DecentrallyConnected

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Blockchain/cryptocurrencies standard notice

This is a standard message to notify contributors about an administrative ruling in effect. It does not imply that there are any issues with your contributions to date. You have shown interest in blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Due to past disruption in this topic area, the community has enacted a more stringent set of rules. Any administrator may impose sanctions - such as editing restrictions, bans, or blocks - on editors who do not strictly follow Wikipedia's policies, or the page-specific restrictions, when making edits related to the topic. For additional information, please see the guidance on these sanctions. If you have any questions, or any doubts regarding what edits are appropriate, you are welcome to discuss them with me or any other editor.

Let me know if you have any questions and happy editing. JBchrch talk 21:14, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

Bizarre edit pattern / WP:PGAME concern

Hi - what's with the large series of dummy edits to your userpage? I only ask as that sort of behaviour could be seen as gaming the system with regard to automatic permissions. Can you shed some light? Thanks, firefly ( t · c ) 13:04, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

Hi, @Firefly:. Thanks for raising your concern. Is this not allowed? I'm indeed trying to reach a certain number of edits, so that I can contribute to a specific page. I tried to request access to the required permission for that page, but was denied. I don't believe this was fair, as I've proven my legitimacy as an editor with various contributions to Non-fungible token, in particular. I have no nefarious intent. My argument is that it would take several months to unlock the requested permission, because I'm not a frequent contributor. I've also requested specific changes on the article's talk page, without any response. I hope this makes sense, in some way. I would like to edit a page, have proven myself respectful of Wikipedia policies and guidelines, but would only be able to do so next year. DecentrallyConnected (talk) 13:35, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

It's certainly not a good idea - it goes against the spirit/sense of the restrictions (especially if the page was protected as a page-level sanction under general sanctions). Regardless, if you game your way to extendedconfirmed an administrator is likely to revoke the right anyway. There are plenty of other pages you can edit in the meantime. firefly ( t · c ) 13:50, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

OK, understood. Thank you for the clarification. DecentrallyConnected (talk) 14:02, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

Clarification on NFT history

Unfortunately the mainstream media doesn't cover crypto much, especially newer techs like NFTs. And when they do, the information is often wrong. (See WIRED article from yesterday that was so inaccurate the author deleted her Twitter account.)

But I have done a lot of research on NFTs and can clarify the timeline and technical specifics here, even if there's not a whole lot of RS for the subject and little of this is "admissible" yet. Here's the evolution, in chronological order:

1. "Colored coins" was a theoretical concept that blockchain assets could represent real-world (or otherwise external) things. There's not a whole lot of evidence that this gained any traction or was even seriously attempted until Counterparty (explained below) launched in 2014.

2. In the interim period between BTC's launch and Ethereum's launch (2011-2014), a few "alt" blockchains completely separate from Bitcoin dabbled in using blockchain tech for things other than fungible & divisible coins. Huntercoin, for example, was a blockchain-based game with a 2D world players could move around. https://twitter.com/griffds/status/1456253046841757706 The game even had a unique item players could win and possess (but not keep for very long), which could be considered an NFT of sorts.

2b. One of these "alt" chains was Namecoin (which co-mines with BTC). Namecoin was intended to be a replacement for DNS and provide a decentralized mapping of human readable names to digital data. Like DNS, each "name" in the system is a time-limited rental, not an infinite possession. Namecoin enabled generous metadata space which Kevin McCoy then used to create the "Monegraph" standard; a way to organize this metadata to point to some external asset. "Quantum" was one of these and a SHA-256 hash of the artwork GIF was stored in this metadata of its Namecoin name, fitting the Monegraph standard (not the image itself).

Unfortunately (1), the Monegraph standard was not enforced by the Namecoin chain at the protocol level so while a few Monegraphs were created by others, many of them were incorrectly formatted and are, thus, broken.

