[HN Gopher] In Response to My first impressions of Web3
___________________________________________________________________
In Response to My first impressions of Web3
Author : bbno4
Score : 198 points
Date : 2022-01-08 10:12 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (skerritt.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (skerritt.blog)
| chrisco255 wrote:
| > Illegal images being sent to your wallet, forcing you to go to
| prison in some places.
|
| Images are not stored in a wallet. NFTs and ERC20s do not
| actually live in a Ethereum wallet. They live in a smart
| contract. And that smart contract has a ledger of account for who
| has the right to transfer that particular asset.
|
| The images themselves, unless they are SVGs, are typically stored
| on Filecoin or Arweave or a centralized server and marked by an
| IPFS hash.
|
| Content moderation is handled by the data storers in those
| networks: https://www.arweave.org/technology#content-moderation
|
| Spam NFTs are just like spam email. The receipt of something
| illicit or illegal does not mean automatic imprisonment anywhere
| that I'm aware of. If you live in such a jurisdiction, I suggest
| you flee immediately.
| soheil wrote:
| > This is a lie. Most NFTs which sell for millions use IPFS,
| Arweave, Filecoin or others for decentralised storage of data. A
| lot of NFTs do use Google Drive or Imgur or whatever.
|
| This is such a he said she said. Can we get some stats on this?
| Are NFTs primarily stored on the chain or linked to a URL? I'd
| like to see the breakdown by platform, Opensea, etc.
| ra-mos wrote:
| "proposed solutions solve this"
|
| ~ every cryptocurrency/blockchain/web3 article ever written
| vitaflo wrote:
| Yeah it's starting to sound a lot like "this is the year of
| Linux on the desktop" to me. We're always one year away.
| dylkil wrote:
| slowly but surely things improve, and then people find
| something else to complain about
| wepple wrote:
| This is the TL;DR for me. Perhaps a lot of this will evolve and
| we'll end up with some fantastic technologies that are truly
| revolutionary.
|
| But, a lot of us are pretty jaded by "blockchain is a game
| changer" with no tangible evidence beyond BTC as a highly
| unstable store of value and claims of some great future state.
| bombcar wrote:
| Either it will solve something and you can get on later, or
| if you have to get on now "before it goes up" it's just a
| scam (or"investment") of sorts.
| fivea wrote:
| > (...) beyond BTC as a highly unstable store of value and
| claims of some great future state.
|
| Bitcoin is not a store of value, and never was. A highly
| volatile asset, specially one whose market price halves
| overnight without much surprise, does not serve the purpose
| of a store of value.
|
| I mean, this week alone Bitcoin dropped around 10%, and
| around 25% during the past month. This is not value being
| stored. If an asset manager lost 25% of it's wallet in a
| month they'd be out of a job.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| Take the money out of equation, and i'm all for it. Which is what
| Moxie is suggesting, more or less..
|
| Sadly it's all about money re/distribution, even if all try to
| dress it in all kind of masks on top..
|
| With a wallet substituting my Identity (or trust, or whatever
| else that is not money).. it's no different to any other
| substitution - email, belonging to a club (FAANG+oauth),
| whatever. Except more involving..
| knorker wrote:
| Standard blockchain apologist. Always jam tomorrow, never jam
| today.
|
| It's always "early" for some definition of the word "it". Any
| decade now we'll have PoS, or an actual use case for smart
| contracts, or NFTs etc.
|
| But no, every year just seems to bring a new "invention" that is
| "still early" while implying that this, unlike every single other
| use of distributed blockchain, somehow is the first of all of
| them to not be pointless (outside of a way to find the bigger
| fool).
|
| Blockchains are just scam generators.
|
| Well, they are of great utility to ransomware, so i guess they
| have found one use case in over a decade.
|
| Edit: and of course this rebuttal found like one possible mistake
| in statistics and calls it a "lie". That should tell you all you
| need to know about the author's intellectual honesty.
| eqmvii wrote:
| Hey now, ransomeware /and/ drugs!
