How @jack could funge the NFT
Lots of folks have been chuckling about the collapse in value of “Crypto entrepreneur” Sina Estavi’s NFT, the NFT for Dorsey’s original Tweet. He bought it for $2.3m, wanted $48m but was offered less WAY less than that, about $7k if you believe the Guardian. However most people haven’t been linking two stories which underline why NFTs aren’t the unchangeable digital assets that people are claiming.
Now here is the thing while this has been going on there has been another piece of tech news around Twitter. They’ve said they’ll support editing
This wonderfully points out the challenge with these supposedly non-fungible digital assets. The NFT contains some signatures, the content of the tweet, but then contains two links.
"external_url":"https://twitter.com/jack/status/20",
"image":"https://v.cent.co/data/tweet/media/20"
The image is the tweet, although not the original, its just a screen cap of the tweet at the time of the auction. Back in March 2006 Twitter did not have this look and feel.
So the URL to the tweet is the ‘real’ piece here. Now it is possible, but spectacularly unlikely, that Twitter’s edit button could result in a brand new URL being created so quote tweets, retweets etc will still refer to the old version. More likely they’d go down the route of keeping the main URL the same and then using a history to link to the older tweets (like status/20/1 etc).
So there is very much a likelihood that when Twitter introduces the edit button people will be able to edit a tweet and the URL remain the same. This would mean Jack Dorsey could edit the original tweet to say “The owner of this NFT is f’in idiot who didn’t understand how the internet works”. This is alongside the challenge that Dorsey could be banned from Twitter and thus render it inaccessible, or choose to delete the tweet, threats that already existed.
It is hard to think of a better lesson for everyone on why NFTs are crypto homeopathy than the collapse in value of an NFT which points to a URL that could be edited.