONE CARES.

        Least of all the people copy pasting the images. That's what people don't get. The only people who care about the authenticity are the suckers buying them. People taking the images just want the image - they don't care if its authentic or not.

        • by vux984 ( 928602 )

          But you seem to be missing the point. Apparently the blockchain If I'm reading this right, the blockchain only proves that you own the image at some address...

          www.someimageshacksite.example.com/fish/your_special_fish_1.jpg

          Even if you are an NFT collector... how valuable is the NFT proving you are the authentic and sole unique owner of that image going to be when someimageshacksite.example.com is gone?

          • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            The value isn't the URL, it's that the artist made the NFT. It's like a signed book, you can read the same story in a book that the author didn't sign, or you can make a photocopy of their signature, but the fact that they didn't write it with their own hand makes those things less valuable.

            • by vux984 ( 928602 )

              It's not though. To try and carry your analogy...

              With a signed book, the signature is on the book. But it its particularly collectible, you might even have a notarized certificate of authenticity for your collectible signed book, with a photo of the artist signing it, attesting that it's all 'for real'. That certificate proves your copy a lot more special. Are you with me so far?

              But you see... that certificate is only worth anything at all, if you ACTUALLY STILL HAVE THE BOOK.

              The NFT on the blockchain is li

              • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

                Just right click and save a copy. Even if the website goes away you still have the image and the original certificate that was created by the author.

                • by vux984 ( 928602 )

                  Just right click and save a copy.

                  Nope. That's just a random copy you made. Same as the copy in the torrent in TFA. Nothing special about it at all. In fact, that copy is exactly the same as every other copy everyone else has.

                  It's not the bespoke special image blessed by the author and recorded as authentic by the NFT... its just a copy you made yourself by right clicking and saving a copy... you said as much yourself that's what it was.

                  Your NFT doesn't say anything about that copy being special, because its not the file the certificate poi

                  • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

                    That's the point. The copy on your screen is a copy. The copy in your web browser's cache is a copy, the copy on the web server is a copy.

                    • by vux984 ( 928602 )

                      And if none of those copies are where the NFT says the official copy is, then they aren't the official copy.

        • Other uses (Score:4, Informative)

          by BenJeremy ( 181303 ) on Thursday November 18, 2021 @08:01PM (#62000643)
          An NFT can, very easily, be used as proof of ownership for things far more tangible than an image or video... an NFT could represent ownership of a game, for example. Tie in the wallet and it's a quick check to determine that the wallet's owner owns a license to play your game or use your application with full features. As much as we all dislike DLC, that is another use. Vehicle and even land titles may one day use the blockchain to provide proof of ownership. There is VALUE to the concept of NFTs, and whether you like it or not, there are even people who will not stop liking NFTs, as well - no matter how much you demand it.
          • Re: Other uses (Score:4, Informative)

            by NagrothAgain ( 4130865 ) on Thursday November 18, 2021 @08:25PM (#62000685)
            What an NFT is, very simply put, is a digital Notarization stored in a blockchain. It doesn't actually prove ownership of anything other than the "signature."
            • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              That's like saying your house title deeds don't prove you own the house. They do, because your country's equivalent of the Land Registry recognizes them as proof of ownership.

              What most NFTs are missing is a contract stating exactly what they mean. Do they transfer copyright, or are they merely some token that the author pinky swears they will only ever make one of?

          • by Tom ( 822 )

            Vehicle and even land titles may one day use the blockchain to provide proof of ownership.

            I've actually participated in a government blockchain project around such topics. That general claim is true. However, at least the various players participating in that project were considering blockchain technology, not any of the existing blockchains. That's an important difference.

            • Probably a bad idea. Government IT staff running blockchain nodes with no profit motive is a recipe for the whole thing going to shit.
              • by Tom ( 822 )

                You essentially summed up why I stopped participating in that project. :-)

            • International Property Registry

              That way when things change no one can say ... "there are no records for that property".

              If property changes hands on individual or even nation scales, via purchase, war, or anything else, we can still track previous ownership for due compensation, or track owners for pollution remediation and so on.

              That seems like a good use of blockchain technology to me.

          • > An NFT can, very easily, be used as proof of ownership for things far more tangible than an image or video... an NFT could represent ownership of a game, for example

            You don't need NFTs for this. In fact, NFTs don't seem to add anything to this scenario over more traditional software licensing. NFTs will not add anything to prevent unauthorized copies of the game, nor does it make it any easier to verify if a particular user has a license to play it - if anything it makes it worse, because now you have

      • by brunes69 ( 86786 )

        The point is that the signature is not useful when the original source vanishes.

