[HN Gopher] Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about i...
___________________________________________________________________
Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of
getting richer
Author : CynicusRex
Score : 331 points
Date : 2021-09-24 10:34 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (defector.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (defector.com)
| BTCOG wrote:
| Here's your seemingly month reminder that there is only one
| cryptocurrency. Bitcoin.
|
| NFTs are epitome of tulip mania. Bitcoin, while it does increase
| in value due to low supply, is the only secure and actually fair
| escape hatch to the global monetary system and holds value
| globally. Proof of Stake, and every single coin below Bitcoin,
| copied from Bitcoin, are similar to fiat and centralized.
| Ethereum is the worst of the bunch and is scamming millions.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Let's accept your premise for the sake of argument.
|
| Why do you thinik the contagion from other crypto scams
| imploding won't bring down BTC? Will people still trust BTC if
| they lose trust in other crypto?
| BTCOG wrote:
| The rest are completely irrelevant.
| postalrat wrote:
| To me this sounds like more lies.
| kharak wrote:
| For everyone who doesn't follow crypto. OP is obviously a
| Bitcoin maximalist. For them, the world of crypto begins and
| ends with Bitcoin.
| rchaud wrote:
| A fair escape hatch?
|
| Anybody can buy BTC with stablecoins, which are unaudited, and
| whose creators have openly lied about maintaining a 1:1 ratio
| between USD and stablecoins in circulation.
|
| Say what you will about fiat, but no bank in the world will let
| me exchange monopoly money for something I can use to buy a
| sandwich.
| bo1024 wrote:
| I think NFTs are really dumb, a scam, and/or vectors for money
| laundering. Then again, I think the same thing about multimillion
| dollar private artwork and politicians' "nonprofits".
|
| I think most cryptocurrencies and tokens are really dumb or a
| pyramid scheme. Then again, I think the same about multilevel
| marketing and much of the modern real estate and stock markets.
|
| But I also see the really exciting potential and promise of
| blockchain tech. People are working on expanding access to
| capital and systems to countries with unstable currencies.
| They're working on the future of the corporation beyond
| capitalism with DAOs. Enabling micropayments for creators. Much
| more. It's tiring seeing all these articles harping on the
| downsides without acknowledging or looking into the upsides.
|
| Probably because the system works fine for these authors --
| they're somewhere with a stable currency, their 401k is going up,
| etc. Blockchain is a space where people are actually dreaming of
| something different and better instead of accepting the status
| quo. Meanwhile in the U.S. we have a Fed printing trillions of
| dollars to prop up asset prices, we have wars to support USD
| hegemony. In other countries their wages inflate away before they
| can spend them, etc.
|
| I don't know a lot about all this stuff but I really respect the
| part of the blockchain space which is about broadening access,
| decentralizing power, and envisioning new systems.
| voidray wrote:
| If you take every long-refuted criticism of Bitcoin along with
| cherrypicked examples of cringe celebrities endorsing it, and you
| combine that with misinformed neo-Marxism and an unquestioning
| acceptance of government officials, you get this article.
|
| If your average sports writer actually wanted to understand the
| space, they could read something with real data:
| https://nydig.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/NYDIG-Bitcoin-N...
| oyf wrote:
| > Since 1920, at least 55 hyperinflation events have taken
| place, destroying savings and creating economic hardship...
| Bitcoin offers the world an alternative - a sound monetary
| system outside the control of governments and central banks.
|
| The paper you linked doesn't exactly get off to a good start,
| considering there are ~1600-2200 dead/worthless
| cryptocurrencies (see below) and Bitcoin itself is incredibly
| volatile. It's somewhat absurd to claim Bitcoin is the stable
| alternative to fiat currencies, or the solution to cases of
| currency collapse. The rest of the summary is just speculation
| on how the carbon footprint of Bitcoin might be reasonable in
| the future. Would you mind pointing out the parts that you feel
| refute the article's criticisms?
|
| https://www.coinopsy.com/dead-coins/ https://deadcoins.com/
| overlaid wrote:
| BTC _specifically_ has seen it 's volatility drastically
| reduced. It's not hard to find several stocks with a much
| higher volatility in the last month, particularly the last
| week.
|
| Many other cryptocurrencies still experience extreme
| volatility on par with BTC's early history.
| doomroot wrote:
| > Bitcoin itself is incredibly volatile.
|
| Largely in the right direction.
| oyf wrote:
| Good point, but you have to consider that if we're talking
| about a scenario in which it's being used in the place of a
| national currency, the bigger picture matters less. If your
| paycheck can lose 20% of it's value in a few days you may
| not have the option to wait for it to possibly regain that
| value. Even ignoring the short term issues, I'm not
| convinced Bitcoin is any more protected from becoming
| totally worthless than any given fiat currency. I just
| can't see the scenario in which it solves or even helps the
| issue of hyperinflation in a way that fiat currency
| couldn't.
| ahoy wrote:
| This is the exact kind of utopian fantasizing that the article
| talks about. Charming!
| voidray wrote:
| Can you be more specific?
| crumpled wrote:
| Keep in mind that Bitcoin is vulnerable to cracking by quantum
| computers some time in the next couple decades.
| swift532 wrote:
| This is kind of overstated. From what I remember, it only makes
| addresses vulnerable after you spend from them, and in all
| likelihood the network would migrate to a resistant algorithm.
| [deleted]
| maxharris wrote:
| Thanks for posting that. I hadn't seen Jack's pro-Bitcoin tweet,
| and seeing it here allowed me to like and share it.
|
| This author obviously has an axe to grind, so I didn't get much
| out of his words.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| I got about half way through the article, and all I'd read was
| a bunch of poorly attributed motives the author had invented
| for the people who participate in cryptocurrency.
|
| Did they actually get around to talking about cryptocurrency at
| any point?
| kureikain wrote:
| One thing funny about cryptocurrency is that it's built for
| highly technical group of audience. But in my peers, a majority
| of people who get benefit from it are non-tech user.
|
| Think of wallet concept. The wallet literally hold nothing. The
| fund isn't a file or something that the wallet keep. The wallet
| is simply server as an interface. The transaction can generate
| off chain. You can signed the transactionor any message to prove
| who you are. Read is essentially free but write contract cost
| gas. How can we explain these to a normal user? Why Solana is so
| fast and Ethereum is slow?
|
| Now, the highly technical user understand those concept and feel
| something shady about a certain thing. Then they don't buy it.
| Meanwhile, othergroup get rich so quick and it makes the world
| feel like crypto is a ripoff.
|
| Add in the controversal stuff such as Sushi fork Uni, then
| founder run off with $14m(and later return)...
|
| all of that made crypto looks really bad.
|
| But now let's see what blockchaing give us from a technical
| perspective. It's a distributed database where you can store data
| into it, like git, and can prove and trust it's what you write
| into it.
|
| Example, DNS. DNS is very decentralize but what if your DNS
| server decided to return something different from the name
| server. What if we store DNS into blockchain? Write to it cost
| money but read is essentially free as long as you have a node.
|
| But due to the highly cost of mining, and the craziness of its
| price, develop on blockchain is costly and it push people away
| because the people who want to build something on it doesn't have
| the fun. I, for one, want to do the above DNS idea with Ethereum
| but choose to go with Solana because Ethereum cost is just so
| damn high...
| space_rock wrote:
| The rebranding of MySQL as blockchain was a brilliant move for
| sales. Bit torrent is decentralized and it doesn't use
| "blockchain". "Blockchain" only works for money and nothing else
| TrackerFF wrote:
| World's most expensive linked-list.
| wpietri wrote:
| I mean, if you look at transaction cost, settle time, user
| friendliness, and currency risk, it doesn't even work as a
| medium of exchange, which is the definition of money.
|
| More than a decade on, approximately nobody uses Bitcoin for
| normal transactions. Compare with Venmo or MPesa, both of which
| launched around the same time, to se what actual digital money
| looks like. Both of those do way more transactions than Bitcoin
| and are much more widely adopted.
| doomroot wrote:
| Why does the bitcoin blockchain need to be used for normal
| transactions? Do you not think a neutral payment rail/unit of
| account between nation state level actor's could be valuable?
| kristjansson wrote:
| _Anything_ that one could get central banks or nation
| states to agree to use would be valuable. The LOE the
| technical system (SWIFT, Bitcoin, whatever) is absolutely
| infinitesimal compared to negotiating a change of that
| magnitude.
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| These nation state level actors would need to convert their
| Bitcoin into something that they can actually spend.
| Governments need to pay employees, contractors, and
| suppliers. These people want actual currency they can
| spend.
|
| The main alternative would be to issue a Bitcoin backed
| currency. But then you're just re-creating the gold
| standard, and all of the problems that go along with that.
| imtringued wrote:
| In my opinion there is nothing wrong with third parties
| offering services on top but you know, the whole
| cryptocurrency idea is that you don't need them.
| wpietri wrote:
| Let me refer you back to the original paper:
| https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
|
| The goal was "a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic
| cash". That is, money.
|
| If you are proposing a new goal, a settlement system for
| couple hundred named organizations with strong
| relationships, then a) that's not money, and b) the Bitcoin
| system is socially and technically wrong for that. But if
| we keep the goalposts in their original location, Bitcoin
| is clearly a failure when you look at how the competition
| has done.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Hard agree - the only thing bitcoin can reasonably be spent
| on for most folks is black market goods (usually drugs).
|
| Which is really why bitcoin exists as thing today, in my
| opinion. It was a way to pay for drugs over the internet.
|
| The rest of the pricing is _purely_ speculation, and it hurts
| any real utility it might provide.
| wpietri wrote:
| For sure. And I think that speculation (with attendant
| market manipulation) are the main observed purpose of it
| these days. The total drugs market is large, but I'd be
| surprised to learn that even 1% passes through all the
| cryptocurrencies put together. Especially Bitcoin given how
| traceable it is.
| mywittyname wrote:
| It does seem to be used by people transferring funds
| internationally, especially from SEA to the USA.
| wpietri wrote:
| Oh? What percent of international transfers are using it?
| mywittyname wrote:
| No clue. I just know people who do it.
| wpietri wrote:
| Got it. I mean, I know people who ride unicycles. But for
| this I'm not interesting so much in "is it possible" as
| "is it effective and widely adopted".
| mywittyname wrote:
| Agree, anecdotes aren't data. But seeing non-tech-savvy
| people doing it definitely makes me think it's somewhat
| common. I posted half with the expectation that someone
| would chime in with some personal experience on the
| topic; HN has a pretty diverse group here.
|
| I found a number of guides on the pros and cons of
| various international money transfers options, and BTC is
| often included as an option. I also found some recent
| (and old!) articles about its use as a remittance system
| in poorer areas of the world[1].
|
| > Other emerging market central banks in Latin America,
| India, and Southeast Asia, where remittances make up a
| significant share of the economy, are in a similar bind.
| Bitcoin transfers surged in emerging markets last year,
| as the pandemic accelerated the rise of cheaper, more
| efficient digital remittance services.
|
| [1]https://qz.com/africa/1983610/bitcoin-draws-millions-
| of-work...
| jdauriemma wrote:
| Add Starbucks to that list
| Destiner wrote:
| Even if so, "only money" is a multi trillion dollar industry.
| fksadfji12 wrote:
| Money was the entire point...
| overlaid wrote:
| > The rebranding of MySQL as blockchain
|
| Sadly this really _is_ the most nuanced definition of
| "blockchain" that many people can understand
| space_rock wrote:
| It is the only definition of blockchain that matches it's
| use. Where they copied the word from, the bitcoin
| datastructure, is unrelated
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Q4 is set to be an amazing crypto run because all I see is lots
| of last minute FUD right now on all media channels, and of course
| from China. The OG FUD source has blown its final wad and banned
| all crypto "for real this time." Let's hope the USA isn't as
| backwards thinking and sees that banning crypto is removing
| yourself from the new world economy.
| EliRivers wrote:
| Surely you DO want the USA to ban crypto? I'm assured that
| crypto bans make the price go sky high and then the whales can
| cash out into dollars.
| codingclaws wrote:
| Off topic. Did anyone else's AI generated text radar go off on
| this article? Seems like too many fancy words.
|
| I wonder how many media outlets use GPT-3 to help generate
| content.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Unless specifically encouraged, GPT-3 would probably prefer to
| use common language.
| mahidhar wrote:
| Actually it's pretty weird. This is a sports blog and content
| engine. And the author is someone who started this publication.
| I'm not sure what the motivation/context is at all here.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| The author does seem to be influenced by the writing style of
| https://www.pakin.org/complaint, but the arguments he presents
| are coherent.
| HelixEndeavor wrote:
| I won't pretend I'm a computer genius or anything, but I feel
| like I understand tech at least more than the average Joe - at
| least, I'm the designated IT guy for computer problems faced by
| anyone I know.
|
| The fact that, despite having it explained multiple times by
| multiple sources multiple ways, I still can't seem to wrap my
| head around how crypto functions... Makes me suspicious. It feels
| like the whole idea is to obfuscate it's functionality to the
| point it becomes this incomprehensible enigma - by design.
|
| If it's not easy to comprehend, and instead a strange mystery
| number that moves between even stranger mystery-er numbers,
| someone is bound to think those numbers must be worth something -
| otherwise it wouldn't exist, right?
|
| Basically what I'm saying is cryptocurrency sends me into an
| existential spiral of thoughts about how all value is just
| perceived and agreed upon and 90% of what we call "the economy"
| is just fake. Look up fractional reserve banking and join the
| existential crisis with me!
