It could just be and let me explain why.

Gasless minting or Lazy Minting is actually a misnomer - nothing gets minted and it sure as hell does not happen without gas. It merely delays the minting of an NFT by preparing the code needed for it and inserting it into the purchasing transaction, leaving the buyer with the gas bill and minting the NFT upon purchase.

Ever since Lazy Minting was implemented on the leading NFT marketplaces OpenSea and Rarible, creators have flocked to put more artworks up for sale as all they needed was to mine the registration transaction to get their account on the platform and the rest is merely preparing listings without having to pay any more gas fees.

Unfortunately but also undoubtedly, this opened the floodgates even more for art thieves.

No, not the "tech support" jokers who ran off with a bunch of BAYC apes after conning their holder into clicking something while sharing their screen on Discord. I am talking about the much bigger menace that victimises many of those who aren't even in the cryptospace - the art thieves who attempt to mint NFTs of art that they do not own. This includes but is definitely not limited to copyminters.

Previously the minting of said NFTs were only doable as and when they were uploaded. A series of transactions minted the token then added it to the marketplace if the creator so desired for it to be up for sale or auction.

Since Lazy Minting does not process any transactions until the time of purchase, there is no token minted on the blockchain yet - but the intent is clear that the uploader wants it to be minted as an NFT. At this point of time the coinbase for the minting of the NFT has been signed and is being put up for sale.

Between the uploading of the artwork or file and the actual minting of the token nothing is permanent and the process can still be stopped in its tracks.

It is in this window of time that public marketplaces who provide Lazy Minting services can act on reports and complaints regarding the token. Previously when complaints were received the most that the marketplace could do was to prevent the listing or sale of the fraudulent NFT on their platform but this does not destroy the NFT. Once minted, only the holder of the NFT is able to destroy the token if the minting contract permits.

Fraudulent tokens should have no home on the blockchain. Previously when barriers to entry were high, when token contracts needed much more technical skill, much less bad actors had the patience to learn how to code and then spend their Ether on such new technology. Once NFT marketplaces and dapps took off, however, the further democratisation of the technology led to the surge in stolen artwork being minted on the blockchain.

The advent of Lazy Minting came across as a way to maximise profit from the sale of NFTs. Although designed to benefit artists and creators, those who seek to profit through stolen artwork tend to follow the path of least resistance. Right now it provides them with an avenue to conduct their scam and theft with even lower risk than before.

I won't defend the misuse of the blockchain. That's definitely a bad thing - but it does provide a chance at making things right.

DeviantArt, one of the world's largest online art galleries has implemented a paid service being DeviantArt Protect, which scans the internet for possible matches of artwork uploaded to the platform. Through computer vision and machine learning, it has been able to detect when similar artwork is uploaded.

Now it has expanded its coverage to include NFT matching and detection which alerts artists on its platform when one of their works is minted as an NFT, possibly without their permission.

In my humble opinion, this is what OpenSea needs to do. If they feel confident enough in doing an IPO, they can sure as hell afford this - and any other aspiring NFT marketplace that wants to make a mark on the NFT scene should pay attention too.

The odds of coming across an art thief who's ready to mint on Ethereum is far less likely than an art thief who wants to try to get in on profits without spending a single cent - hence why the gates need to be put up around lazy minting. Before an item can be listed, it should be withheld for image matching and a delay be implemented.

Lazy mint NFTs are confined to the OpenSea platform since the data is not on-chain yet. Sure, the terms and conditions say no copyright violations allowed - but let's face the truth its happening and its more rampant than ever thanks to lazy minting.

In fact, OpenSea has even admitted this - over 80% of the NFTs created with their "free minting tool" are 'plagiarized works, fake collections, and spam'. No prizes for guessing what a majority of those were.

OpenSea used to take the diligence to verify collections on their platform that so requested it. This recently changed to merely saying that they will only verify collections that they see are fit for it and there is, at the time of writing, no way to put in a request.

There are also some verified collections that anyone can mint on at OpenSea, such as the one in the image above. These are mintable collections, meaning that anyone can select this as their target collection on OpenSea and mint into the collection. The result? A blue-check verified NFT without any of the oversight that verified collections should have.

This is a gaping hole in the system since verification is supposed to allow people to buy with confidence knowing that there was some degree of manual verification by the creator of the token. Instead this problem remains unresolved till today with nothing more than a little yellow exclamation mark next to the the collection name stating that it's "mintable".

OpenSea, meet deviantArt - perhaps the world's biggest art gallery.