    • by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

      > the majority of images I've seen are hosted on Web 2.0 storage which is likely to end up as 404

      One would think if you're paying millions of dollars for an NFT the creator would at least have the decency to pay the 'gas' to upload it to the ethereum blockchain.

      Ironically, there will come a time with the true owners no longer have access to their NFTs and they'll rely on pirates.

      • Ironically, there will come a time with the true owners no longer have access to their NFTs and they'll rely on pirates.

        This is delicious irony.

      • They didn't cost millions when they were minted, they cost a few dollars. Gas for a 100k image would be thousands of dollars.
        • by Tom ( 822 )

          Gas for a 100k image would be thousands of dollars.

          Which is single-digit percents for a million-dollar NFT, and fractions of a percent for some of the most expensive ones, so yes GP is right, there's no rational reason why that's not included in the price.

          • There is no need to pay thousands of dollars to store the image directly in the blockchain and have it replicated on every full node. The better NFTs just store a hash of the data, or an IPFS content ID (which is also a hash). The image itself can be stored elsewhere. As long as someone (like the NFT owner) keeps a copy of the file it's trivial to show that the content matches the hash on the blockchain.

            If a particular NFT doesn't include a hash or some other immutable, detailed description of the content t

    • Many projects store the images on IPFS and so they are not just going to disappear. And some projects store the image or code to generate the image on the blockchain itself, but this is tricky since the size that can be stored on blockchain is limited.

    • by Kisai ( 213879 )

      This is something that already happens with dropbox/onedrive/google-drive links when they're used for download links for purchased items like ebooks.

  • by theshowmecanuck ( 703852 ) on Thursday November 18, 2021 @06:02PM (#62000459) Journal

    ...

  • by Dictator For Life ( 8829 ) on Thursday November 18, 2021 @06:09PM (#62000479) Homepage
    *patting his still-full piggy bank contentedly* Don't you worry. We're going to make it through this.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • This is no different than anyone downloading everything the public domain ever existed and saying they "pirated" it. Why? Because NFTs NEVER HAD ANYTHING TO DO WITH DISTRIBUTION OR RIGHT TO DISTRIBUTE ANYTHING. I'm not sure why its so hard to understand that all you are getting with an NFT is the exclusive rights to the data contained within the blockchain with that particular address. What that data represents is entirely up to you and whoever you convince that of that it matters. This is no different

  • by hey! ( 33014 ) on Thursday November 18, 2021 @06:41PM (#62000553) Homepage Journal

    But the actual bits that the NFT refers to *are* fungible. That's kind of the point; if the resource being protected is not easily reproducible, you don't need an NFT of the thing. You don't need an NFT of your car, you need keys to it and a title document [note 1].

    An NFT is essentially hard-to-counterfeit metadata. That metadata authenticates, but does not actually *verify* a claim by one party to have assigned rights of an unspecified nature to another party. I could issue an NFT to you for a picture from the front page of today's New York Times, and the NFT would authenticate that I made that NFT and assigned it to you. But it wouldn't prove that you own that image, nor would it restrict access to that image in any way except voluntarily.

    Note 1: actually using NFTs for the title document would make sense if you wanted an decentralized registry of title data. However it wouldn't stop someone from driving your car, or people who don't recognize the authority of the blockchain from selling the car to other people like them.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The idea is that the person who signed the NFT has a public key that becomes accepted as authentic. It's a bit like how artists sign their paintings, and experts verify that the signature matches other known examples.

      You making a NFT for a photo of the NYT front page would have little value because nobody would accept your signature as being an official one of the newspaper.

      • by hey! ( 33014 )

        Except that if you sign a photo or a painting, the data is in effect watermarked. NFTs are just metadata.

  • I can see where they think they're making a point...and to many people, they are.

    Unfortunately, too many people think they know 'The Real Truth' and won't be convinced otherwise

    Their loss.

  • by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Thursday November 18, 2021 @06:53PM (#62000569)

    Thanks for the free backup, Pirates!

  • The effort to compress 19.5TB down to 15, if that's all it does, is going to cost more in CPU time and space eaten up decompressing than you probably save in transfer time...

    I mean heck, 4.5TB is only another hour and a half to download, and that's on my office connection, not the server room downlinks.
    • by Jeremi ( 14640 )

      The main reason would be to shut up all the people complaining about the file being too large, "and why didn't you compress it?"