| imtringued wrote:
| Honestly, one of the funniest things about our money system is
| that it keeps changing. Our understanding of money isn't really
| "finished". We ended up with a promise (also known as debt)
| based system by "accident" (through slow evolution) and that
| people have to catch up to this.
|
| https://youtu.be/ZFRVfXeIaek
| a_rustacean wrote:
| "I don't understand it, therefore there is something suspicious
| about it" is a very dangerous way of reasoning.
|
| We burned innocent people because of this not long ago.
|
| Anyways, I find the Bitcoin paper very approachable. You may
| need to read it a bunch of times until everything clicks into
| place. But it's all there, in just 8 pages.
| academia_hack wrote:
| It's really just a very slow, very inefficient and very public,
| database with an audit log of hashes keeping track of every
| change made. Everything else is just fluff/hype around that
| idea.
| x3n0ph3n3 wrote:
| > I still can't seem to wrap my head around how crypto
| functions... Makes me suspicious. It feels like the whole idea
| is to obfuscate it's functionality to the point it becomes this
| incomprehensible enigma - by design.
|
| It's certainly _not_ just obfuscation and smoke+mirrors. It 's
| only as complicated as it has to be and the mathematics behind
| it are solid. Unfortunately, it is complicated enough that most
| people won't be able to easily understand it.
| landemva wrote:
| 'existential spiral of thoughts about how all value is just
| perceived and agreed upon'
|
| Yes, you are awakening. Cultures seem to like jewelry and art.
| streamofdigits wrote:
| Cryptocurrency was a broken concept from the very start. It
| assumed that you can build a financial system by engineering
| "trust" in purely technical terms.
|
| Trust is something between humans. If you cannot find an
| arrangement of checks and balances that gives people comfort that
| the "system" is not ripping them off there is no amount of
| cryptoaccounting that will solve it for you.
|
| The very anonymity of the bitcoin founder(s?) shows this was
| never an honest-to-goodness project. Its not surprising then that
| crypto never solved any real economic problem. As in: making any
| economy a tiny bit healthier, more resilient, less unequal. Not a
| single one.
|
| But had it stayed a failed financial reform project would have
| been one thing. It is heartbreaking to witness the amount of
| fraud, waste of resources and manipulation it unleashed. Its
| ongoing amoral adoption by the formal financial system as "yet
| another asset class offering diversification to our customers" is
| a fitting closure.
|
| The chicken came home to roost.
| trixie_ wrote:
| All I know is that I actually feel in control of my money with
| crypto and can easily move it around the world. ACH and wire
| transfers are painful in comparison.
| streamofdigits wrote:
| I am not defending existing monetary systems. The cost and
| difficulty of transfers is in no small measure the result of
| cartels that the official system is quite happy to let fester
| because they haven't seen an oligopoly they didn't like.
| trixie_ wrote:
| I'm sorry, it has nothing to do with cartels and everything
| to do with an incredibly complex banking infrastructure
| running mostly on fortran and cobol.
| streamofdigits wrote:
| I'm sorry, do some research. A few large operators keep
| the remittances costs high.
| https://voxeu.org/article/stubbornly-high-cost-
| remittances
|
| As for fortran and cobol, why change the technology if
| you are sitting pretty?
| imtringued wrote:
| In my opinion it feels like Bitcoin was designed by an amateur
| from a monetary perspective. Imagine if governments actually
| used it. Inequality would get worse than it already is. People
| buy it because of the multi level marketing aspect. Someone
| bought Bitcoin and they tell others to buy it, rinse and
| repeat.
|
| People will call "nocoiners" jealous because they missed some
| train after all they didn't buy Bitcoin when it was at $100.
| Yet they talk about how oppressive the government provided
| financial system is. Like how getting -0.5% negative interest
| on savings above $100k is the end for the small saver but
| having your money go up 10x because you bought it early and
| having the purchasing power of your labor go down by 10x
| because you bought too late is the paragon of equality. One
| year of work buys me less Bitcoin than 3 years ago. I'm getting
| priced out like with real estate. It's really puzzling to me
| how this is supposed to lead to a crypto utopia.
| streamofdigits wrote:
| The jealousy argument just reveals the character and
| knowledge level (and maybe age) of the people who make up the
| cryptomania movement.
|
| Money is not a "asset class", it is a claim on other people's
| time and the economic value they can generate with their work
| and talent. It is only "worth" the value of the community
| that accepts it as a legitimate tender. If a token dollar is
| worth something it is because a vast range of people will
| happily exchange it for something trully valuable.
|
| The economy of a community made up of speculators and
| extortionists is worth exactly zero (if not negative) and it
| is a matter of time before this transpires.
|
| The only positive thing to say about bitcoin and friends is
| that is showed to many more people that monetary system
| alternatives are in principle possible. Ofcourse some people
| have been for ages working on complementary currencies and
| such. Digital and programmable currencies _are_ the future,
| but they will have to become real economic tools that will
| fix true problems before they stand a chance against the
| current system.
| cfup wrote:
| I was involved in a blockchain (DeFi) startup. All the blockchain
| companies are mostly a huge pyramid scheme. The company I worked
| for has a lot of big claims, raised millions, wanted to solve
| world hunger, prioritized partnership, marketing, while having no
| working implementation. Others in the eco system are the same.
|
| The NFT scene is even more BS. It could destroyed uninformed
| people's life, just like gambling. However, this kind of gambling
| is public on the internet with little regulations.
|
| I hope more tech people speak about this instead of just ignoring
| them.
| ngokevin wrote:
| The most absurd thing I've ever heard was crypto could help
| people in Africa store their diplomas.
| hanniabu wrote:
| "I worked for a sleezy startup that was scamming people,
| therefore all companies are scams"
| cfup wrote:
| "I worked at a sleezy startup and meet a bunch of partners
| doing similar things, and most of them are worse or just as
| sleezy"
|
| - But cuz you work in a sleezy one so you can only meet the
| bad company
|
| We were very technical oriented in the beginning. I was hired
| to do formal verification and system design. Until, money
| happened, and founders realize they over promised.
| boh wrote:
| Are you suggesting your statement is sarcasm?
| overlaid wrote:
| How did the pyramid scheme work? Who was recruiting (not in an
| abstract sense)? What were the rewards for getting new
| recruits?
| dotlog wrote:
| Was is literally a pyramid scheme that recruited people and
| paid people for getting new recruits? Or just a scheme?
| xur17 wrote:
| > I was involved in a blockchain (DeFi) startup. All the
| blockchain companies are mostly a huge pyramid scheme. The
| company I worked for has a lot of big claims, raised millions,
| wanted to solve world hunger, prioritized partnership,
| marketing, while having no working implementation. Others in
| the eco system are the same.
|
| I agree that there are lots of scammy "blockchain" startups,
| but I don't think it's fair to paint them all with that brush.
| There are also plenty that are actually building cool projects,
| without pumping their coin, and announcing light interactions
| with a company as partnerships.
|
| If you have 20% of companies being scummy, but churning out 80%
| of the news, your assumption will be that all of the companies
| are scummy.
| aazaa wrote:
| > The hucksterish utopian rhetoric and blustering ambient scuzz
| of the broader cryptocurrency thing as it exists in this moment--
| the clammy slew of posturing experts, the open mendacity and
| barely concealed rube-running bad faith, the actual criminality
| and simple goonery that define its day-to-day--do the idea at the
| center of it no favors, but that is, more or less, the thing that
| always happens to any idea once people get ahold of it. Again,
| this is something that most people understand without really
| understanding how they understand it. At some point, when you are
| being lied to all the time and everywhere, you just know when
| it's happening.
|
| There are way too many words in that article, yet the author
| manages to say almost nothing that hasn't been said before. I
| suggest removing all adverbs and adjectives, then re-writing.
| nootropicat wrote:
| In absence of real economic growth winning at zero and negative
| sum games is the only realistic chance at making it in the
| broadly defined West. The ponzi trend is only going to grow until
| the whole system collapses under itself. People not playing the
| game are going to lose the most, as unfair as it is, because rich
| executives are going to exploit their positions and dump their
| bags on public companies they control. In more corrupt cases,
| countries instead of companies. It's only going to grow.
|
| Even so, arguably crypto ponzi games are harmless compared to
| more socially accepted ways of wealth extraction. Facebook,
| twitter and other mass social media destroyed society and utilize
| best ai/ml in existence to steal people's attention, at this
| point they should be viewed as human hostile ais. The lost
| potential of years wasted on pointless flamewars and mindless
| clicking is immeasurable. So many smart people wasting their best
| years on making ads even more effective instead of creating
| actual wealth.
|
| In the good timeline there was no bailout in 2007 and the global
| financial system completely disintegrated, deleting most of fake
| wealth and unsustainable liabilities in the process, but without
| long term damage to real productivity.
|
| This is the bad timeline in which wealth extraction dominates
| until there's nothing left, after which everything stops with no
| system energy reserves. That's how Soviet Union ended.
| lkrubner wrote:
| Regarding an interesting counter-example to blockchain hype,
| check out Omnichains:
|
| https://www.omnichains.com/
|
| They initially argued that they could provide an unrivaled form
| of transparency because they kept all the data on the blockchain.
| But now I'm working for a customer of their's, and I realize
| there is no blockchain. I believe they now run a standard service
| backed up by a standard SQL database.
|
| But look at their marketing:
|
| " _Omnichain has earned the prestigious recognition for its
| innovative solution that is helping brands and retailers create
| more transparent, connected supply chains and drive intelligent
| process automation._ "
|
| Or check out this blog post:
|
| " _Lack of visibility is not a new problem. Supply chains have
| long dealt with fragmented management systems and data siloes--
| barriers that limit transparency, efficiency, and collaboration
| between stakeholders. The pandemic only magnified these
| challenges._
|
| _...Moving forward, end-to-end visibility solutions--made
| possible by technologies like blockchain--will be instrumental in
| helping businesses proactively identify risks and pivot
| accordingly. So going back to suppliers, manufacturers can use
| blockchain to connect and share data with their suppliers. With
| accurate, real-time visibility into available resources upstream,
| they can quickly identify alternate sources if needed, and
| ultimately prevent costly production delays._ "
|
| I have the impression this company started off hoping to use the
| blockchain to create a more transparent supply chain. I also have
| the impression they have pivoted away from that vision.
|
| And that's fine, of course. I'm not criticizing them. A startup
| starts with one hypothesis, tests it, and then pivots when that
| first hypothesis fails. This is good management.
|
| But I think, in a small way, it indicates what is happening with
| those startups that got started when blockchain hype was at its
| peak. Two or three years ago you could get money from investors
| by promising to revolutionize an industry by using the
| blockchain. And now it's turning out that the blockchain is less
| useful than was supposed for creating new kinds of transparency.
|
| As it turns out, supply chain transparency is limited by each
| companies unwillingness to share it weaknesses, it's lack of cash
| flow, it's lack of inventory, and it's slow shipping times.
| Blockchain can not fix any of those things.
|
| And as I've said elsewhere, with these industrial applications of
| blockchain, I've yet to see a service that could not have been
| done more easily with a standard framework (Ruby On Rails or
| Django or Symfony or NodeJS) sitting in front of a standard SQL
| database.
|
| A final point: this is my first time working on a big
| retail/warehouse project, and I am absolutely shocked at the
| primitive technology that is currently in use. Most of these
| companies lack APIs, which, in the year 2021, I find shocking.
| For our warehouse, for instance, there is no way to do an API
| call to find how much of a particular item is still in inventory.
| And this clearly limits how much the blockchain is able to change
| anything.
|
| And this is especially wild: I've spoken to the good folks at
| Omnichains, and they tell me that they do not have an API.
| Rather, they can send us a CSV file at regular times, but that is
| it. In the year 2021!
|
| Just amazing.
| jcbrand wrote:
| This article conflates NFTs with cryptocurrency, in a way that
| looks to me to be intentional in order to bolster his argument
| that crypto is for rich people to conspicuously consume and to
| pump and dump on the plebs.
|
| NFTs aren't money, or currency and just because they can be
| created on some blockchains doesn't make them so.
|
| I also don't see a genuine effort from the author to really
| understand why proponents think that this technology will
| positively change the world. You might not agree with them, but
| at least then rebut their arguments instead of creating straw
| men.
|
| Bitcoin is open source, the original founder is nowhere to be
| found, there were no VCs involved in its creation or in the
| distribution of the coins and the entire network is run out in
| the open. The Bitcoin network is a commons.
|
| The permissionless, decentralized, p2p and stateless aspect of
| cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin is as revolutionary as it was 12
| years ago, and in these 12 years "normal" (i.e. non-rich) people
| had access to them as much as anyone else. Heck, 10 years ago
| there were faucets that would hand out 5 bitcoins if you solved a
| captcha.
|
| The people who are today involved in the creation and
| distribution of fiat money have incredible power, a power which
| is largely hidden from view, but which actually drives and shapes
| a lot of what we see. Of course these people won't take an open
| source competitor lying down.
| shkkmo wrote:
| I don't see any such conflation, nor do I see any rejection of
| cryptocurrency's future potential. This article is primarily
| about what is happening with cryptocurrency right now:
|
| > Whatever cryptocurrency might someday be For All Mankind, it
| is most urgently and avidly in this moment something that
| people tell weird lies about in hopes of getting richer.
|
| You seem intent on spreading such get rich quick and utopian
| dreams on cryptocurrency. How much do you have invested in the
| ecosystem?