| floatboth wrote:
| And both are now eclipsed by the wild speculation. The vast
| majority of buttcoins' "usage" is all about "number go up".
| srqwe wrote:
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| How financial markets should be.
| sobkas wrote:
| > How financial markets should be.
|
| Until the bubble pops, then better not be one holding the
| bucket.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Don't forget money laundering with NFTS and bribing
| politicians
| kristofferR wrote:
| knorker wrote:
| > if you were intellectually honest you would agree that the
| decentralized web/crypto both have positives and negatives.
|
| If this were 2010 then I would agree that it's interesting
| technology with some possible use cases not yet clarified.
|
| But this is 2022, and it's now time to turn this around to
| focus on actual solution first, get-rich-quick as a possible
| incidental side effect. Because we've had over a decade now
| of get-rich-quick first, "maybe solve a real problem, not
| sure how because I've not talked to domain experts to find
| out what the real problems actually are" as incidental.
|
| Like, talk to any contract lawyer and ask them if "smart
| contract" is a solution to any of their hard problems. It's
| not. It just makes everything much worse.
|
| Or currencies. You can't just (at best) say you'll bolt on
| AML/KYC to your perfectly anonymous currency "later". And
| without AML/KYC it's not actually a solution that anybody
| wants (except very rare anarcho-libertarians and ransomware
| people).
|
| So does this whole space have positives? It's not impossible.
| Every single so-called solution in this space has made its
| intended space worse, and also created huge externalities
| (environment, e-waste (old mining rigs), resource shortages
| (GPU, SSD), etc...).
|
| But it's not impossible that any decade now something will
| actually be a solution. But because the "solutions" are also
| get-rich-quick schemes, the "inventors" don't want to wait
| for the solution to actually be... a solution. Launch now,
| get rich, problem (of not being rich) solved.
|
| Take PoS for example. Greta Thunberg is wrong to attack
| boomers. Looking at the age bracket of cryptocurrency
| supporters it seems that millennials are also pushing that
| whole "environment" thing to future generations. "Oh, it'll
| be fine with PoS eventually. But today we can burn the
| environment a bit because I gots to get paid".
|
| So no, it doesn't "have" positives. It's one of the
| infinitely many pools of ideas where positives could come
| from, but haven't yet.
| kristofferR wrote:
| Silk Road is the easiest example of a positive to mention.
|
| And you know very well that the Kintsugi testnet is public,
| to falsely pretend it's decades away is shitposting.
| fleddr wrote:
| Well, the author at least makes an intellectual attempt, unlike
| you.
|
| Both the original article and the response are reasonable,
| which is rare in this discussion. There's actual substance,
| rather than lazy binary conclusions.
| knorker wrote:
| I did call out the major flaw in the response (always jam
| tomorrow, never jam today) and elaborated on it, with
| examples or other technologies.
|
| At no point did I say "this is a lie".
|
| You can disagree with my factual rebuttal of the response,
| but you are also factually incorrect that I was doing some
| sort of shitposting.
| fleddr wrote:
| It's cute that you call your own response "factual"
|
| "Any decade now we will have PoS" Almost every blockchain
| already is. Ether will move to PoS within the coming 2
| years. They must, as competition is fierce and may become
| irrelevant if they don't. Bitcoin will never move to PoS.
| So, "any decade"...what does it factually refer to?
|
| Your remark on use cases is equally primitive. There's a
| few hundred million people using crypto. You can say that
| the existing use cases aren't for you, but that's not
| factual. Facts are that user growth is exponential.
|
| Singling out ransomware is equally lazy. A recent study
| showed that the portion of criminal activity in the crypto
| space is lower compared to cash. Yet you'd never comment on
| cash being a criminal invention, would you? Yet you're the
| "intellectually honest" one.
| knorker wrote:
| > "Any decade now we will have PoS" Almost every
| blockchain already is.
|
| You know that's not relevant. Nobody cares about the
| number of blockchains having one or another attribute. I
| could create and launch a billion new ones, and it
| doesn't matter.
