Someone on HN might ask: "Uuh, but how do we know that this is really \"The first iTerm2 Commit\"?"
The steps to verify would be like this:
- Open the page with the NFT, see the author name/address
- In this case "GeorgeNachman" so we search for that on Google
- Now two main results from two different sides show up, Twitter and GitHub
- Visiting the GitHub user we can verify that it actually is the iTerm2 author
- Visiting the Twitter timeline we can confirm the same username has published a tweet about the NFT itself (https://twitter.com/gnachman/status/1376267539894870020)
Now, why is this the interesting? Not sure. I find it weird that it's just a screenshot of git output, instead of the actual git data structure, would have been more interesting. But still, would I ever buy it? No, and not sure who the target audience is either.
Edit: Right, or you could just look at the HN submitter which also seems to be the author. Verify the other profiles via keybase which is linked. Hi!
Whereas NFTs kind of give individuals the ability to "print their own baseball cards". What this means is that an NFT's identity isn't really just the item itself, it's the item + the person/entity that "minted" it. Anybody can go create an NFT for your piece of art, but arguably only the "official" ones from you are (should be?) valuable.
WRT NFTs as a whole: as with nearly everything else on the blockchain, I think it would be better as a centralized service that "minted" these "cards" and skipped the crypto stuff entirely. In addition to getting rid of the environmental concerns, this central authority could vet each "verified artist/creator", making sure that each NFT actually does come from the right party and isn't being fabricated by someone else (this is a real problem right now; I follow Twitter artists who deleted all of their art posts for fear of someone turning them into NFTs without their consent). If security is a concern for such high-priced transactions, just... use really long passwords/keys to secure people's accounts/items. Maybe upon purchase you get a custom YubiKey that has a picture of the item, or something.
...of course, then you wouldn't have all the crypto-fanatics hyping it up and boosting prices to get the whole thing off the ground :P
About NFT itself, I use T shirt analogy to convince my self: you pay quite a bit for a logo on a T shirt, with NFT you are buying the signature the logo, so if we are already doing this in real life, we probably would do it in the future.
NFTs relying on content-addressing are all fine though (like IPFS) and most of the NFTs I've seen are using IPFS, although some of them screw up the linking and add a link to a IPFS gateway instead of just the hash.
You can easily check the commit here: https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2/commit/eb4c3c33506b604e35....
I think you mean to ask "how can we verify the author?".