|
| Edit: In my opinion, people who genuinely care about the
| revolutionary potential of Bitcoin need to avoid feeding the
| hype train that helps normalize the sketchy lieing behavior in
| the ecosystem and simply work on building that future instead.
| jcbrand wrote:
| > You seem intent on spreading such get rich quick and
| utopian dreams on cryptocurrency.
|
| Please point me to where I spread get rich quick dreams in my
| comments.
| KorematsuFredt wrote:
| May be I am too old but completely fail to see any value in the
| notion of NFT. I do see value in Bitcoin. Bitcoin has basically
| thrown a wrench into all government controls on cross border
| payments. I don't know if Bitcoins will be very successful or
| not, but I am pretty sure the concept will last very very long.
|
| NFTs on other hand appears to be equivalent of selling Golden
| gate bridge to tourists.
| boh wrote:
| Not really a revolution when most people just trade it (mostly
| via fiat money). The original idea was for Bitcoin to be a
| currency, unfortunately the "hodlers" won, now its only reason
| to exist is to be more expensive. Boosters are still milking
| the original premise as some revolution they're supporting,
| when of course, if you ask how much of their crypto assets
| they've actually used/spent, the typical answer is 0%.
|
| Satoshi is dead, the dream is dead, people are just trading the
| corpse
| leppr wrote:
| L2s and decentralized stablecoins keep the dream of a free
| decentralized economy alive. It's a smaller community for
| sure (as most pretend enthusiasts aren't actually interested
| when there's no Ponzi in it for them, and most detractors
| would rather focus on easier strawmen), but it exists and
| it's thriving.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| What has happened in those 12 years has been a great deal of
| scams, get rich quick scheme a and instability. Bitcoin has
| also become dominated by a few major players and is a power
| structure in itself, not really benefitting ordinary people
| much at.
| jcbrand wrote:
| Bitcoin is NOT dominated by a few major players. A few years
| ago when some large commercial players wanted to increase the
| block size, they weren't able to do so because a majority of
| nodes on the network rejected their code.
|
| The Bitcoin network has stayed remarkably stable and it's
| still possible to run a node on a raspberry pi, which is done
| exactly because the Bitcoin community value the ability of
| normal people to participate and be able to verify their
| transactions and that of the whole chain.
|
| Concerning scams. Let's look at another relatively open
| technology. Email.
|
| The vast majority of emails are actually spam, and a lot of
| those are scams (phishing, Nigerian princes etc.). In the
| beginning a lot of people fell for email scams, many still
| do, but by and large people are aware they exist and are able
| to use email productively without constantly falling victim
| to scams.
| boh wrote:
| Most people who have Bitcoin don't spend it, only trade it.
| If you're only trading it, then your only interaction with
| Bitcoin is via exchanges. A handful of exchanges control
| most of the trades.
| WinstonSmith84 wrote:
| the ecosystem from 12 years ago is radically different from
| what it is now. Heck, it's radically different from what it
| was just 2 or 3 years ago.
|
| And well, it benefits (smart) ordinary people. That is, those
| who have invested or are investing. Smart money is here - and
| small investors are here too. And I'm saying purposefully
| "investing" as opposed to "trading". The former doesn't
| require any technical skills.
|
| As for "ordinary people" not versed into technologies doing
| what their government is telling them to do (bans, warnings,
| hackers, criminals, murderers, ...), well... I'm feeling
| sorry for them, but crypto cannot just replace local country
| currencies without government consent. Now think again: who
| is to blame?
| boh wrote:
| Yeah 12 years ago people actually thought they'd be using
| Bitcoin as it was intended: as a currency. Now most people
| know better than to do anything but trade it.
| WinstonSmith84 wrote:
| oh come on. - defi? - Twitter introducing tips in crypto?
| ..
|
| personally speaking I'm paying every day with a crypto
| card (which gives me a few % cashback ..). But that's ok,
| you seem to purposefully want to miss the train, can't
| help people against themselves I guess :shrug:
| boh wrote:
| For the past year your train cost you <$1<$4 for every
| dollar you spent.
| imtringued wrote:
| You do know you're missing the train by spending your
| crypto?
| shashasha2 wrote:
| Spending does not prevent stacking... The more you spend
| sats, the less you need Fiat...
|
| Also velocity will get rid of volatility !
| boh wrote:
| And value. One of the reasons Bitcoin is so expensive is
| bcs most of it isn't being traded. If people actually
| start using it and loosen the supply, value goes down.
| imtringued wrote:
| It's designed to be harder than gold. When there is a
| shortage of gold people starting mining it. With Bitcoin
| there is always a shortage of money. I don't know why
| people think expensive money is good money. It really
| isn't.
| CynicusRex wrote:
| You need to buy crypto"currencies" to get into NFTs as far as I
| know; there's no conflating.
| dpedu wrote:
| > Bitcoin is open source, the original founder is nowhere to be
| found, there were no VCs involved in its creation or in the
| distribution of the coins and the entire network is run out in
| the open. The Bitcoin network is a commons.
|
| Hmmm. You've conveniently danced around any suggestion or
| mention of the fact that the "creator" of bitcoin mined 1.1
| million - 1/20th of all bitcoins that will ever exist(!) -
| coins in private before launching bitcoin publicly and holds
| them to this day.
| jcbrand wrote:
| Those coins have never moved in all these years. You would
| think that Satoshi would want to spend and enjoy some of his
| riches right? To me this points towards Satoshi likely being
| dead (e.g. him being Hal Finney).
|
| Also, AFAIK those were mined because Satoshi was the first
| miner, not because he purposefully kept it private in order
| to get the most for himself before anyone else could
| participate.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| Satoshi isn't Hal, and please stop suggesting it is. You
| put Hal's family in danger with this nonsense.
| dpedu wrote:
| Some of those coins moved in the last year or so [1]. Just
| because they haven't moved for a long time doesn't mean
| they won't tomorrow.
|
| 1. https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/satoshi-is-
| that...
| jcbrand wrote:
| Those are coins from 2010, not 2009 when Satoshi started
| mining and they're not from the same addresses.
| rssoconnor wrote:
| This isn't true. The genesis block references a Times
| headline published on Jan 3rd 2009, so that block was created
| no earlier than that. The source code was published and
| publicly available on Jan 9th 2009, which is 6 days later.
| Blocks were mined much slower than the target of every 10
| minutes in the beginning. Block number 17 was mined on Jan
| 10th 2009. At 50 bitcoins per block we are talking at most
| 850 bitcoin or so mined "in private" before launching
| bitcoin.
| dpedu wrote:
| https://whale-alert.medium.com/the-satoshi-
| fortune-e49cf73f9...
| rssoconnor wrote:
| Even if that analysis were accurate, that isn't mining
| "in private" before "publicly launching" as you claimed.
| dpedu wrote:
| That's fair, my memory was incorrect. However, I don't
| think that makes a difference w.r.t. calling the coin
| premined.
| leppr wrote:
| As far as we know Satoshi himself was rather selfless. The
| Patoshi[1] miner suggests he actually calibrated his own
| mining to foster the network's health and decentralization in
| its early days, in detriment of his own output.
|
| I'm absolutely on board to criticize the amazing amount of
| grifters in crypto. But letting this corrupt the image of the
| few people like Satoshi (and Vitalik Buterin and many others
| basically absent from the media), who willingly strayed from
| the opportunity to be among the richest individuals in the
| world, in order to instead focus on building something they
| think can better humanity, is not right. You don't need to
| look far to find the real grifters, they're showing ads in US
| media and paying millions to celebrities for product
| endorsements right now.
|
| [1]: https://bitslog.com/2020/06/22/a-new-mystery-in-patoshi-
| time...
| toomim wrote:
| And he never spent them. It's the most selfless act I've
| witnessed in my life.
| flipbrad wrote:
| Might not be especially hard to use them as collateral for
| a loan, though. Live like a king and then eventually sell
| them, repaying the loan from the (now rather generous)
| proceeds.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| This absolutely is not the case, as any collateralize
| loans require you to transfer custody to a 3rd party
| making the loan.
|
| Otherwise, you could just steal the coins straight after
| handing over the private keys. And even if that wasn't
| the case, the loaner will want exclusive control and move
| them to another key they control anyway.
|
| If it was a loan, you would have blockchain records of
| movement of Satoshi coins. This can be proven not to be
| the case, and so we can be quite confident there was no
| loans to Satoshi.
| mdoms wrote:
| Because he's dead.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| > the insistence that cryptocurrency is a boon for all of
| humanity quickly collapses into the assertion that it will become
| one
|
| This one annoys me in tech discussions all across the board.
| Someone justifies some piece of tech as good, others give counter
| evidence, and then the proponents say that it doesn't actually
| matter because it will be true _some day._ Social media is
| healthier than other media (well, it could be). Self driving cars
| are safer (well, they will be). Crypto is better for the people
| (well, it could be). Or my favorite, seen this morning in another
| thread: bitcoin isn 't bad for the environment (well, it could be
| better, therefore it's fine).
| cratermoon wrote:
| How long before Amazon starts paying their workers in a
| BezosBucks cryptocurrency that can only be redeemed at the Amazon
| company store? https://jacobinmag.com/2021/07/amazon-warehouse-
| communities-...
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Good god what is with their obsession with scrip? Scrip
| payments have already been banned and it wasn't even a winning
| strategy for its users! You might as well raise concerns about
| the Kaiser going militant or the Shogun holding a coup in
| Japan.
|
| I am seriously sick of people writing execrable impromptu
| science fiction and presenting it as reality.
| boh wrote:
| https://youtu.be/CPW3YikDwEM
| useful wrote:
| Selling a future that hasn't happened is fine. If you saw the
| initial version of the internet or a cell phone you'd likely
| dismiss them.
|
| Crypto is rebuilding the same things that already exist but that
| process has the chance to remove people from a system who used to
| provide services and replace them with an algorithm. Most people
| would dimiss a NFT but some of the use cases could be great. If
| most laws/rules were enforced in code for business transactions
| would you need to spend as much money on a lawyer in your
| lifetime? That's the future of money and it's exciting. Will that
| happen? Maybe not, which is why it is speculative.
|
| The problem is that a large majority of people who are
| speculative and most crypto assets are highly centralized, which
| defeat the point of decentralization to remove a few large actors
| from having control. Plus the scams and idiots in the space that
| income without labor always attracts.
| rchaud wrote:
| This is all pie-in-the-sky theory that has already been used
| unsuccessfully to exhort the merits of cryptocurrency. Where is
| the evidence of any of these benefits in practice? Crypto has
| been around for over a decade, yet its only uses post-Silk Road
| have been for ransomware and NFTs.
|
| The Internet changed how we communicated and shopped in well
| under 10 years, and in an era when 56kbps modems were a luxury,
| and nobody had a computer in their pocket. There is no
| comparison between the two, much as crypto-maximalists would
| like for there to be.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| Cryptocurrency has even become _less_ useful as time has gone
| on. The utility of the internet and smartphones was
| immediately apparent. Cryptocurrency fans are always reaching
| for that analogy, but it 's fundamentally flawed.
| useful wrote:
| I'd argue that BBS and compuserve/aol were in the 80s. It
| took 30 years before everyone had a computer in their pocket
| and Amazon took off.
|
| A debit card is similar to crypto. Is a debit card any
| different than cash for an end user? Did it cause big changes
| in banking? I can show you my account balance with a debit
| card. It may convince you I have the assets to buy whatever
| you are selling. I can bring a debit card to another country
| and exchange it to local currency. The merchant is passing on
| the 2-5% fee to you so that you can use a debit card. There
| is a huge organization of people behind that debit card.
| rchaud wrote:
| Amazon took off well before the smartphone era. Bezos was
| Time Magazine's Person of the Year in 1999.
|
| I don't understand what you mean re: debit cards. Is it
| that the transaction processing fee is passed on to the
| customer? That is already well understood. The issue is
| that crypto is nowhere near to matching VISA/MC's per-
| transaction cost.
| useful wrote:
| My point was that you need less people for a transaction
| to happen.
|
| The cost will go down over time.
| rchaud wrote:
| > The cost will go down over time.
|
| And the number of transactions will increase over time,
| adding to the cost. So what does it net out to?
|
| It doesn't look favourable when the bloated payment
| behemoth can get by charging 2-5%, but crypto transfer
| fees end up being significantly higher, and prone to
| surge pricing if too many people are buying Cryptokitties
| at the same time.
| useful wrote:
| The prices on layer 2 like lightning and polygon/matic
| are pretty reasonable right now. I don't think its far
| fetched to say that the network capacity will increase
| with adoption.
|
| I only have a hobby interest in crypto, but even etherum
| is planning on having side chains that operate
| independantly.
|
| To me, crypto's biggest risk is a lack of
| decentralization. The bitcoin network basically votes to
| adopt bitcoin changes but the etherum developers can
| force changes on the etherum network. Whats the point of
| proof of stake if most of the coins are owned by the
| original developers? Ala Chia. Why not just run a sql
| database if 51% of the network is owned by a
| person/entity or a few. Bitcoin is pretty decentralized
| in ownership unlike every other coin attempting to be a
| currency but pooling in bitcoin has put too much
| hashpower into the hands of a few.
|
| Without wide adoption, crypto is not decentralized. There
| is little point if the various networks retain their
| oligopoly.
| mypastself wrote:
| Wouldn't most laws need a real-world source of truth and
| arbitration external to the network? It seems like a lot of
| work just to arrive at what is essentially centralization once
| again.
|
| And the people who might have initially dismissed the early
| internet would likely have not understood it. A lot of NFT
| detractors are plenty tech-savvy.