Unfortunately (2), Quantum and every other Monegraph name went into disuse over the years and were not renewed by the owners. The Namecoin chain itself is extremely small and mostly unused. Speculators re-minted some of these old Monegraph names, including Quantum, but they are not linked to the originals that expired in any meaningful way. To the Namecoin chain, they are totally new. In fact, every renewal of a name requires the Metadata to be set fresh.

To get around this and sell Quantum, billed as "the first NFT" ever, for > $1M at Christie's in 2021, McCoy re-minted Quantum on the Ethereum blockchain. The buyer, Sillytuna, has been engaged in a social media war with the anonymous user "EarlyNFT" who owns the Quantum Namecoin name (reminted after expiration) over who really owns Quantum.

It's a mess.

2c. Influencers and speculators billing themselves as "NFT Archeologists" have also attempted to retroactively assign "NFT" status to names (and their metadata) on the Namecoin chain, including Twitter Eggs and Blockheads. These were Namecoin names created automatically by signing up to certain online websites and all expired in the intervening years. But these speculators have succeeded, at least in part, in calling them "NFTs" and promoting them as PFP-worthy images.

As one twitter user put it: "They're telling us that photocopies of expired drivers licenses are now the first NFTs ever" (paraphrased). Needless to say, these retroactive NFT-izing attempts are highly controversial. — Preceding unsigned comment added by User5109nfsaln (talk • contribs) 17:34, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

3. Counterparty (2014) is a protocol that sits on top of BTC and keeps track of other "alt coin" assets and is very significant in the "blockchain collectibles" timeline, even if 99.9% of its units are fungible. It uses the metadata of BTC to create and keep track of other assets, very similar to Ethereum ERC-20 coins. It's like keeping track of "madeupcoin" in the memo section of a normal bank check, benefiting from its (the check's, the bank's and the whole monetary system's) inherent security and inertia. Counterparty allows the coin creator to set the total supply and divisibility, so while most coins were created with supply >100 (i.e. they are fungible) or were divisible (you can own 0.0001 of it), a few folks did create non-divisible Counterparty tokens with a supply of 1, namely OLGA, THING, etc.

Many significant cryptoart and collectibles were created on Counterparty, including Spells of Genesis (2015) and Rare Pepes (2016), and although they are fungible, the term "NFT" appears to have expanded to cover them and is now more closely akin to "blockchain collectible", fungible or not.

Throughout its first 2 years, Counterparty saw many different alt coins created, including some that were explicitly called "collectibles" at the time (Spells of Genesis) and some that have tried to claim NFT status (TEST, TESTER, THING, OLGA, etc) with varying degrees of legitimacy. Some parties have even tried to brand *divisible* assets (like Counterparty's FDCARD from 2015) as NFTs. Also controversial.

In any case, none of the art for these assets lives on the chain, but is externally assigned via centralized means, appearing on sites like xchain.io. Since this art is not on the chain, it's not blockchain-provable when the art was assigned although I suspect there is a social consensus around things like Rare Pepes. OLGA and TEST/TESTER, for example, had art assigned to the token much later than the original mint date.

4. Ethereum launched July 30, 2015, enabling the first unambiguous, true (non-expiring, non-fungible) NFTs, the first of which was Etheria, deployed to the chain in October 2015 and presented at DEVCON 1 in London in November 2015. It was the first blockchain land and the first art-on-chain NFT project. Its known holders from 2015 include an Ethereum co-founder and noted conceptual artist Rhea Myers.

Importantly, Etheria is the first NFT where everything is tidily on-chain. The map tiles elevations and coordinates, the builds, etc. The original build mechanics from 2015 even introduced physics/gravity in that bricks had to stack on top of each other and couldn't conflict with other bricks. These build mechanics are now prohibitively expensive and the original dev has created a new system leveraging the unlimited "name" field of each tile to store build data that is compressed and decompressed off-chain. Note that this is not a hash: All the data needed to reproduce Etheria and its artworks is still on-chain.

5. The second true NFT project was PixelMap (Ethereum, Nov 2016), a blockchain project inspired by the "million dollar homepage" of the 90s.