Before NFTs were all the hype, deviantArt took the initiative to implement image matching. If anyone was serious about stopping art theft in its tracks, it would be them.

Now they are coming after NFTs and they have good reason to. First it was bad actors who reupload deviantArt artwork to OpenSea. Now they have gotten so used to it that they are botting the OpenSea system, pulling artist bios, profile pictures and more into freshly generated (and often empty) Ethereum wallets. With barely any sunken cost and just a computer running several lines of code, these abusers successfully fool art collectors into thinking they really bought from the artist.

It dilutes the whole concept of NFTs supporting artists directly which has come under intense fire lately for how detrimental it is to artists' online presence instead.

The nail in the coffin here is that there are barely any captchas on OpenSea. There are little to no anti-botting measures in place to prevent the system from becoming overrun by these automated art theft operations. It's not like captchas are difficult to implement - we click through them every day and there are plenty of captcha providers out there to choose from.

This is where it's really critical to ask someone if they're a robot.

Seriously, an email address!?

Artists whose works are being plundered are having to deal with inboxes that are flooded with takedown requests and replies from the answering machine at OpenSea.

Saying that the insane number of reports was a justification for removing the old reporting form is simply taking the lazy way out. Worse, it's taking the apathetic way out.

As a former journalist my writing instincts tell me not to hurl allegations but I simply cannot see any other attitude from OpenSea that can quite describe their attitude towards the reporting of stolen artwork and copymints.

Let's step back and seriously think about this - would any good NFT artist upload their work anywhere else before they mint it?

This is a responsibility that can be easily borne by NFT artists. It's simple, really. If someone attempts to mint an artwork - or any digital image that can trigger a match with a high enough similarity on another part of the internet, that image should never be minted, nor should OpenSea or any other public minting service allow for it to be minted, whether through lazy minting or not.

It's really not too much to ask for NFT artists to keep their artwork to themselves until they so decide to mint. Forget about art streaming and WIP uploads. If you really value your artwork and want to push it out as an NFT, there are responsibilities that you can and should uphold to take care of your content.

There's more than enough technology out there to implement this. Check every image uploaded. Heck, run matches on videos and 3D models too. There are plenty of open and proprietary source computer vision software out there that OpenSea and other minting services can use for this.

There is absolutely no need to rush when minting an NFT. OpenSea is currently the biggest marketplace out there and they pride themselves on it. It's time to walk the talk if the reputation of the platform means anything to them.

Platforms acknowledge that art theft is rampant but do they do anything about it?

Sure they do! When the cameras are rolling and the artists who've had their art stolen begin to make noise, that's when there's action. When the pressure is on, they'll do it like how OpenSea delisted a Bored Ape derivative project PHAYC merely out of pressure from the fragile egos of several Bored Ape holders.

However, there's definitely a lack of preventive measures taken that can stop this from happening in the first place. OpenSea needs to not just match stolen artwork against the greater internet but also their own marketplace. Copyminting of existing NFTs is already happening and OpenSea among other marketplaces, do not seem bothered to check if something has already been minted or not.

If YouTube can scan and detect ContentID matches during content that is streamed live, it means the technology exists and should be implemented right here where it is most needed.

Again, it's not like OpenSea can't afford it.

OpenSea prides itself on being the world's biggest digital asset marketplace and I am not here to challenge that. Their work has democratised digital asset creation to a fault by allowing absolutely anyone who has a computer to begin their journey.

Once upon a time that required a computer and some crypto but lazy minting changed that forever.

Lazy minting is unfortunately one of the implementations of NFT creation that allowed art thieves to exploit the system with virtually zero risk. However there are good reasons for lazy minting to exist. Aside from lowering the barrier for legitimate NFT artists, lazy minting consumes less gas at the point of sale and thus, has a lower energy consumption since it puts less nett load on the blockchain.

If left unchecked, OpenSea will be the bane of digital art on both web2 and web3. It will force artists to retire their artwork from web2 art sharing services like DeviantArt. It will degrade the quality of the NFT art world. It will be the home of rampant copyminting and art theft - and because it's all on the blockchain, it affects us all. That would include artists who do not want anything to do with web3, whose choices must be respected.

The rest of you NFT marketplaces with minting functionality? You best be listening too before you also screw up the NFT scene for all of us.

Coming out of the (broom) closet.

Among the many threads on social media where people who are alien to the concept of NFTs are asking what this fancy new three-letter thing is, one particularly popular explanation seems to have become quite a go-to analogy. It appears to be from a Tumblr-style thread and it's quite a read.

