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On Friday, thousands of NFTs that had once sold collectively for millions of dollars vanished from the internet and were replaced with the phrase “This content has been restricted. Using Cloudflare’s basic service in this manner is a violation of the Terms of Service.” The pictures eventually returned but their brief loss, as a result of one of the services that served the NFTs being migrated to a free account, is a reminder of the ephemeral nature of digital goods as well as the craze for crypto-backed pictures that dominated the internet for a few years.
The pictures were part of a CloneX RTFKT (pronounced “artifact”) collection, a Nike-backed NFT project done in collaboration with Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. They disappeared because the corporate overlord that acquired them was no longer investing the time or capital into the project it once had.
At around 5 a.m. EST on the morning of April 24, more than 19,000 NFTs in the CloneX RTFKT (pronounced “artifact”) collection vanished. In their place was white text on a black background that said: “This content has been restricted. Using Cloudflare’s basic service in this manner is a violation of the Terms of Service.”
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This.
As much as I hate the overall concept of NFT backed images (people who call the image itself an NFT are out of touch with what an NFT is), the core principle of them was your ownership was literally baked into the very much not ephemeral blockchain db.
All you have to do is produce your copy of the file and demonstrate the SHA256 hash or whatever of that image matches the one in the DB, and you can “prove” ownership. Forever.
Which shouldnt actually matter to anyone, but it is a pretty neat tech demo, but not a super useful use case. It’s annoying that of all things that is what we now associate with NFTs, and not something actually useful like, I dunno, royalties on digital properties like music or whatever.