|
| > Ether will move to PoS within the coming 2 years.
|
| I truly hope so. I'll believe it when I see it.
|
| > There's a few hundred million people using crypto.
|
| Estimate I found is one, not a few. But that could be
| wrong.
|
| But yeah. I know of several people who tried, some
| successfully, to get paid in bitcoin. They didn't want to
| pay taxes.
|
| Everyone wants everyone _else_ to pay their fair share.
| You can 't point to someone saying "Well I don't want to
| pay _my_ fair share " as a contradiction, because that's
| a completely different statement.
|
| Everyone wants only sober people on the street, but come
| on, it's me and I only had three beers and it's like a
| 10min drive.
|
| > Singling out ransomware is equally lazy.
|
| Lazy because it's not hard. "Pointing out murder is
| wrong, is lazy". Uh... so what?
|
| > A recent study showed that the portion of criminal
| activity in the crypto space is lower compared to cash.
|
| Speculation is by far the biggest, yes. Studies have
| shown that much or most of that speculation is market
| manipulation, too.
|
| > Yet you'd never comment on cash being a criminal
| invention, would you?
|
| I didn't say that about blockchain either. I said it's a
| scam generator. Cryptocurrencies are more like the scam
| of being paid in company credits in the company store, if
| you want to make comparisons to cash. It's not a great
| comparison, of course, because your whole question
| assumes that "cryptocurrencies are just like cash" which
| they are very much not.
|
| Partly because what I already said. But partly... well I
| don't think you're interested in hearing anything
| anything, so what's the point?
|
| If you've gotten this far, and are this invested, then
| you'd need to get over the cognitive dissonance of that,
| and a HN comment won't help.
|
| > you're the "intellectually honest" one.
|
| Yup.
| fleddr wrote:
| You are too random to waste any more time on.
| knorker wrote:
| Sure. Other people get it though (compare comment
| scores). So I think it's you.
| kortilla wrote:
| > Ether will move to PoS within the coming 2 years.
|
| Did you mean to agree with the poster? Because you just
| perfectly proved how even ether has kicked the can down
| the road to avoid upsetting the apple cart.
| fleddr wrote:
| I was responding to the hyperbole of calling it "the next
| decade". It's an extreme exaggeration, just like it's an
| extreme exaggeration to say that crypto's only use case
| is ransomware.
| dlubarov wrote:
| Why are critics so focused on timing though? Does it really
| matter whether the Eth2 merge happens in 6 months or 12 months,
| as long as steady progress is being made?
|
| Granted, early timelines from Vitalik and others were way off
| base initially. The planning fallacy is a thing, and we
| shouldn't expect a 21 year old to accurately predict the timing
| of a very complex network migration. Hanlon's razor suggests
| that bad estimates are usually just bad estimates, not some
| kind of scam.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Because in the meantime the Ethereum network has less
| computing power than a Raspberry Pi while consuming several
| orders of magnitude more electricity. So it's shitty,
| expensive, and horribly polluting.
| [deleted]
| gooseus wrote:
| This is a grift as old as time, promise salvation tomorrow to
| all those that worship today. Tomorrow is only ever a day away,
| and really isn't the worship and community great anyways?
|
| The doomsday cult and spiritual guru model of community-
| building fits right into the Silicon Valley culture of techno-
| optimism alongside the "if you believe it, you can achieve it"
| New Age mantras and "fake it till you make it, it's not fraud
| if you believe it" naivete.
|
| The only thing more upsetting that watching it happen is
| knowing how it will likely unravel, with everyone pointing
| fingers and rushing to find a conspiracy theory to explain why
| "the powers that be" targeted them for destruction because they
| were so threatened and were afraid of the power they were
| losing to the Bored Ape movement, or whatever it is.
| serverholic wrote:
| You could say similar things about nuclear fusion. It's easy to
| say this when you don't actually follow the technology and the
| people actually building it.
| oblio wrote:
| 1. Nuclear fusion has a much more solid theoretical base.
