So I’ve been looking into NFT’s and it seems that the actual image isn’t ever stored on the blockchain, the only thing that’s stored is a json file that includes a URL to the image.
How can anyone be sure the NFT’s they own will still be there in 5 years. What if the company who’s paying for the hosting of these images goes out of business? Or the domain name is bought by someone else? Or they don’t pay their bill?
This doesn’t seem very non-centralised to me and it seems very non permanent. There’s a hundred different things that could happen that results in a URL not being available in the future.
So how can you be sure your NFT is even going to remain in the location permanently? Isn’t this a huge risk to the investment?
NFTs can be done that way but shouldn’t be.
There is another tech that needs to be combined with the blockchain which is a persistence layer but a better name would be “forever hosting”.
There are two main vendors, IPFS and Arweave, if you don’t see those names in the url of the NFT then it’s likely the NFT has the problem you described.
If you do see those names then it’s very likely (Arweave 100%, IPFS depends how they did it) that the NFT will last forever (or 200 years for Arweave).