5b. The third known (but non-true) Ethereum NFT project, Curio Cards, didn't come until May 2017 and was like SoG and Pepes in that each card in the set is fungible. Some have termed this class "semi-fungible tokens". Interestingly, the biggest influencer in the NFT space, Gary Vee, lied to CNN when he called Curio Cards the first NFT on Ethereum in August. (He had mentioned Etheria multiple times on his podcast previously.)

6. The remainder of 2017 saw an explosion of pre-721, static-supply, non-fungible, non-expiring projects such as Ether Rocks (blockchain pet rock), Cryptopunks, Mooncats, Cryptocats, and, notably, CryptoKitties.

7. After a lull with a smattering of projects through 2018, 2019 and 2020, NFTs burst into the mainstream in 2021 due to the runaway success, eye-popping sales, and pfp/identity social media usage of CryptoPunks. Many of the old projects from above, on both Ethereum and Counterparty/BTC, then sold out as collectors sought out valuable "artifacts" from blockchain history. Ether Rocks, for example, go for > $1M each. Etheria tiles are ~$150k. — Preceding unsigned comment added by User5109nfsaln (talk • contribs) 17:18, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

Thanks @User5109nfsaln: – this is both an insightful and fascinating read. You've certainly thrown a few curve balls regarding the timeline, in contrast to what's reported in the media. As you point out, major news outlets are only beginning to cover NFTs, really, and have a lot of digging to do to get the facts right. Of course, this means RS are few and far between. It will probably take a mainstream documentary or in-depth reporting before much of what you've written is admissible.

That said, I do think some of this should be integrated into Non-fungible token, and, perhaps, sources can already be found. Would you mind posting this on the article's talk page.? (Alternatively, I can post it for you – as long as it's there, it won't get deleted.) I think this is valuable and important to know for all editors working on the article.

I'm curious about EarlyNFT's claim. If I understand this correctly, it sounds like they don't even own an NFT, because the re-minted Monograph doesn't refer to an asset in the metadata? It's just a name on the Namecoin chain, correct? So it seems like McCoy's re-minted Quantum on Ethereum is the closest thing to the original NFT, even if it's not the original he made for the conference. It seems more like the significance that McCoy invented it, and the intention of the original, along with the artwork, are what Sotheby's really sold for over a million dollars. DecentrallyConnected (talk) 12:13, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

Yes please go ahead and post this on the article's talk page. I'm afraid if I do it, it'll just get removed.

Attempting to claim that Namecoins are NFTs introduces a number of issues:

1. Do you actually own something that is time-limited? I own certain normal domain names and in some cases, yes, I feel I own them as I have no plans to relinquish them while I'm alive. In other cases, I feel that they are rentals. Eye of the beholder, even the same beholder.

2. Many of the old, purportedly important "NFTs" on the chain expired. In fact, I don't know of a single one that DIDN'T expire in the intervening years!! (Namecoin kinda died off because its intended use never came to be in any mass adoptive sense.)

3. As far as Namecoin's protocol is concerned, expired or not, a new registration (or extension) is an entirely new marker on the chain. The "NFT" namecoin marker owned by EarlyNFT now contains data about Quantum that wasn't there before. Take a look at this NMC explorer link of Quantum: https://namebrow.se/name/d41b8540cbacdf1467cdc5d17316dcb672c8b43235fa16cde98e79825b68709a/ This is what EarlyNFT squatted in April 2021 and he's added a bunch of comments there to assert ownership of Quantum, against the wishes of McCoy and Sillytuna. Like I said: a mess. Here is a juicy back-and-forth on Twitter https://twitter.com/beaniemaxi/status/1444344033187352591

Anyway yes please add my info to the talk page. BTW, is there any chance Wikipedia will allow actual, you know, blockchain data as proof? I mean that's what blockchain is: undeniable mathematical consensus of truth. Seems like a missed opportunity to ignore it. 207.188.22.198 (talk) 00:54, 17 November 2021 (UTC)