| useful wrote:
| Any time you deal with physicals things? Yep.
|
| I wouldn't need a lawyer if a digital contract enforced a 2%
| commission paid to a wallet address.
|
| I would need a lawyer if all transactions weren't paid into
| that wallet address.
|
| If I use software to play a song and it uses an NFT to make a
| payment to the owner. I theoretically cut out a lot of
| middlemen whos value is making sure the correct people are
| paid. There are tons of edge cases where anyone can argue
| that this wouldn't work but I think that the system only has
| to meet a bar where it is potentially better than what we
| have now.
| tomp wrote:
| You mainly spend money on lawyers when things go wrong (or in
| anticipation of things going wrong).
|
| In crypto, when things go wrong they just fork the blockchain.
| YOLO
| sneak wrote:
| We are currently transitioning from the part where they laugh at
| you, to the part where they fight you.
| ttyprintk wrote:
| The article mentions launderers and dirty tricksters, who we
| haven't collectively stopped laughing at, yet to effectively
| fight.
| zaphar wrote:
| Nah, I'm still in the bemused stage. They may actually succeed
| in making crypto a normal thing adopted by society. At which
| point I'll transition to my usual next stage. Being resigned to
| yet another bad technology solution to what is fundamentally a
| people problem.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| > Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of
| getting richer
|
| An amazingly succinct title. Absolutely true. Whenever someone
| hypes up cryptocurrency, it is almost always for their personal
| gain, directly or indirectly.
| bitcoin_anon wrote:
| https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
|
| What was Satoshi lying about? What has he done with his riches?
|
| > The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout
| for banks
|
| This is not the motivation of someone trying to get richer.
| It's someone who cares deeply about humanity.
|
| Is it so hard to believe that there are others in the space
| with similar motivations?
| SwimSwimHungry wrote:
| Who cares what Satoshi said back then. What Bitcoin has
| become _now_ is a complete sham with early adopters stoking
| the flames of FOMO to get rich quick at the expense of
| everyone else.
|
| I wish cryptocurrency fans would stop smelling their own
| farts for once and realize they aren't the absolute geniuses
| in finance that they claim to be. It's arrogant.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| And I wish cryptocurrency detractors would stop lick state
| boot, calling for bans and throwing out stupid arguments
| like energy usage.
|
| While many in the coin space are arrogant from ignorance, I
| would argue that the detractors are universally arrogant
| with their ignorance.
|
| Bitcoin people are trying to decentralize the world. Make
| the powerful less powerful. Free humanity from debt
| economies, inflation, weak fiscal policy and the slow theft
| of fruits of your labor.
|
| AntiBitcoin people are trying to centralize the world.
| Empower the already powerful. Stamp that boot onto the face
| of humanity forever. Ensure that the state can always rob
| its people of their savings and lifes work, and force
| compliance with weak fiscal policy, negative interest
| rates.
|
| I think I know which is on the correct side of history.
| imtringued wrote:
| >Bitcoin people are trying to decentralize the world.
| Make the powerful less powerful. Free humanity from debt
| economies, inflation, weak fiscal policy and the slow
| theft of fruits of your labor.
|
| I have looked at lots of potential money systems and I'd
| say most cryptocurrencies fall into the usual deflation
| speculation death that lots of government currencies
| (especially during the gold standard) have fallen victim
| to.
|
| In fact, most currencies are heading down that route. The
| euro and yen are prime examples. It's kind of funny how
| people shout about inflation the most when it's been
| super low for a long time. They complain about inflation
| when their real problem is that they have no bargaining
| power because inflation target policies are also supposed
| to inflate wages. Bitcoin also doesn't solve the rentier
| problem with land. If your purchasing power magically
| increases with Bitcoin then the land owner just gets more
| of your money.
|
| I am really tired of the anti debt crap. The only reason
| people would be against debt is that there are crazy
| people who are out of touch with reality who insist on
| permanent positive interest rates. Just think about the
| absurdity of hating debt when interest rates are
| negative. It's simply illogical.
|
| >AntiBitcoin people are trying to centralize the world.
| Empower the already powerful.
|
| Deflation is empowering the rich. That's what positive
| real interest rates do. If you have a lot of Bitcoin and
| Bitcoin goes up in value then you get more gains than a
| poor person with very few Bitcoin. Inflation and negative
| interest rates hurt those who are rich the most and hurt
| those who have very little the least.
|
| >Stamp that boot onto the face of humanity forever.
|
| Is this supposed to be some kind of joke?
|
| >Ensure that the state can always rob its people of their
| savings and lifes work, and force compliance with weak
| fiscal policy, negative interest rates.
|
| Savings are literally just a reduction in demand for
| labor. Reducing your demand for labor doesn't make anyone
| wealthier by itself. It's only because there are other
| people who want that labor that saving even earns a
| return. You are basically paid to reduce your demand so
| that other, more productive people get to have the scarce
| labor. If you reduce your demand for labor and nobody
| ends up demanding the freed up labor then you basically
| worked for nothing. The entire point of inflation and
| negative interest rates are to get this fact into your
| damn head. You are piling up a bunch of potatoes that
| spoil before you eat them. Stop that.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| I fundamentally disagree with everything you have
| written, from definitions, to target of harms, to
| outcomes. I think your philosophy is dangerous and
| harmful.
|
| So, No, I will not stop that. Thank Satoshi that I don't
| need to.
|
| I choose to opt of your authoritarian and paternalistic
| philosophies. I will always convert fruits of my labor
| into hard money, where you cannot hurt me.
|
| You can't stop us (all).
| esalman wrote:
| This statement is actually quite similar to what I used to hear
| people say at a stock technical analysis class. In speculative
| financial markets, one person's loss is another person's gain.
| So almost no one is going to give you any advice that will help
| you.. more likely they're helping themselves by misdirecting
| you.
| aceazzameen wrote:
| Absolutely. And with anything that involves greed and riches.
| xutopia wrote:
| Not going to say that no one lies about it but I had to transfer
| a sizable amount of money between two banks at about the same
| time I did a transaction from my home with BTC that took all but
| 20 minutes without the need for fax machines.
|
| There are advantages to cryptocurrencies and one can very much
| want a future where currencies they would use isn't hampered by
| government.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Transferring huge amounts of money between accounts, specially
| when you own both is not a problem unless you live in the US.
| For most of Europe, Asia and even latin america this problem
| has been solved almost two decades ago. Around the same time
| the banks on those countries retired their fax machines.
| xutopia wrote:
| I live in Canada and had bank accounts in France as well
| where anything above 5 figures is hard to do across
| institutions. I was able to move 50k in 10 minutes in BTC
| when 25k CAD was tough to send and required days of wait time
| despite a certified cheque I paid extra for.
| [deleted]
| superkuh wrote:
| > Neither, strictly speaking, is anything that a normal person
| would really need to know or care about unless that normal person
| is the victim of a ransomware scam, or wants to buy drugs on the
| internet...
|
| Ah right... because normal people never donate to journalists.
| Never pay for online subscriptions, never buy hardware off
| newegg. Just because the author has no exerience using
| cryptocurrency he assumes everyone is like him and repeats the
| FUD.
| ahoy wrote:
| Normal people do not have, use, or understand cryptocurrencies.
| If you think they do all that means is you live in a very
| specific bubble.
| EliRivers wrote:
| Normal people do all that with money and credit cards and debit
| cards and bank transfers, which works faster and better and are
| much easier to use and much more convenient. The existing
| framework is a much better way to do all the things you
| mentioned. What do you have for which the existing framework
| _isn 't_ better, and how often do "normal" people do that?
| pjc50 wrote:
| > never donate to journalists
|
| Not really, unless you count patreon.
|
| > Never pay for online subscriptions, never buy hardware off
| newegg
|
| Credit cards or paypal. Both of which have a better refund
| system.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| It's pretty clear from the article that the author thinks markets
| are intrinsically bad, most entrepreneurs and founders are
| generally bad, and that economic activity is generally better
| coordinated and controlled by the state. And it's pretty clear
| from the upvotes and comments that many here agree with this
| viewpoint.
|
| And that's fine. That's a completely defensible world view, that
| many smarter than me have held throughout history. But for
| heavens sake why are you spending your time on a forum about
| celebrating startups hosted by a venture capitalist?
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| It's only "bad" if you believe in democracy and equality.
| Markets are great for those who benefit from them. I just don't
| see cryptos benefiting the majority of mankind. They pretty
| much reinforce or retain existing power structures.
| mettamage wrote:
| I feel the IPFS blog post gave me a glimpse of how blockchain can
| be cool. In certain cases, the need for decentralization is so
| strong that it makes sense to build a blockchain system for it
| (or other secure P2P network thingy).
|
| For example, authentication/identity using blockchain technology
| seems interesting to me.
|
| [1] https://blog.ipfs.io/decentralizing-the-internet-s-root/
| cryptica wrote:
| Authentication using the blockchain makes a great AI-resistant
| alternative to signups with captcha. The same account could be
| used by multiple independent services and this removes the need
| for a signup process altogether. It also removes the need for
| password management since you can use a single
| account/passphrase to log into various services without
| revealing your passphrase to any of these services; you can
| simply sign a message to prove to any service that you control
| an account (and know the passphrase) without actually revealing
| the passphrase to any of the third party services.
| mminer237 wrote:
| Wouldn't that make it impossible to change your password if
| compromised?
| krageon wrote:
| This post is talking about what is essentially a signing
| setup. If your private key is stolen in such a setup, the
| person who steals the key becomes you.
|
| Essentially yes :)
| cryptica wrote:
| Yes but it also makes it a LOT less likely that your
| passphrase would be compromised because it is never sent to
| any service over the wire; with blockchain signatures, your
| passphrase never needs to leave your own machine. So the
| service providers you log into never have any opportunity
| to even see your passphrase; they only see your signatures
| which proves that you know the passphrase. You could use a
| different program for signing login messages so that you
| don't even need to insert your passphrase inside third
| party UIs. You'd use one trusted program of your choice to
| handle logins for all the different services; just copy
| paste the signature into the different services.
|
| There are some stateful blockchains which allow changing
| the passphrase but of course there is no 'forgot my
| password' feature; a malicious actor who manages to steal
| your passphrase could potentially use it to change your
| passphrase and lock you out of your account but at least
| you don't have to live in doubt if you suspect that your
| passphrase was compromised.
|
| The idea behind the blockchain auth approach is that you
| would only need one passphrase for all services but you
| would have to secure it carefully since losing it would
| cause you to be locked out of all services associated with
| that account.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| If someone does steal your identity in this way, there's
| no way of getting it back. You can't appeal to any
| authority, because there's no authority to appeal to in a
| decentralised system. You literally have to start again
| and create a new identity.
|
| So you're gambling bigger: less likely to have your
| identity stolen, but complete loss of everything to do
| with that identity, with no recourse, if it is stolen.
|
| I'm not sure I like those odds.
| kibbleble wrote:
| It can't be much worse than relatives claiming you as
| dead so they can have your house, and then every
| government system denies you any service because you're
| "dead"
| hervature wrote:
| As the saying goes: not your keys not your wallet. This is
| the fundamental issue with the anonymity. You can prove you
| have access, but you cannot prove it belongs to you. The
| centralized/decentralized conversation often doesn't touch
| this aspect. When it comes to ownership, at some level,
| there needs to be a central power to enforce it as
| ownership is in itself a vague concept.
| hanniabu wrote:
| The path forward are contact wallets and dead man
| switches
| hervature wrote:
| Ah, so then possession becomes ten-tenths of the law. I'm
| not sure this is a system that we want. A system that
| allows for every day trading (buying something at a
| store) that requires a second piece of equipment to
| verify your identity that, if someone steals, there is no
| means of recourse. Sure, multiple wallets, something
| something, but this just sounds like a nightmare of
| record keeping where you offload a single point of
| failure to somewhere else (password manager to remember
| all your wallets).
| swlkr wrote:
| You could store that second piece of equipment on your
| person, like an ultraviolet invisible ink qr code tattoo
| on your right hand or your forehead since no one can see
| it except under a black light.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > The same account could be used by multiple independent
| services and this removes the need for a signup process
| altogether.
|
| This is only marginally better than SSO with
| Google/Apple/Facebook/whatever. It dodges the "Google closed
| my account" problem, which is a meaningful improvement. But
| I'm not fully certain why you need the public key to be part
| of a blockchain for this to work. Couldn't you just publish
| your public key identity on any number of considerably less
| wasteful systems? As far as I can tell, the only advantage
| here is the mapping between the name "UncleMeat" and my
| public key would be able to be reused across services... but
| in so many cases I don't want my identity to be consistent
| across services.
| cryptica wrote:
| - Resistant to centralized censorship (as you pointed out)
|
| - It allows you to use the same passphrase for all services
| without compromising security since your passphrase never
| needs to leave your own machine; it is never sent over the
| wire. You just send signatures to different services.
|
| - The cost associated with purchasing tokens needed to
| initialize an account on the blockchain would serve as a
| spam prevention mechanism; an alternative to SIM cards
| which most centralized services rely on today as a cost
| barrier to limit the creation of spam accounts.
|
| - Superior integration potential between different
| services/systems provided by different companies/groups
| since they can all refer to the exact same account on the
| same blockchain and provide new ways to unify data between
| the different services.
| noctune wrote:
| > - The cost associated with purchasing tokens needed to
| initialize an account on the blockchain would serve as a
| spam prevention mechanism; an alternative to SIM cards
| which most centralized services rely on today as a cost
| barrier to limit the creation of spam accounts.