      In any case, if your CPU can compress and/or decompress bytes faster than your network path can transfer them, and you've properly pipelined everything, the compression should make the transfer faster rather than slower. (OTOH if you're downloading the entire compressed file, and only after the download completes decompressing the file as a separate step, that will take extra time

  • I really wish people would take the time to actually learn about the NFT space before spreading FUD. I mostly own NFTs in the Cardano blockchain, so l will focus on that. All of the NFTs I have store their image on IPFS and so the image wonâ(TM)t just disappear as is claimed in the article. And there are a number of NFTs that take it a step further and actually store the the image itself or the code that generates the image on the blockchain including dynamic images such as awoken algorithms. The art i

    • by Jeremi ( 14640 )

      NFT solve the problem of forgery and chain of custody which plagues the traditional art market.

      I'm confused by this claim -- if two people show up at my art gallery, both holding what they claim is the Mona Lisa (or insert your favorite valuable piece of art here), how does an NFT help me determine which person is holding the real artwork and which person is holding a forgery?

      Even if one of the people can show that he owns the NFT and the other person cannot, I think that only shows that one person owns the NFT; it doesn't say anything about which painting is the genuine one.

      • Imagine you could look them up on blockchain and review all events including the first one which is being "minted" on a smart contract. If the smart contract is da Vinci, it's authentic.
        • by Tom ( 822 )

          If the smart contract is da Vinci, it's authentic.

          There's your problem right there. (hint: he didn't have an Ethereum account)

          And if you assume that starting today, this would be useful, you essentially claim that this technology will survive a hundred years or more. You are obviously new to how IT works...

          • No, I can't imagine many chains will survive 100 years, but I think Ethereum might. The NFT avatar thing will clearly be over, but who knows? I think some of the early ones like cryptopunks can hold value for a long time. At 4+ years it's already outlasted Tulip Fever or whatever it was called.
            • by Tom ( 822 )

              I predict those insane-money NFTs end up in a museum for curiosities within the next quarter century, at 0.1% of the price someone paid for it this year.

              • Anything digital will become worthless over 25 years. There may not even be computers or internet anymore.
        • by Jeremi ( 14640 )

          Imagine you could look them up on blockchain and review all events including the first one which is being "minted" on a smart contract. If the smart contract is da Vinci, it's authentic.

          Cool, but that only tells me what's on the blockchain, it doesn't tell me anything about the artwork itself.

          For example, say that while I'm looking up blockchain information on my computer, the forger sneaks behind my back and swaps the two paintings. A few minutes later, I turn around, congratulate the person who is listed in the blockchain, and buy the painting he is holding, which I think is the original one because I associate it with the person identified on the blockchain, but I have just bought the

    • I find the entire NFT craze fascinating because it really forces people to contemplate why things have value to other human beings. I think the best way I've seen it phrased is anything blockchain is really a digital equivalent of a notary public. It isn't even really a contract, although we tend to talk about these blockchain interactions like that's what they are. And an NFT certainly isn't an artwork. While you seem to be pointing out that there are alternate ways to store the digital images that NFT

      • It isn't even really a contract, although we tend to talk about these blockchain interactions like that's what they are.

        When the experts talk about "smart contracts" they're using the term in the software sense, as in "design by contract" [wikipedia.org]. In other words, the contract is a protocol or API. They're not referring to "a legally binding agreement" within the traditional legal system, though there are of course some similarities if you reinterpret "legally binding" to refer only to what the blockchain can enforce. The point being that this use of the term is far from novel and makes perfect sense when read in its proper context.

        O

  • i just starting buying them there but looking for other places too.
  • Whoever came up with the concept of the NFT is a genius - a genius scam artist. Selling someone not a real thing, but a a virtual thing, ok we've been there. Selling someone a link pointing to a virtual thing - wow. If you had asked me a decade ago, I'd have said people might pay a few cents for the novelty value. People paying actual money, and tons of it, for a hyperlink to a bunch of bytes - unimaginable. It's one of the things that you would've never thought possible until someone did it.

    • by Briareos ( 21163 )

      Well, first it was property on the moon, now it's NFTs - not just genius, but EVIL genius at that...

  • GNU (Score:4, Funny)

    by Mystic102 ( 6313512 ) on Friday November 19, 2021 @03:13AM (#62001175)
    Since the 'The NFT Bay' is a project of art does this mean that there is an NFT for it? Can this NFT then also be included in 'The NFT Bay'?
    • Since the 'The NFT Bay' is a project of art does this mean that there is an NFT for it? Can this NFT then also be included in 'The NFT Bay'?

      yes thats allowed.

      But don't try to construct the NFT which includes all NFTs which are not a member of themselves, or you get into a pickle.

  • Seriously, People are buying all sorts of crap.
  • Does it contain/has someone registered the goatse pic?
  • When we thought that paying for a banana duct taped to a wall and considering it "art" was bonkers?

    At least you could eat that banana... and someone did.

Some people manage by the book, even though they don't know who wrote the book or even what book.

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