I don't know if it's deliberately trying to sound convoluted from a poor understanding or whether the explainer is legitimately confused themselves. From saying that the alleged seller would "burn down an unspecified amount of the Amazon rainforest" shows a poor understanding of the energy consumption of EVM-compatible blockchains that can support NFTs. While energy is consumed by these blockchains for the minting and trading of NFTs the comparison to burning down the Amazon rainforest is blown severely out of proportion but the details of that is a story for another day.

However, they chose an excellent example to explain what an NFT is.

image from Pixabay

The Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci is not just one of the most valuable paintings in the world, it's also among the most reproduced images in history with plenty of lookalikes and reproductions of the original by painters, forgers and artists alike. However regardless of how many iterations existed, the original Mona Lisa has, for centuries, been property of the French state.

The painting is on display at The Louvre Museum in Paris which is also run by the French Government. This is an arrangement where its ownership can be questioned. Does it belong to The Louvre? Does that mean that whatever belongs to The Louvre is automatically property of the French government?

Traditionally we would slap our name on something we own to assert our ownership over it but in the case of art, many would rather not damage or alter the pristine state of the artwork just so that an owner's name can be put on it. Furthermore that name would need to be altered when the artwork changes hands.

One common solution is to have a document certifying ownership. This is typically in the form of a Title Deed or a document that certifies that whoever holds it is also the owner of an item it is referencing. Cars, properties and some articles of jewellery often have such documents to certify their authenticity and ownership. They are usually countersigned by government authorities such as the land office or Department of Motor Vehicles where they can be checked against.

Let's pick up this Analogy where the writer queersamus explains that after someone offered to let you purchase the Mona Lisa, they would 'go to an unmarked supply closet in the back of the museum' to post a handmade label inside of it to state that you are the owner of the Mona Lisa.

Such a label would be pretty damn useless, just like an NFT minted in the same manner - referencing an artwork that was not meant to be tokenised or tokenised without the consent of its creator/present owner.

However, the explanation of the location of the label being in an unmarked supply closet is misplaced. The blockchain is not an unmarked supply closet. It's not a single location as its replicated across its network which makes it both searchable and immutable.

On top of that it is also public and digitised, meaning that NFTs are searchable and publicly viewable. The importance of this is that it's not an obscure, single record. A blockchain that hosts NFTs like Ethereum keeps this in its history. Even if the NFT is destroyed by its owner through a burn command (enabled on some NFTs), the record of its existence is eternal - a broom closet is anything but that.

This in no way adds validity to the aforementioned hypothetical Mona Lisa NFT. This is to point out a misconception of how an NFT is stored and accessed and how different it is from physical document storage and present day computer filesystems.

Of course The Louvre is under no obligation to let you redeem the actual Mona Lisa for some NFT you bought from a stranger. This is where the analogy is spot-on. NFT issuance is traceable on the blockchain to the address of its issuer. This means that if the French government by some stretch of the imagination really wanted to sell you an NFT of the Mona Lisa, they can identify that the NFT proving the ownership of the painting originated from themselves and choose to honor it.

Whether they do so or not is a different story since we are dealing with a physical, real-world object here. The technological implication changes significantly when the artwork in question is completely digital and intangible. In that case, of course you can just right-click and save the artwork onto your laptop and you potentially have a perfect 1:1 copy of the digital artwork and not a gift shop replica like the one mentioned in the analogy.

This explanation makes sense because one - an NFT is a certificate in this context and in this case, is trying to be a certificate of ownership of the Mona Lisa. What should have been explained that this is an abuse of the technology and not its intended purpose of being a certificate. Just like how counterfeit certificates can be made in the real world, counterfeit certificates can be made on the blockchain. The difference is each NFT can be traced back to its issuer - and an issuer can elect to only honor the NFTs that they issued.

While counterfeit certificates can be made, it is next to impossible to impersonate an issuer. You can make a phony NFT but it will always come from you and never from who you're trying to impersonate. Hence there needs to be this distinction between a counterfeit and a forgery. You can easily counterfeit an NFT but forging an NFT is practically impossible.

What queersamus got right in this analogy is that an NFT is indeed just a certificate of ownership that is not necessarily always issued by a genuine authority and in this case, is completely bogus. People do sell such NFTs as part of scams to make a quick buck - and the authority that controls the actual item that the NFT claims to certify ownership of need not respect the NFT because the issuer it is traced to is not identifiable by them, hence the part about trying to take the original Mona Lisa home and failing miserably, possibly at the hands of the gendarmerie.