|
| Doesn't seem like that to me. If I get banned I can just
| move my cash to another account and start again, and
| assuming multiple services does this I can amortize the
| cost over all of them.
|
| The rest seems to me like something mTLS could solve
| better.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > Resistant to centralized censorship (as you pointed
| out)
|
| I'd wager that most people don't care about this much,
| though it is real. Still, this can be achieved with
| signature-based authentication that doesn't require the
| tremendous waste of BTC. Just... tell the service your
| public key and sign a message when you sign up. Your key
| pair doesn't need to be associated with some distributed
| system for that to work. This has been around for decades
| and not exactly caught on.
|
| > It allows you to use the same passphrase for all
| services without compromising security since your
| passphrase never needs to leave your own machine; it is
| never sent over the wire. You just send signatures to
| different services.
|
| This is true for all signature-based authentication,
| which does not necessitate a blockchain.
|
| > The cost associated with purchasing tokens needed to
| initialize an account on the blockchain would serve as a
| spam prevention mechanism; an alternative to SIM cards
| which most centralized services rely on today to limit
| the creation of spam accounts.
|
| This sounds like an anti-feature to me. Especially since
| it'd be foolish for a service to _only_ support
| authentication via a blockchain. Imagine telling my
| grandmother that she needed to buy some btc in order to
| sign up for the service that hosted my wedding photos.
| cryptica wrote:
| >> This sounds like an anti-feature to me. Especially
| since it'd be foolish for a service to only support
| authentication via a blockchain. Imagine telling my
| grandmother that she needed to buy some btc in order to
| sign up for the service that hosted my wedding photos.
|
| This is different because your grandma would have to buy
| the tokens once and signup once and she will have access
| not only to the 'wedding photo service' but a large
| number of other services. It's more like paying a small
| amount of money to get access to an ecosystem of
| services. Like how people pay money to buy an iPhone and
| this gives them access to the Apple App Store and all the
| apps therein.
|
| There will also be network effects associated with the
| blockchain price going up with adoption. People who
| signed up early to the right blockchains will have
| priority access to certain software ecosystems and
| exclusive services which are only accessible to the
| richest among them (for example).
| WJW wrote:
| > People who signed up early to the right blockchains
| will have priority access to certain software ecosystems
| and exclusive services which are only accessible to the
| richest among them (for example).
|
| This seems even more like an anti-feature TBH. Imagine
| not being allowed to use the future equivalent of basic
| services because you were not "early enough". Sorry
| grandma, no wedding photos for you because you didn't buy
| these specific three coins out of the thousands started
| every month.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > People who signed up early to the right blockchains
| will have priority access to certain software ecosystems
| and exclusive services which are only accessible to the
| richest among them (for example).
|
| I cannot possibly imagine a world where services will
| choose to only permit authentication via some expensive
| blockchain such that they deny themselves access to
| markets outside of the global rich.
|
| And telling my grandma "don't worry, the coins you don't
| understand will go up in price" is not going to help.
|
| This is the core question: why is signature-based
| authentication using public keys associated with BTC
| wallets superior to signature-based authentication using
| public keys not associated with BTC wallets? As far as I
| can tell, the only benefit here is that now my identity
| on my photo sharing service can be linked to my identity
| on my wine rating service. Why do I want that?
| wyager wrote:
| The only two known usage of blockchain that actually seem to
| offer a clear advantage over some other strategy (running the
| thing centralized, not having coordination at all, etc) are A)
| solving double spend (a la Bitcoin) B) solving zooko's triangle
| (a la Namecoin, or the clone you mentioned from ipfs).
|
| Identity on blockchain beyond resolving zooko's triangle (I.e.
| stably mapping pseudonyms to pubkeys) typically does not offer
| an advantage over (partially) centralized identity providers.
| E.g. putting anything related to government ID on a blockchain
| is pointless because you might as well have the ID issuer run a
| central or federated service.
| cryptica wrote:
| I think this is an accurate assessment but I think
| authentication and account management should be seen as
| separate from 'identity'. Authentication can be useful
| without being associated with a real-world identity; for
| example, it can be useful for spam-prevention as an
| alternative to signups with captcha. You could theoretically
| log into multiple services which you don't trust by signing
| messages using your private key without revealing your
| passphrase to any of those services.
| karpierz wrote:
| Why does Bitcoin have a clear advantage in solving double
| spend over a centralized solution?
| mcherm wrote:
| It does not.
|
| Bitcoin (and it's successors) are a decentralized solution
| to the double spend problem. If "decentralized" is a
| requirement, then a cryptocurrency can be an excellent
| solution. Other known solutions (like "just trust
| everyone") don't scale well (an understatement!).
|
| If "decentralized" is not a requirement then there are
| other solutions to the double-spend problem.
| mdoms wrote:
| So it's your contention that the current traditional
| financial system "don't scale well (an understatement!)"?
| snarf21 wrote:
| Because the trust is distributed. One single person can't
| cause the entire system to break down or steal all them
| money. With blockchain coins, the incentives are aligned.
| The weird thing that happened with BTC that I don't think
| Satoshi could forsee is that the more valuable it got, the
| less usable it got. This is one of the unsolved issues: how
| to create decentralized consensus very very quickly that
| can't also be attacked via a PoW that is too easy.
| ironSkillet wrote:
| Do you know of any lines of research that are out to
| prove mathematically that it is impossible to have these
| desirable characteristics simultaneously? I.e. any
| improvement in consensus efficiency necessarily gives up
| some amount of decentralization, appropriately defined.
| fidesomnes wrote:
| translation "I demand this random HN user show me how it
| is this is done because I am not going to use a search
| engine to find it out for myself."
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| This is the sort of thing that really needs to be
| questioned.
|
| 1. How much security do we need for this transaction?
|
| 2. For this block of transactions?
|
| 3. Can we have varying levels of security?
|
| What we are ultimately trying to know is, is it
| profitable to double spend? If the answer is yes, then no
| one should be transacting, and anything they do transact
| is a gamble. If the answer is no, there's much less risk,
| and the farther the answer is no, the safer the
| transaction.
|
| But we likely don't need as much security as we do now.
| In fact, it's very easy to handle at a user level.
|
| A. Put the transaction on the blockchain.
|
| B. Wait for additional blocks.
|
| C. If your transaction is huge, wait for more additional
| blocks. Wait a week, a month. This is an important
| transaction. When the blockchain has not reverted for
| such a long time, finally do the transaction in the real
| world.
|
| If you are transacting with yourself, you don't need any
| security at all. If you are transacting with a bar and
| the bar knows you, much like a tab, you don't need much
| security. If you are transacting with an anonymous
| person, you want high security.
|
| So security is currently handled on a blockchain by
| blockchain basis, where it should be a transaction by
| transaction basis. What if you can't wait a month? Then
| you should put heavy fees on that transaction and it
| should be put in with other higher fee transactions.
|
| 4. How does security change with transaction size? Does
| it make sense to have limits?
|
| 5. How does security change with total transaction block
| size? Does it make sense to have limits?
|
| 6. When the coin price goes up, how does that change
| these factors?
|
| 7. When the mining reward in coins drops, how does that
| affect security?
|
| 8. When Bitcoin, in 100 years, moves to 100% transaction
| fee system, what happens to security? What would the
| transactions fees look like?
|
| 9. In 50 years when the block reward has been halved 5
| times, either the price of Bitcoin moves to $1 million,
| or the security drops. Is that okay?
| mminer237 wrote:
| I don't trust the collective anonymous users of Bitcoin
| more than I trust my bank and the court system though.
|
| If someone hacks into my account, my bank will likely
| reimburse me for any losses. There are controls in place
| to stop them from stealing it al. If someone just
| transferred it to their own account, I could use the
| courts to get it back. If I use a credit card to pay a
| scam, I can do a charge-back.
|
| With cryptocurrencies, it's just "bye money". They're not
| going to fork for you. There's no logic to stop people in
| Russia transferring my entire account. It's too hard to
| find criminals to get any relief. It's just your fault
| for using cryptocurrencies and not having 100% perfect
| security.
|
| Not to mention, the chance of my bank stealing all my
| money is nil. They'd be sued and arrested, and the FDIC
| would reimburse me anyway.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| I don't think this is the kind of "trust" that is
| relevant in the prevention of double-spending.
| shawnz wrote:
| > There are controls in place to stop them from stealing
| it al. If someone just transferred it to their own
| account, I could use the courts to get it back.
|
| What if it's taken thorough wrongful civil forfeiture?
| Will you be able to afford to navigate the courts to get
| your assets back after they've been seized?
| WJW wrote:
| Not always, but wrongful civil forfeiture is just one of
| many possible ways to steal. In other cases using the
| court system will be possible. With bitcoin, it is never
| possible.
| shawnz wrote:
| So if you think the risk of permanently losing your
| assets via legal channels is, let's say, 99-to-1 compared
| to the risk of losing your assets to cryptocurrency
| attacks, then wouldn't it make sense to hold 99% of your
| assets in the bank and 1% in cryptocurrencies?
|
| Cryptocurrencies don't have to replace all existing
| financial instruments to be a useful hedge. They can just
| be one tool of many to diversify your risk profile.
|
| Especially consider that for people living outside the
| developed world, the risk of having your assets stolen
| through legal channels is going to be much higher.
| WJW wrote:
| If you think it is indeed 99-to-1, then perhaps. My
| perception of the trustworthiness of most crypto projects
| is certainly much lower (see the endless parade of crypto
| horror stories on
| https://www.reddit.com/r/SorryForYourLoss/), so
| personally I would think the odds of a crypto project
| going under or just simply losing my wallet keys is way
| higher than the chance my bank or my government will
| steal my money or my stocks or whatever. Then again, I do
| live in western Europe so YMMV if you live in Venezuela
| or someplace like that.
| superflit2 wrote:
| Well on the 2008 Crash your ""acount"" was robbed and if
| you live in US you did not get your money back.
|
| You had to cover the "too big to fail" system.
|
| On btc no.
| gota wrote:
| > One single person can't cause the entire system to
| break down or steal all them money.
|
| Funny - I have never seen someone in the traditional
| financing system do that and not get caught. Closest
| things were ponzi schemes like Madoff (and he did get
| caught)
|
| I have, however, heard of dozens of exactly this incident
| happening with cryptocoin exchanges (wallets, services,
| the most general term for all combined slipped my mind)
| wyager wrote:
| If you're fine with all the downsides of trusting you bank,
| the bank's central bank and currency issued, the bank's
| government, etc then that obviously makes Bitcoin less
| appealing for you. Remaining upside includes reduced
| friction for things like international settlement. Don't
| tell me that international settlement is easy with
| traditional banks - I am a financial system power user and
| it is not.
| krageon wrote:
| > centralized
|
| If you want to trust a conglomerate of folks who have a
| vested interest in keeping you small and poor to solve your
| problems, then there is no advantage. If you do not, then
| the advantage is exactly that it is not centralised.
| acomms wrote:
| Why are you so convinced that cryptocurrency solves the
| "outside forces much larger and more powerful than me
| have influence over the system" problem? It exchanged a
| solution to some problems for a new set of problems to be
| solved.
| krageon wrote:
| You are questioning what I'm saying by telling me
| something incredibly vague. I'm afraid I just don't know
| what to do with your question.
| secondaryacct wrote:
| I can rephrase it: why do you think it impossible for
| vastly resourceful entities to acquire so much power they
| can control the decentralized system - in a softer way,
| probably but still.
|
| Imagine a world tmr where bitcoin is everywhere. You ll
| have mining conglomerates in the cheapest electricity
| providers working as cartels to help each other and
| protect their interests (so can envision centralizing a
| blacklist of addresses they dislike, coordination on
| software version etc), de facto cartels of whales (like
| todays "billionaires" people describe as a collaborative
| force), and large lenders who concentrate capital and
| therefore still can buy out whatever they want (today
| called banks).
|
| How do you think the blockchain solve any of that?
| imtringued wrote:
| What keeps people small and poor is the insistence that
| people should save in monetary terms.
|
| It's not rocket science. When you keep your wealth in
| monetary terms, you don't get to have it in physical
| terms. Money represents how much real wealth you could
| have if you spent it. It's deferred consumption. There is
| no real wealth in something that didn't happen.
| xtat wrote:
| What this article does is let me take a mental not to take
| anything too seriously from this source that pops up in the
| future.
| 99_00 wrote:
| New technology often goes through a phase of wild speculation,
| touting by liars, and impractical business models that people
| throw money because they are afraid of missing out. The bubble
| eventually pops. But people keep improving the tech and it
| becomes practical and eats the world.
|
| First there was Railroad Mania
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania
|
| After the initial bubble, rail roads changed the world
|
| First there was the dot-com bubble, and then internet changed the
| world.
|
| Both sides can be right in this debate. Crypto can be a bubble
| and a scam and it can also change the world.
| cromulent wrote:
| This is true. Although the examples you give show survivorship
| bias. There are many new things, fads and scams that simply
| fade away.
|
| I don't think that Bitcoin will be a thing in 100 years, but
| blockchain will still exist in some useful format. Not in the
| way that it is pushed by some of its proponents though.
| Geee wrote:
| Bitcoin has nothing to do with all these scams like NFTs and
| "internet computers" like Ethereum, which are pushed by tech
| gurus, influencers and marketers. It's time to stop conflating
| these under the same umbrella. Bitcoiners are not the same people
| who push these useless things.
| DanHulton wrote:
| Absolutely correct. Bitcoin isn't the domain of NFT grifters,
| it's the domain of ransomware hostage-takers.
|
| We need to be accurate when discussing the various scams
| proposed.
| Geee wrote:
| That's not even remotely true.
| SwimSwimHungry wrote:
| What do you mean? Of course it is. How else has ransomware
| been able to thrive as of late?
|
| The sooner governments abolish fiat to cryptocurrency
| exchanges and make such transactions illegal, the sooner
| this clown car of sadness will come to an end.
|
| As much as I'm not a fan of China and the CCP, they are
| making some good moves in this department recently to
| eliminate unneeded capital flight. The US should follow in
| their steps here.
| roenxi wrote:
| Someone sees cryptocurrency as exactly what it is, and at some
| point in the future we will know who.
|
| But in the interim, lets not compare crypto to some utopian world
| that doesn't actually exist. In the current world which we
| inhabit, the many major currencies are either controlled or
| heavily influenced by people who:
|
| 1) Believe prices constantly rising is good for poor people.
|
| 2) Advocate that governments can spend potentially an infinite
| amount without consequences because they control a printing
| press. And looking at the actions of, e.g. the US government, it
| is easy to suspect that the people who understand the nuance
| there aren't the ones in control of the money supply.
|
| In such an environment, the crypto folk are reasonable. Even if
| in a perfect world they would clearly all be scammers.
| ttyprintk wrote:
| I wish the downvotes would explain how they plan to solve these
| problems, or otherwise concede the argument of the linked
| article.
| roenxi wrote:
| I wouldn't normally comment on downvotes, but the torrent on
| this post caught me by surprise. Probably they just disagree.
