I was playing around with simple Ethereum smart contract creation and NFTs on Ropsten (Ethereum testnet) and I started to wonder what is the difference between Ropsten and BSC/Polygon/XDai. They look all awfully similar, they are all 'forks' of Ethereum. Transactions are basically free on Ropsten (since you can get testnet ETH for free) but after you deploy the NFT, it can interact with a website through web3 just like mainnet tokens.
And as a long as Ropsten exists, the NFTs will exist.
The Ethereum community shutdown a testnet a few years ago and presumably, all the data as lost for those that didnt backup. So that's the real risk, the risk that the network will dissapear. Which incidentally, is also the risk of BSC, Polygon and XDai because they are centralized.
They wont shutdown by choice like some of the testnets (so I guess thats why they charge a little for their service), but governments might come after then and force their closure.
I suppose, one way to ensure a protection against this is to make snapshots of the relevant part of the ledger (say, the creator of an NFT, takes snapshots of who owns his NFTs) as a safe backup so that can be restored in another chain if that network is shutdown. Another method would be to automatically deploy that NFT on all those cheap chains and give buyers of the NFT (say on Polygon) an option to also redeem the NFT in other chains (say BSC and XDai) as a safety mechanism. Although, it can get messy as people trade that NFT in one chain and try to reclaim in another, so a lot of coordination would be required
But what struck me of using Ropstein for create NFTs, is that the same 'benefits' that people pitch as being positives for BSC, Polygon, xDai can be found for free on Ropstein. If I have a ticketing company, I can issue tickets on Ropstein for free and superfast but sold for payment with ETH on mainnet (when the ETH mainnet smart contract receives ETH, my centralized node can then issue a Ropstein NFT to the same address) . Then people interact with a website or in person with a QR code to prove that they have the ticket. Those people can then trade those Ropstein NFTs at no cost but for real world value (if the tickets have the ability to be used over and over for 1 year for instance)
So it seems to me that all these 'cheap' alternatives to Ethereum are just premium testnets because whatever they can do, testnets can do as well. But presumably, they are a bit more secure than a PoW testnet that can be 51% attacked easily. But they are also much more centralized and very exposure to government pressure, particularly BSC and xDai. But it was funny when I was using Ropstein, it feelt so much like using BSC and Polygon except I didn't had to pay anyone