One bad example does not define the technology as a whole. There are many things wrong with NFTs which is why they suck for the most part today - but one bad example should not define everything to do with it.

So you heard of NFTs in this 2021 explosion of monkeys and pixel people that are now all over the internet. You may be wondering what new trend is consuming cyberspace and when you discovered more about it, found yourself seething with anger at the state of things.

NFTs, or Non-Fungible Tokens have been around since around 2017 when Ethereum Request for Comment 721 or ERC721 was accepted as the standard for NFTs. This was the protocol that allowed for tokens, that were once fungible like currency, to become non-fungible and unique. NFTs were even possible before this but they did not follow a standard, thus making them inefficient and difficult to implement.

With such a new standard, developers began experimenting more with how it could be implemented. One art studio, US-based Larva Labs opted to try using this new quirk of the Ethereum blockchain for artwork. 10,000 unique pixel profile pictures were created and made into art NFTs that were then put up for free.

Yes. For free. The only thing needed in order to claim one was a small transaction fee, or "gas fee", which is required when transacting on the blockchain.

image from Larva Labs

These were the CryptoPunks - pretty much the OG NFT profile pictures that reached widespread adoption.

I cannot personally verify if they are the very first attempt at NFT profile pictures and I will gladly stand corrected if they are not - but the point is this is not a brand new 2020 fad. They only achieved hype in 2020-2021 when most of us were stuck at home thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic.

It's hard to not draw a parallel between the pandemic and the massive clash of opinions surrounding this technology. We can only guess that more people sitting at home behind their keyboards, starved of the experience of owning a physical collectible couldn't accept that a digital one could ever take its place.

Digital collectibles will never completely replace physical collectibles the same way ebooks have never replaced paperback books. It's not wrong to want something physical but is it wrong to want to own something digital?

Do we need this ability to own things digitally?

I'd be the first to agree - the world does not need NFT technology - the same way we don't need virtual reality headsets, MP3 players and digital photo frames.

Many new technologies came far before their utility could be proven. Even in the cryptospace, Proof-of-Work algorithms were developed by Harold Finney as early as 2004 - a good 4-5 years before the genesis of Bitcoin.

Now we're faced with another technology struggling to prove its worth in the world and it's already off to a terrible start.

Aside from being a rich boys' toy, NFTs reached mainstream infamy through NFT art. Rich cryptobros seemed to be readily willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency just for a JPEG file on the internet. If it sounds ridiculous to you it's because it kind of is.

In some cases, when artists sell their artwork as an NFT, it makes sense when the primary buyer picks it up and the payment goes straight to the artist. As NFT art platforms evolved, this became more elaborate with functions baked into the marketplaces that ensure an artist receives a commission everytime the artwork is sold by their holders. The ecosystem was meant to benefit artists so that they can potentially get a share of the purchase value of their art once it's out in the wild.

The reason I used the past tense is because along the way, the tools that were made available to artists opened the floodgates to abuse that went unchecked and created a huge problem that spilled over from web3 and went after our friends in web2.

At first, it took an elaborate smart contract deployment put together in Solidity in order to push out an NFT.

Then, OpenZeppelin made that much easier with their templates and wizards, greatly simplifying the process of minting NFTs.

Following that, the explosion of NFT marketplaces took off, leading to NFT marketplaces like Foundation, Rarible and more that allowed anyone to hop on and mint an NFT from any image on their computer.

As the process became easier for simply anyone with an Ethereum wallet to up and mint an NFT from any file on their computer, the obvious also happened. The tools that were at anyone and everyone's disposal also found their way into the hands of bad actors, particularly art thieves looking to make a quick buck.

When Cargo, a pioneering NFT marketplace cooked up Magic Minting, the cost of minting was greatly reduced to a flat fee and the gas fees, which are blockchain transaction fees, were then passed to the buyer of the NFT. The resulting condensation of minting and purchasing operations into one single transaction decreased the computational power required, which resulted in a lower gas fee and lower energy consumption.

While Magic Minting was not what opened the floodgates for art thieves, it led to the next problem - Lazy Minting.

Lazy Minting passed 100% of the cost to mint to the buyer, making it completely free to list an NFT. This changed the course of art NFTs forever. Now, anyone could technically create an NFT for almost nothing. One could do so with a completely empty wallet with no payment required upfront and without any verification or checks, thanks largely to a platform called OpenSea which prides themselves on being the biggest NFT marketplace.