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| > 1) Believe prices constantly rising is good for poor people.
|
| I mean, inflation actually does benefit poor people, _when
| wages and prices rise at the same rate._ Devaluing savings
| accounts isn 't a big deal if you don't have any savings in the
| first place. Inflation also makes debt less valuable over time,
| making it gradually easier to pay off.
|
| The real problem is that (in the US) wages have been stagnant
| for decades. That's not an issue that cryptocurrency is going
| to solve.
| pontus wrote:
| Well, there are a lot of ways of investing your money in ways
| that track or exceed inflation, so it's not like people
| without savings are doing well with inflation whereas all
| those people with savings are getting screwed.
|
| Further though, I would imagine that people who have a little
| savings but not that much, would end up keeping that in a
| savings account rather than investing it. As such, the little
| savings poor people do have would be eaten away by inflation.
|
| Also, like you suggest, wages are not rising with inflation
| so that just makes things even worse.
| imtringued wrote:
| >1) Believe prices constantly rising is good for poor people.
|
| Inflation isn't meant to cause rising prices. It's a shitty
| approximation for negative interest rates. What inflation is
| doing is letting money rust so that it is flexible enough to
| represent the real world. Logically speaking income earned in
| 2010 should be losing value because of the opportunity cost of
| not employing people. Imagine an economy with two people and
| you decide to spend your money ten years later. The other party
| has to spend 10 years unemployed. Even though you lost 10 years
| of potential employment you still insist that your money from
| 10 years ago is still worth the same amount. Inflation adds
| enough flexibility to represent this loss and makes the holder
| of money realize the loss in the real economy, which encourages
| him to minimize the loss in the real world. With deflation you
| deny its existence by making the money system rigid and
| incapable of representing this potential state of the economy.
|
| Say's law postulates that aggregate demand and supply are
| always in balance in a barter economy. Money as an intermediary
| allows short term mismatch between the two and deflation allows
| an almost permanent mismatch. Since inflation erodes past
| income any surplus is eroded which encourages people to utilize
| their surplus and let aggregate supply and demand match again.
|
| >2) Advocate that governments can spend potentially an infinite
| amount without consequences because they control a printing
| press. And looking at the actions of, e.g. the US government,
| it is easy to suspect that the people who understand the nuance
| there aren't the ones in control of the money supply.
|
| Maybe you like to think that other people think like that but
| reality is quite boring. What people have recognized is that
| the real world matters, not the financial world. If you see an
| unemployed person you can hire that person and at the end of
| the day customers are happy because that person provided goods
| and services and the worker is happy because he got paid. If
| granting credit and promising debt lets that person work, then
| it's better than trusting on some financial bean counter that
| tells you that employing people and providing goods and
| services is bad for the economy.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| The title is 100% true for much of the cryptocurrency sector, but
| the body of the article is a shameless bad-faith attempt to
| rationalize an extremely heavy handed government response that
| would criminalize entire classes of voluntary interactions
| between consenting adults, and turn the future of the internet
| into a much darker place with much more government repression.
|
| Only a deep-seated ideological precept, that idealizes the
| supremacy of the state over all aspects of the lives of private
| citizens, could motivate such a dismissively mean-spirited
| article. There isn't an even an attempt by the author to give the
| subject an objective treatment. Usually this would sit fine with
| me, as a useful counter-force to the mirror negative that exists
| in the deluge of crypto hype from profit-motivated speculators,
| but the advocacy for illiberal laws that would prohibit financial
| privacy and imprison peaceful individuals makes the article
| unconscionable.
| pcmaffey wrote:
| If you think about crypto as a MMOG, people's behaviors start to
| make a lot more sense.
| marban wrote:
| The whole NFT craze lost me when tech founders I once highly
| respected started pushing and showing off their ugly gifs and
| trading cards on Twitter.
|
| Bad taste of the bored rich is not a new thing, but I hope NFTs
| won't become a noble tradition.
| skinnyasianboi wrote:
| It's not just ugly gifs. It's digital art, your online game
| items, concert tickets, supermarket vouchers and so on.
|
| Quote from statista: "In 2020, global gaming audiences spent an
| approximate 54 billion U.S. dollars on additional in-game
| content". But the players don't own their purchases. You don't
| play the game anymore, servers go down or you get banned and
| all your stuff is gone. Think about that.
|
| Edit: Of course my comment got nothing but down votes again on
| HN. Was worth a try anyway.
| stephen_g wrote:
| But it's not. It's a token on a blockchain with some
| metadata. You'd actually need a separate legally binding
| contract to link it to actual ownership, and at that point
| you could have just made up the legal contract without any
| blockchain or token...
|
| With your example, if the game goes down, an NFT of the in-
| game purchase isn't going to be very useful. What's the
| difference between having a token or not of the content if
| there are still no servers for the game either way? Maybe the
| NFT still points to a screenshot? Great...
| skinnyasianboi wrote:
| Imagine an indie game developer creating an open-world game
| where you can use your Sims furniture, Warcraft sword,
| Stardew Valley animals and so on.
|
| I don't quite understand your first point. Edit: the NFT is
| verifiable in your wallet and comes from a verified source
| kristjansson wrote:
| Doesn't your indie developer still have to acquire both
| licenses and assets for all those items, since NFTs (a)
| don't actually convey a recognizable legal ownership or
| right of any kind and (b) impose costs proportional to
| size in bytes, and so can't effectively store the actual
| data over which they claim ownership?
| skinnyasianboi wrote:
| Good points. (b) The actual data (jpeg, mp4, 3d mobdel,
| etc) is usually stored on a system like https://ipfs.io
| and not on the NFT chain itself. (a) I think the optimal
| solution would be that it is in the interest of
| publishers to have their assets used in other projects.
| This would give them more value, and the NFT creator
| usually charges a transaction fee on their assets (every
| time something is sold on the secondary market, a
| percentage goes to the creator). Another option would be
| for the indie developer to assign these items to their
| own items. For example, AAA studio sword xy is assigned
| to indie game sword xy. Of course you can't manually
| assign zillions of NFTs, you would probably do this in
| tiers and I would imagine there would be services built
| around that. This would eliminate the IP problem as far
| as I know, and would just mean that owning NFT xy unlocks
| a feature/element in the game. This would of course be
| interesting for official collaborations between
| publishers.
| mosdl wrote:
| You listed centralized services, so even with nfts they still
| can be made useless or revoked/etc.
| skinnyasianboi wrote:
| You mean that your in game items get revoked after you got
| banned from a game? That's actually a good point. It
| wouldn't help you to sell these items on a secondary market
| except you try to scam someone. At least the items could
| still bring you value in external games/prokects.
| iscrewyou wrote:
| The problem with NFTs and blockchain is that they purport that
| anyone can have access to it...the whole decentralized thing.
|
| Except all these NFT stores require an invite from another
| artist. As someone who loves taking photos but isn't socially
| connected because it's a passion and not a job, it seems very
| elitist. Maybe it's that way because I don't have access to it
| and my brain is just playing tricks. But it seems like one of
| those "you aren't good enough for this" kind of thing. Some of
| the online stores like Foundation app have become gatekeepers
| rather than outlets.
| jcpham2 wrote:
| I have never used Twitter, I don't understand NFTs.
|
| Most of the influencers are shilling something, obviously
| TomGullen wrote:
| I must be getting old because I just don't get NFT's. They look
| stupid and I don't get why anyone would buy them. Declining
| tech companies and startups seem to be trying to crowbar them
| into their products much like Blockchain when it was new and
| shiny. Perhaps younger me would of seen something I can't
| anymore.
| SergeAx wrote:
| They don't look stupid, they are stupid outside of their
| blockchain. There's no way to force a proof of ownership
| between NFT and physical item.
| endymi0n wrote:
| I feel exactly the same way when thinking about the 90s.
| Telemetry and multimedia... two words that back then had
| exactly the same vibe to me. Both sounded as ambitious as
| ambiguous, raised millions and made zero business sense
| despite sounding glamorous and all-encompassing.
|
| The writing was on the wall when the big newspapers gave
| stock tips for consumers on the hottest newest telemetry
| startups.
|
| We all know how it went.
| k__ wrote:
| NFTs can be anything.
|
| I don't get the art focus.
|
| They can be a degree, a concert ticket, a driving license, a
| permission to a API service, equity to a company.
| TomGullen wrote:
| Permission to an API service maybe, the rest of the
| examples create more problems than they solve.
| k__ wrote:
| How come?
|
| Just think about all cases of fake liceses? This could be
| verified rather easily with an NFT while faking it would
| be quite hard.
| dkersten wrote:
| How? Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying.
|
| Since drivers licenses are linked to individuals, and
| cannot be traded, the traffic cop that's checking your
| license will need to compare it to your government issued
| ID. Then they look it up to see that its valid and linked
| to you as a person.
|
| How is doing this as an NFT (or other blockchain thing)
| any better than having a government database they look
| up?
|
| This is a big problem I have with _most_ blockchain tech:
| yes, it _can_ be built on a blockchain, but it doesn 't
| _need_ it and alternatives tend to be simpler and
| cheaper.
|
| I'm overall pro cryptocurrency and blockchain, but if we
| want people to still take it seriously in twenty years
| time, we need the use cases to actually make sense. I
| don't see how NFT's make sense here, unless I'm missing
| something.
| k__ wrote:
| To be fair, I don't know either what of the possible use-
| cases are actually good use-cases.
|
| But having a globally available, decentralized, and
| transparent database for some of these "certificats"
| could be a good thing.
| detaro wrote:
| What would you verify with an NFT? "the government
| created this NFT"? Also known as "a digital signature",
| if you leave off all the blockchain bits?
| rchaud wrote:
| So can blockchain, but the only use cases anybody has ever
| cared about are the get-rich-quick ones.
| k__ wrote:
| Yes, and that's sad. It has so much more potential.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Out of the examples you gave, degrees, driving licenses,
| and permission to an API service are not suitable for NFTs,
| since they cannot/should not be traded. Presumably we do
| not want for people to sell their driving licenses or their
| degrees.
| k__ wrote:
| The (non-) fugibility of a token is just one aspect of
| it.
|
| You can code a non-tradable NFT no problem.
|
| Tradable NFTs are just the hype right now.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > You can code a non-tradable NFT no problem.
|
| WTF does that even mean?
|
| Do people remember what a blockchain even is, at this
| point?
|
| A blockchain is a chain of transactions. You take away
| the transactions, and its not a blockchain anymore.
| Unless we _really_ stretch the definition of a
| "transaction" or blockchain......
|
| Cryptocurrency has lost the plot. People are talking
| about blockchains, that don't have mining, or
| transactions now apparently.
| cslarson wrote:
| blockchains are databases.
|
| transactions change the state of the database. they
| aren't limited to trading-related transactions.
| detaro wrote:
| Creating an NFT is a transaction.
| dkersten wrote:
| So you limit the types of transactions in your blockchain
| to _" this thing has been issued to this
| person/id/hash/whatever"_ and do not have any
| transactions of the type _" this thing has changed
| ownership to a new person/id/hash/whatever"_. A bank
| account that allows deposits but no
| withdrawals/transfers, its still a ledger, it just limits
| the operations you are allowed to do (not the operations
| you could theoretically do).
| andechs wrote:
| When a central authority is in charge of adding
| transactions to the blockchain, ie: DMV issuing licences,
| what's the advantage of blockchain over a standard
| database?
| dkersten wrote:
| Oh, I agree. See my other comment on this page, I said
| the exact thing you did! Most cases where blockchain is
| usable, alternatives are still simpler, unless you
| actually need it to be distributed and zero trust,
| blockchain probably doesn't make sense.
|
| I was just pointing out how it can be done or how it
| might make sense, if you needed it for something where
| blockchain did actually make sense, but in the case of
| drivers licenses, I don't think it does.
| k__ wrote:
| To me it's the other way around.
|
| The blockchain space is just starting out and people try
| new things. But many can only see the crypto currency
| use-case.
