Originally published at: Counterfeit NFTs indistinguishable from the real thing | Boing Boing
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So rich people can’t tell if their energy inefficient jpegs/gifs are real or not?
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I can tell by the pixels.
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There’s a nerdy security lesson buried up the sleeve of the NFT mess: computers are wonderfully useful precisely because of the ease of duplication, transmission, and mutation of their amazing array of data structures. So what do you want to be sure to guard against in terms of valued objects, fiat money, and perhaps, most importantly: vote balloting? Exactly the sort of facile duplication and manipulation which computers permit. Stick with paper ballots! The money issue is already lost to the convenience of bankers and cell-phones. (“But but… block chains (you idiot)!” yes, no problems of eluding societal ethics there, right?)
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‘Counterfeit fakes indistinguishable from the real fakes.’
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I’m sure the cryptotoken community, known for their willingness to follow the rules and their high ethical standards and lack of greed, will never allow this scam to become more than a one-off experiment.
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Thanks, I needed a good funny ha ha today.
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This NFT nonsense is over before it’s begun.
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Thousands of black hats are now frantically studying the technique to see if it could be applied to BitCoin.
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Spoiler alert: it won’t. 
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Also crypto is hard. Until proven otherwise, you got it wrong. (No matter how minor your contribution to it is.)
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yeah, i read the blurb trying to understand what the difference between the two might be - but, then i dont really understand blockchain anyway in the first place 
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My understanding is that this is an exploit in smart contracts used to mint NFTs, and generally BitCoin transactions are not based around complicated impossible to understand by humans “smart” contracts.
I think from the description and my very limited knowledge the idea is to craft a smart contract that future transactions in the system will think is a standard NFT smart contract, but it includes some significantly more complex code that bypasses some checks but makes it look like those checks were done.
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The conclusion implied by the cited article is incorrect.
It’s not that a flaw was discovered that renders the whole idea of NFTs moot. Rather, a specific implementation (smart contract) of the standard that specifies how to talk to NFTs has a flaw that allowed for this “exploit”.
TL;DR a vetted implementation of the standard in question (ERC-721) will be adopted by the NFT community - problem solved.
apparently they are just links to jpegs and gifs 
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