With that, the floodgates burst open with the force of a hurricane. Bad actors were minting artworks peeled straight off DeviantArt, some even coding bots to do so. No captchas stood in the way of the robo-apocalypse that tainted the NFT market in the eyes of many artists waking up to find their works taken from them.

It keeps getting worse as I write this with OpenSea being unable (and more likely unwilling) to cull the intense influx of art theft on their platform.

As web2 folk begin to learn about NFTs, their tainted name took shape as a thieves’ paradise, where art theft runs rampant.

Then there are the other web2 folk who saw an investment opportunity in some rare and valuable NFTs. Without much reading up on the wonderful world of the blockchain, some jumped straight in, believing that their 50,000 dollar purchase would give them hyper-exclusive access to an image on the internet.

Perhaps they were still living in an era when computer mice only had one button.

Some of these people flipped out extensively at others who merely right-clicked and saved their NFTs, making them a massive laughing stock on the internet as the absurd demand for "Right-Click Protection" was made by these folks. There was cynicism surrounding whether or not these people were actually being serious. It turned out there are people out there who really believe that they can exert such control over the internet because they are used to being able to do that in the physical world.

Artwork NFTs do not change exclusivity to the artworks they point to. They are merely tokens that verify ownership of an asset that they point towards. While web3 applications can build upon that verifiable ownership to unlock special features in Discord servers, video games and the metaverse, they will not lock down access to an image.

You may already have seen the big battle between "NFTs are good!" and "No F**king Thanks!" on social media between the many people who are for and against the technology.

The issue with NFTs is not the tech but the people who use it. It's just like guns. Guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people.

With the internet in a constant tug-of-war between privacy and regulation, cryptospace takes the stand in the corner of privacy and control. It has granted anonymity and control to the users and is part of what makes web3 what it is.

Mega-corporations like Meta and Google stand in the opposite end of the spectrum, collecting user data and hyper-regulating their spaces, controlling what people see and don't see, giving rise to plexiglass echo chambers with walls so clear many of us don't even realise that they are there.

There are a lot of arguments against NFTs as a detriment to the environment and a cause for climate change.

The high energy use by Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains has been a cause for concern for years now, even before NFTs entered the scene. From Bitcoin to Ethereum, PoW blockchains consume as much energy as entire nations in a year.

In future articles on this blog I will write more about how this energy use is calculated, what is being done about it and how the energy conversation is shaping the future of NFTs.

The one thing I will mention here on this topic is that the conversation is largely imbalanced due to an imposed correlation between energy use and pollution. While our current circumstances reveal that we still largely rely on fossil fuels for electrical energy in the world, the push for renewable energy is the conversation we should be having. It's very easy to blame those who use energy and too much work for the average person to follow the trail back to those who make the decisions as to how energy is produced and managed.

Climate change is indeed serious. There is a world beyond the concrete jungle dying every day. Rivers polluted with toxic waste, trees being felled in mass deforestation, oceans rife with plastic debris are among the contributing causes.

The consumption of fuel to produce electrical energy will always come at a cost to our environment either in thermal or chemical emissions. Any device connected to the grid will consume energy produced by a fuel baseload. Renewables help to offset this reliance and help us transition more easily with minimal disruption to the grid.

When we can reach a point where energy production is from mostly renewable energy is not up to the cryptosphere but instead, up to the governments who decide what goes into our power plants.

The truly new and disruptive innovations in technology are always met with strong resistance and opposition by those who are complacent with a technology that they are familiar with and would prefer not to have replaced. After all, many people do believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

NFTs are currently straddling the thin line between make or break. Some believe that in the tech should be rejected at all costs while some still want to hang onto the hope that it can one day, after it stabilises and presents the full force of its utility to the world, be able to thrive.

There are believers, there are cynics, there are haters. Then there's me.

My name is Daniel Anthony. I have been a blockchain enthusiast for almost a decade, delving into the many quirks of Bitcoin since its inception. NFTs are a headache and a wedge so big it breaks families and communities apart like never before.

My passion for web3 and all things blockchain and my heartbreak with the widespread abuse of this technology brings me here today, to this melting pot of optimism and frustration, excitement and anger, anticipation and disillusionment.

Today as I publish this, I am turning 30 years old and starting a new chapter in my life. I decided to take a stand - and to be the change I want to see.

This blog is my story. Thank you for reading. Hope to see you around.