| rchaud wrote:
| The only implementation of NFTs I've come across that doesn't
| look like a fly-by-night operation is NBA's Top Shot, where
| you can buy video NFTs of special moments in NBA history.
|
| At the very least, you can buy a piece of IP directly from
| the IP holder, and receive a package that's nicely presented.
|
| It's still totally overpriced, but I can see at least some
| value. It still needs to go a step further technologically.
| Like a special app that allows you to view the NFT with AR
| features artificially implemented. Or displaying it in a
| holographic form, especially for moments captured with
| 360-degree cameras.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| My main complaint with Top Shot is that the moments exist
| only on the proprietary site. They also can't be traded
| anywhere but that site. This removes any value the nft
| aspect brings to the table as it's now single-point-of-
| failure.
|
| There was talk about expanding off the one site, but I
| haven't seen any progress there.
| paulgb wrote:
| > At the very least, you can buy a piece of IP directly
| from the IP holder
|
| You're not really buying the IP in any meaningful way,
| though, you just get a non-exclusive, non-transferable (!)
| right to display it. They can still air it or license it to
| others without paying you royalties.
| rchaud wrote:
| I understand that, I am likening it to purchasing a DVD
| of a game, which is something that used to happen. Maybe
| not in the NBA, but in soccer, some clubs do put out DVDs
| of famous victories.
|
| And even then, I'd say those mass-manufactured DVDs with
| 90 mins of content are intrinsically more valuable than a
| GIF-length video clip.
| paulgb wrote:
| Ah, I think we agree then. I guess someone could make the
| argument that even though the license to reproduce is
| limited (e.g. it must be non-commercial), you technically
| have more IP rights with a TopShots NFT than with a DVD.
| But yeah, I'd take the DVD myself (if I still owned a
| player).
| Jxl180 wrote:
| TopShot is nice and I made some money on it -- but it only
| takes fiat currency and can't be sent to my cold storage or
| transferred off the marketplace. Nothing about it is in the
| spirit of an NFT or anything decentralized.
| newbie789 wrote:
| It's a made up class of asset that's entirely made for money
| laundering. That's it, now you're an expert in NFTs.
| 21eleven wrote:
| The thing about NFTs is that many people who buy them "don't
| get NFTs".
|
| All an NFT is is a token that represents ownership, like if
| the title to your car or house deed was on a blockchain.
|
| NFTs have some sane use causes like designating the owner of
| a valuable asset or creating electronic tickets that can be
| resold or transferred without some centralized entity like
| ticketmaster.
|
| Prior to NFTs existing, would you purchase the ownership
| rights to a gif or tweet? Probably not. And that is what is
| dumb about the excitement around NFTs, some people with more
| money than sense seem to think that now that you can
| represent ownership on a blockchain some things, like crappy
| jpegs, have suddenly become valuable assets.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Yep. It's a completely made up problem. It's maybe useful
| in enforcing existing IP law (i.e., I can prove that that
| picture is mine), but even that is questionable (proof of
| ownership of digital IP has already been proven
| satisfactorily for courts of law to rule on it).
|
| The fact there is a new way of proving ownership doesn't
| make the thing owned valuable.
| pornel wrote:
| NFTs don't actually prove ownership of anything but
| themselves. Owning a hash of a URL has no connection to
| the real world, and can't prove that the NFT was created
| by the author of the artwork.
|
| It makes me doubly furious that NFT is advertised as
| caring for artists. In fact, NFT makes it easier than
| ever to sell stolen artwork. NFT itself doesn't contain
| any copyrighted material, and selling metadata/URLs is
| not illegal, so it's likely that fraud through NFT is de-
| facto legal if you just carefully word it as selling the
| NFT of the artwork, and not the artwork itself.
| lostcolony wrote:
| I'm not saying it does; I AM saying that it's an
| additional public record that can be used to bolster a
| case in the event of unclear ownership. And even that is
| "maybe" useful, hence my use of that phrase.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| As far as I'm aware, the NFT doesn't itself convey any
| transfer of copyrights (or any other form of IP). That
| has to be done by a separate document (and therefore it's
| that document that transfers the rights, not the NFT). So
| I don't see how the NFT is doing anything to help enforce
| existing IP laws?
| anonporridge wrote:
| Here's an NFT which is the best description I've ever seen
| of what NFTs actually are,
| https://foundation.app/@visualizevalue/nfts-explained-12012
|
| It sold for 74 ETH.
| somenewaccount1 wrote:
| Which is about approximately $240,000 USD.
|
| Hrm...I wonder if I should mint some nft's?
|
| And so it begins.
| pornel wrote:
| I think it's more likely that the author of this NFT paid
| this much to himself. It's the pump phase of a pump and
| dump scam.
| anonporridge wrote:
| This is the equivalent of someone seeing how much a
| Picasso sells and wondering if they should become an
| artist. For every success, there are 10,000 failures.
| somenewaccount1 wrote:
| That's true, but in the Picasso scenario I actually need
| to learn to do art. In the NFT case, apparently a 3rd
| grade level of photoshop skills would do.
| kristjansson wrote:
| 3rd-grade photoshop and weapons-grade marketing
| anonporridge wrote:
| You could also tape a banana to a wall and sell it for
| $120k in the traditional art world.
| https://news.artnet.com/art-world/maurizio-cattelan-
| banana-c...
|
| Don't mistake extreme technical skill as being the sole
| reason humans value things. Sometimes, it's just about
| being the first to effectively convey a new idea, and the
| crudeness of the execution doesn't matter. And there are
| plenty of extremely skilled artists that spend decades
| mastering their craft whose work is effectively
| worthless, because they're not actually breaking new
| ground.
| somenewaccount1 wrote:
| In hindsight, I was making a joke that seeing the value
| of an NFT has convinced me to make NFT's - and that this
| is the very cycle which has made NFT's valuable.
|
| I was not actually implying that I would literally start
| making NFT's right now.
|
| I did however forget that jokes and humor were against
| Hackernews rules, and for that I thank you kind sir for
| the reminder.
| isoskeles wrote:
| s/Picasso/Rothko/
| somenewaccount1 wrote:
| To make that nft would take me - or my 8 year old niece -
| no more than 2-3 hours to craft.
|
| Learning to mix paint like Rothko would take years.
| tomp wrote:
| Except that, it's not even true.
|
| NFTs are equivalent to a orange checkmark on the website
| twotter.com that I just set up.
| anonporridge wrote:
| I imagine it could actually develop into a similar
| situation for physical art. There is an original work
| that is worth a lot because humans are weird like that,
| and an entire industry of experts who try to sort out the
| actual original NFT that was minted by the artist over
| the duplicates and fakes.
|
| For example, we know the original creator of Nyan Cat
| came out of the woodwork to retroactively mint an NFT for
| it, https://foundation.app/@NyanCat/nyan-cat-219, which
| sold for 300 ETH. Obviously, anyone can create an NFT
| with the same gif, but we are reasonably certain that the
| actual created this ONE and declared it be the original.
|
| Obviously, this is a very odd thing to try to wrap your
| head around, but is it really that different from valuing
| original physical artwork?
| root_axis wrote:
| > _All an NFT is is a token that represents ownership, like
| if the title to your car or house deed was on a
| blockchain._
|
| No. An NFT is just a few bytes of text pinned to a
| blockchain. They are essentially useless, and every useful
| property of an NFT can be achieved using asymmetric
| encryption or digital signatures, the blockchain component
| is just wasteful hype.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| If an external source - say the Twitter account of an
| artist - can authenticate that the holder of the NFT is
| who the creator of the art work wants to be recognized as
| the owner, then social consensus will lead to widespread
| value assignment to that NFT.
|
| The ability to hold and trade the NFT on the public
| blockchain makes that asset accessible to a large number
| of autonomous on-chain markets, like dApps which allow a
| person to take out self-executing loans that use the NFT
| as collateral.
| acdha wrote:
| > If an external source - say the Twitter account of an
| artist - can authenticate that the holder of the NFT is
| who the creator of the art work wants to be recognized as
| the owner, then social consensus will lead to widespread
| value assignment to that NFT.
|
| In other words, you don't need the blockchain because the
| actual value comes from a different system. The only
| thing it's adding is overhead and unreliability.
| TomGullen wrote:
| Can't understand "Ownership of a Tweet" as Twitter owns
| them - or at the very least they can destroy them whenever
| they want.
| cperciva wrote:
| Thing is, NFTs _don 't_ represent ownership, absent some
| external legal documents which tie ownership to the NFT.
| (And even with such external documents p perhaps not; see
| e.g. the statute of frauds which restricts in what form
| land ownership can be transferred.)
|
| I can sell NFTs of bridges all day long; doesn't mean
| anyone is buying a bridge.
| Joeboy wrote:
| An NFT is decent evidence in favour of the keyholder
| being the creator of a work, if there's no earlier
| evidence of somebody else being the creator of the work.
|
| When people first started talking about them I thought
| that was the idea - a kind of people's copyright registry
| on the blockchain. Which seems like a fairly reasonable
| idea, as far as it goes.
|
| Edit: To be clear, I mean a copyright registry that is
| used for the sort of thing copyright registries are used
| for, ie. adjudicating copyright disputes. I am _not_
| saying an NFT of the Mona Lisa is good evidence you
| painted the Mona Lisa (unless you minted it in 1502), and
| I 'm _definitely_ not saying the current market in NFTs
| is sensible.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| It's not at all there is rampant fraud in the NFT market.
| So much so Deviantart made some detection software to
| help alert artists their work is being stolen.
|
| All that can be definitively proved outside of other
| methods is who created the token.
| Joeboy wrote:
| It sounds like you're talking about cases where, as I
| said, there's "earlier evidence of somebody else being
| the creator of the work". _In_ _the_ _absence_ _of_
| _that_ , I think the token would be a decent piece of
| evidence in favour of the token owner.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| So would posting it anywhere online essentially. Twitter
| would work for the same usecase. Or the old sending it to
| yourself through the mail thing.
|
| NFTs also don't put the image on chain usually instead
| just linking from the metadata so a fraudster could
| register a bunch of placeholder NFTs and then later put
| stolen art where the link points to. Hey Presto you can
| steal art and "prove" the actual creator is the fraud.
| Joeboy wrote:
| Well, posting the actual content publicly would obviously
| make it public, which registering a hash on the
| blockchain would not. "Sending it to yourself through the
| mail" would probably be the competition, and I would say
| a cryptographic hash is at least as good as a postmark,
| as well as cheaper.
|
| Anyway. I wasn't talking about NFTs as they exist today.
| I'm just saying the original concept (as I understood it)
| seemed basically reasonable, before everybody went
| insane.
| root_axis wrote:
| > _An NFT is decent evidence in favour of you being the
| creator of a work, if there 's no earlier evidence of
| somebody else being the creator of the work_
|
| It's really not at all reliable. I could create an NFT
| for the "Joeboy" HN account right now, and ostensibly
| become the owner of your HN account since such an NFT
| does not already exist. Obviously, this makes no sense,
| the NFT is meaningless.
| capableweb wrote:
| No, you could create an NFT that supposedly represents
| that but unless people buy into the idea, no is becoming
| the owner of anything.
|
| If instead Ycombinator would release each user as an NFT,
| and allow people to buy/sell then, then yes you could
| become the owner of an HN account via NFTs. But until
| then, the one who knows the password is the owner.
|
| People seems to have some sort of problem with trying to
| understand NFTs were all thoughts and logic go out the
| window as soon as NFTs are mentioned.
| Joeboy wrote:
| As I understood their comment, they were pointing out the
| absurdity of the idea you are also pointing out the
| absurdity of.
| Joeboy wrote:
| If there was no evidence of the account existing before
| you registered the NFT, I think that would be a
| reasonably credible bit of evidence in your favour.
| acdha wrote:
| > An NFT is decent evidence in favour of the keyholder
| being the creator of a work, if there's no earlier
| evidence of somebody else being the creator of the work.
|
| The second clause shows why the first is not true: the
| other evidence is what gives you the information you
| need. In every context where it really matters it comes
| down to what a court would accept and ... uh ... I would
| not want to be the one having to tell a judge that
| something is proof of ownership when anyone on the
| internet could submit the same record.
| Joeboy wrote:
| I can't say for sure what a judge would make of a
| cryptographically secure hash of a piece of content that
| there's no record of prior to the hash's registration on
| a blockchain. I think if somebody tries to claim
| authorship of eg. a screenplay I've written, such a hash
| _should_ be pretty good evidence in my favour.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Yeah, an NFT is more like a receipt. Except when you buy
| one, you _only_ get the receipt. The actual item remains
| "out there".
| KorematsuFredt wrote:
| NFTs don't sell ownership rights. NFTs are equivalent of
| buying photographs of a celebrity. You may own NFT that
| represents Taylor Swift, but she aint going on a dinner
| date with you.
|
| Not to mention you are not the only one to hold it either
| as someone else can Taylor Swift NFT and sell it to.
|
| It is exactly same as buying and owning cards of your
| favourite celebrity. They are worthless even compared to
| cowdung and have absolutely not practical value.
|
| One has to be high on drugs to buy ugly gifs for thousands
| of dollars.
| Jxl180 wrote:
| The NFTs that people are making their profile pictures
| are drastically different from the celebrity and athlete
| NFTs put out by DraftKings or topshot. The NFTs in
| profile pics on Twitter (like crypto punks) have randomly
| generated features making each and every minted nft
| completely unique.
|
| I feel like there are two vastly different audiences with
| NFTs. The casual, celebrity/athlete NFTs that are selling
| multiple of some persons face for fiat currency, and
| parole who are actively participating in minting NFTs
| with web3 dApps made by developers with roadmaps and a
| strong community.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| There isn't much to get. It is a collectible and now, for a
| variety of reasons, all sorts of collectibles are gaining
| value. I have a pet theory that after art market got heavily
| regulated with AML laws, a lot of it moved to NFT, where it
| is very much free game for anyone with money to stake.
| throwdecro wrote:
| I think it's something you can make for free, and sell for
| money. I don't think anyone "gets" the whole thing; I'd be
| shocked if anyone selling these things was also a collector.
| You either get the money or you give the money.
| nradov wrote:
| Beanie Babies also looked stupid. It's just another fad and
| bubble.
|
| https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2015/03/02/beanie-baby-
| bubbl...
| SergeAx wrote:
| At least you may physically own a beanie doll.
| cratermoon wrote:
| They're more like tulips. Physically owning a tulip is
| rather transient.
| [deleted]
| dehrmann wrote:
| Exactly. If you think your beanie baby is still
| interesting in 2021, you can put it on a shelf. Showing
| off your NFT quickly devolves to "cool story, bro."
| mindvirus wrote:
| I'm still skeptical, but think of them as digital goods that
| you own, and that can follow you across applications. If you
| collect items in a game, you can have them in another place
| too.
|
| The metaverse pitch is that you can create economies around
| these that aren't constrained to a single application. I can
| make and sell cool art, and you can buy that art and put it
| anywhere - and it's yours, in a way that a downloaded PNG
| just isn't.
| larsiusprime wrote:
| As far as I can tell, there's nothing to "get":
| https://www.fortressofdoors.com/the-degraded-blockchain-
| prob...
| zepto wrote:
| The emperor is dressed in NFTs.
| cratermoon wrote:
| The clothes have no emperor
| trystfest wrote:
| It lost me when an OpenSea executive tried to manipulate the
| prices. I'm just happy that he got caught.
| oefrha wrote:
| I'm on board if charities* could somehow get in on the action
| and convince the bored rich to part with their money.
|
| * Real charities, not those billionaire tax avoidance schemes.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > Real charities, not those billionaire tax avoidance
| schemes.
|
| No such thing.
| javert wrote:
| Do you even know what you're talking about?
|
| In the US, a billionaire has more money at the end of the
| day if they just pay taxes on it than if they give it to
| charity and take the deduction.
|
| The only other way a charity helps a billionaire save on
| taxes is if they use the charity's assets (e.g. boats,
| helicopers, real estate) as personal assets. But that's
| felony tax fraud. A billionaire wouldn't be likely to risk
| prison for that kind of chump change.
|
| The crooked thing about charities is the people who _run
| them_ , focus on fundraising, and pay themselves a huge
| salary. But those people aren't billionaires.
|
| Now, you could rent your real estate to a charity you
| control at an inflated price, or sell them other services,
| but I think that's probably an edge case.
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| Yeah, charities aren't full tax avoidance for the rich.
| It's more of a dick swinging contest amongst the wealthy
| with some tax breaks to take some of the sting away. At
| least some good may come from these contests though. Even
| if 90% of the funds go to pay charity management salaries
| it's better than nothing.
| javert wrote:
| That's way too cynical. That's out of touch with reality.
| Lots of really rich people give to charity and don't talk
| about it.
| azundo wrote:
| It isn't about having money, it's about control of that
| money. Zuckerberg doesn't "have" the money he gives to
| his foundation, but he still controls it, vs taxes which
| he wouldn't.
| javert wrote:
| Better Zuckerberg than using the money to send our young
| men to their deaths in Afghanistan, or pay people to have
| kids and not work, or to have it siphoned off through
| fraud by government workers, or wasted by their
| negligence, or...
| pamplemoose wrote:
| I liked the idea of the moonshot bots
| https://decrypt.co/79606/moonshot-bots-nfts-gitcoin-
| ethereum... where the funds raised are used for public goods.
| Tenoke wrote:
| I'd wager billionaires donate a lot more to charities than
| they spend on nfts. Look at the Gates Foundation.
| oefrha wrote:
| You don't need to be a billionaire to count as "bored
| rich", which I take to mean anyone who has too much money
| lying around and can't find better uses than shitty
| computer-generated "art" (note that this doesn't include
| people who buy these with the sole purpose of flipping them
| to a greater fool).
|
| There are a surprising number of bored rich people,
| especially when you consider all the new-found crypto
| wealth. Most of them probably haven't contributed any of
| their excess wealth to help the hundreds of millions of
| people who are still starving, so if NFT is one way to
| extract some of that, so be it.
| zrobotics wrote:
| >> (note that this doesn't include people who buy these
| with the sole purpose of flipping them to a greater
| fool).
|
| Hate to burst your bubble, but that is 99.99% of the NFT
| market. There is maybe 5 people total who bought a NFT
| for art appreciation reasons, but aside from that
| rounding error the only reason anyone owns one is as a
| speculative investment.
| oefrha wrote:
| Sure, even in that scenario, if a slice of the MLM money
| can be used for societal good, it's still something.
| sercand wrote:
| I didn't understand NFT storm as well then I made a 10K
| collection of NFT images with my friend (I wrote the smart
| contract) in three weeks and earned $3M from that. I made a lot
| of money and now I'm part of the creator community but I still
| sometimes ask "Why?"
| m12k wrote:
| I understand why people make NFTs (to cash in on the craze),
| but I still don't understand why anyone buys them (outside of
| money laundering).
| SwimSwimHungry wrote:
| Nice subtle humble brag.
| xwdv wrote:
| You mean at some point NFT had you?
| marban wrote:
| Well, I found it to be a decent solution to support actual
| artists (esp. Photographers or folks like eBoy fame) who were
| already selling their digital art in genuine and honest
| capacity.
|
| But when some random guy without a story renders a thousand
| animated dogs from a script and the actual art is how to push
| it via Reddit bots, my support for artistic value creation
| has reached its limit.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| I don't get this. The concept hasn't changed since and
| those genuine artists are still there you supported.
|
| Or things are only cool until they are not mainstream?
| wpietri wrote:
| I think the NFT thing is kinda ridiculous. But then so
| are plenty of other marketing shenanigans. Maybe it could
| have worked?
|
| But once it was picked up by the grift/hype/fincrime
| machine that has eaten cryptocurrencies, it lost all
| semblance of plausibility to me. It has gone from
| something like "I bought a small piece of a creator whose
| work I treasure" to "ZOMG MAKE MONEY FAST".
|
| As an example, take the guy who was big on what he calls
| investing and I call gambling, who proposed to his
| girlfriend with an NFT:
|
| https://twitter.com/redditships/status/143239669460866253
| 6?l...
|
| For me it's the same deal with cryptocurrencies in
| general. Interesting idea, and I want to visit the
| alternate reality where it was developed gradually and
| sanely by the sort of curious, well-meaning person that
| got into it early on. But the sort of value-based
| innovation I care about got stomped long ago.
| II2II wrote:
| My interpretation of what they were saying: NFTs are a
| worthy means of supporting artists but have been tainted
| by the other breed of artist (the scam artist).
|
| I would extend that by suggesting that NFTs should be a
| valid means of supporting new artists. The problem arises
| when people dump garbage into the market to make a quick
| buck. This will ultimately diminish the long term value
| of NFTs, meaning there is less value for those who are
| trying to make a living from their art (and even for
| those who are trying to make a living investing in art).
| saalweachter wrote:
| Honestly I don't think NFTs - as it exists - was ever a
| good model.
|
| I know there's a hypothetical resale mechanism, but it's
| fundamentally operating on a lottery system - artists are
| buying a ticket hoping to hit it big, and that favors a
| self-destructive mentality.
|
| A Patreon-like system still has an element of luck, but the
| steady monthly income makes it much easier for an artist to
| say "this is working, I should keep going" or "I guess I
| should start looking for a/keep my day job".
| nerdponx wrote:
| It wasn't ever meant to be a lottery. It was and remains
| just a way to sell ownership rights to stuff without
| physically transferring any stuff. The fact that a
| speculation market bloomed around it was just a weird
| circumstance.
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| Weird circumstance? It seems like an entirely predictable
| outcome, and as such it seems like it may very well have
| been the actual point.
|
| Especially since NFTs confer no actual assets or rights
| in anyway that matters EXCEPT for in an adjacent
| speculative market.
| pibechorro wrote:
| I am an artist. Have shown in galleries, museums and rubbed
| shoulders with all sorts of dealers etc in Manhattan art
| world. What you see in the nft space is pretty normal.. for
| every genuine, talented artist there are 1000 copy cats
| just gaming the market trends. For every genuine,
| professional art seller/buyer there are 1000 used car
| salesmen looking to flip hype and bad taste for quick
| profit, screw over naive and poor artist and the big
| elephant in the room, money laundering.
|
| The recent Met gala.. socialites and wealth parading the
| halls hanging Caravaggio and Van Gogh, who died destetute.
| analog31 wrote:
| What's lacking is an agreed upon mechanism for
| distinguishing the real artists from the hacks, and the
| real buyers from the flippers.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Real art is what you agree in your mind is real art.
|
| If you are trying to find something to filter out art
| that will not skyrocket in prices that's different. You
| need to find out what people are buying and only buy
| those. Each subgroup will be buying different types of
| art so research is required.
|
| Anything is real art. A rock you brought in or a painting
| made by a computer. As long as you see it as art, special
| and perhaps get an emotion from it.
| marban wrote:
| "Art is what you can get away with", to quote Andy
| Warhol.
| fullshark wrote:
| I was pretty torn about crypto, I saw most of what this essay
| describes but I also did find it as a potential global
| currency / computer system outside gov't control that could
| enable more as a result. BTC v. $ has been discussed to death
| but the BTC case isn't COMPLETE nonsense imo, in a world
| where trillions are generated out of thin air to prevent debt
| defaults and everyone supports it.
|
| However once NFTs became a thing and the crypto whales
| started pimping it I saw the truth. These people have no
| vision beyond finding some story to get someone else to pay
| more for their crypto tokens down the line, full stop.
| analog31 wrote:
| I have a rule, which is that by the time I dream up an idea,
| plenty of other people have already had the same idea. So, when
| I proposed selling NFTs of the rehearsals of my band, and told
| my son about it, he said: "Dad, a million people are already
| doing that sort of thing."
| marban wrote:
| If you're with Pink Floyd, you could still give it a try.
| rchaud wrote:
| Is your band famous in any way? Or does it have a cult
| following of some kind?
|
| If not, who would buy an NFT of your jam sessions? The
| pioneering garage rock band The Stooges released a remastered
| edition of 1970's Fun House some years back, and included 2
| CDs of rehearsal/studio sessions and outtakes.
|
| They were widely panned for it, with some reviews saying that
| even the most ardent Iggy Pop fan wouldn't need 5 versions of
| "TV Eye".
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| And yet people are buying NFT's of random crappy JPG
| avatars by nobodies. I don't know why either!
| endisneigh wrote:
| ICANN isn't perfect (not even close, lol) - but I wish a
| consortium of countries would just create their own crypto.
| Unfortunately this would probably devolve to what we currently
| have with individual fiat.
|
| Would anyone even use a not-for-profit backed "crypto"? I don't
| mean in the blockchain-backed sense, more in the ICANN/gift-
| cards/points globally distributed sense.
| wpietri wrote:
| If you look at ICANN's .org fiasco, it's pretty clear that they
| couldn't handle even the relatively small amount of money
| flowing through that. The corruption opportunities of an entire
| currency are way too much for them.
| hanniabu wrote:
| You mean ENS?
| pjc50 wrote:
| Bretton Woods, but for crypto?
| henvic wrote:
| Not necessarily, but to be honest I haven't seen a single
| cryptocurrency that made sense so far.
|
| I wrote about how misleading the crypto ecosystem is a while ago
| here: https://henvic.dev/posts/bitcoin/
| Justsignedup wrote:
| The fomo is real tho.
|
| Everyone imagines "just imagine if I invested when BTC was < $100
| just a few years ago. I could be sailing near my own island now.
|
| And with everyone from celebrities to investors constantly
| promoting it, it is hard not to jump on the craze.
|
| All "doom and gloom" has bounced off the market. I am still
| expecting a massive crash, but to be honest, if I invested a few
| years ago I would be sitting at 3-20x my investment.
|
| It is insanely profitable.
|
| Thats the fun part of all this :)
| dorgo wrote:
| >I am still expecting a massive crash
|
| I wonder what you would consider a massive crash in crypto.
| Because -90% in two or three months is nothing special, just
| day-to-day business. I would start to worry if it drops below
| 0.1% though.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| In the sense that people who can't afford rent buying lottery
| tickets is "fun".
| cube00 wrote:
| https://archive.is/SRr5X
| brianolson wrote:
| Cryptocurrency gives people something they want. At best it might
| a new decentralized leaderless censorship-resistant free-as-in-
| freedom finance platform. At worst it might be a new
| decentralized leaderless pyramid scheme where we don't even need
| a Bernie Madoff because now we have The Algorithm. If I am
| simultaneously cynical and hopeful, maybe it will have an
| adolescence of B and mature into A.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Except its not very decentralized and leaderless. It is
| dominated by a few ultra rich players, to an even greater
| extent than the stock market. And that didn't democratise
| finance either.
| fksadfji12 wrote:
| Thats not true at all.
| raptor99 wrote:
| I think you can sub in the word Money or Currency in this
| headline and it would still ring true or perhaps even more true
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-09-24 23:02 UTC)