|
| 2. Bud, if we go tell every cryptocurrency enthusiast that
| they'll be allowed to invest in it now and get a return on
| investment in 80+ years[1], crypto will be dead within 24
| hours.
|
| [1] The first experimental fusion reactor was tested in 1958
| and at the rate they're going, 2038 seems like a reasonable
| date for the first commercial fusion reactor.
| knorker wrote:
| It's an interesting comparison.
|
| I mean the easy reply is no: Fusion is not a solution in
| search of a problem. It has a precise defined desired output,
| and the engineering is being worked on to achieve that
| output.
|
| (E.g.) NFT don't. Smart contracts don't. Even
| cryptocurrencies don't. If you precisely define what you want
| from a cryptocurrency, then you'll either end up with
| something that's better solved centralized (to a larger or
| lesser degree, but at least control), or you'll end up with
| something that nobody actually wants.
|
| And if you launch today with something nobody actually wants,
| then you get rich. So who cares if eventually it solves a
| problem? And there's no incentive to make that happen.
|
| The main difference is that blockchains are being launched
| before any thought has been put into what problems they
| solve. Because the money is made on the speculation. Solving
| the problem is incidental.
|
| Sure, you could be super cynical and say that fusion, or
| indeed every single company in the world, is only there to
| make money, primarily. But they do that by solving (or trying
| to solve) actual problems.
|
| Again on cryptocurrencies: Why do you think I'll have a hard
| time walking into a bank with duffle bags full of cash?
| Really think about that question. Really think about the
| hundreds of years of thought that has gone into it.
|
| Do you think the main problem these generations of people
| were trying to solve was "intransigent bankers"? Do you think
| the bank doesn't "like" you as a customer if you walk in with
| duffle bags full of cash without explanation, and that's why
| it has rules and takes time, and you have to explain
| yourself?
|
| Now cryptocurrencies just treat that as "that's stupid, let's
| remove all that".
|
| Let's say a thief stole your TV. They catch the thief, and a
| court orders them to repay you. They have the money. They say
| no. Obviously you want a court order to be able to take their
| money.
|
| A friend of mine was sexually attacked by a guy. The guy was
| convicted and ordered to pay a fine. He refused. The court
| ordered his safe deposit box opened, and they took the money.
|
| And that's a good thing.
|
| > when you don't actually follow the technology
|
| The technology doesn't matter, if problems are misidentified.
| kristofferR wrote:
| Once you realize that "you" doesn't equal everyone else,
| you'll stop acting like that.
|
| Plenty of people want and use what crypto already offers.
| Moneygram was a horrible experience for me, for example,
| I'm really glad my language school accepting crypto
| payments.
| knorker wrote:
| > Plenty of people want and use what crypto already
| offers.
|
| You're saying a statistically significant number of
| people want all three branches of government to be
| completely stripped of any power? No criminal or civil
| courts?
|
| I think that's ridiculous on its face.
| kristofferR wrote:
| Please get off your privileged high horse; most people
| aren't living in proper democracies, unfortunately.
| dmitriid wrote:
| The absolute vast majority of people in the world live in
| countries with functioning governments.
|
| Whether or not they are "proper democracies" is really
| beside the point because no one can define a "proper
| democracy" (US and Sweden are different as night and day
| and yet both are democracies, for example).
|
| And crypto makes non-functioning governments
| significantly _worse_. Good luck proving the NFT on your
| house proves you 're an owner in a dysfunctional
| government.
| kortilla wrote:
| If you're living in a dysfunctional government then at
| least crypto protects you from random seizures/freezing
| of your assets.
|
| > The absolute vast majority of people in the world live
| in countries with functioning governments.
|
| The underlying statement you are making bere is that we
| shouldn't be building technology that helps people
| undermine their governments' ability to control their
| citizens' assets.
|
| That's the crux of the argument here. If you live in a
| government where things generally work for you, this
| technology is threatening. If you don't, it's a possible
| path to some semblance of autonomy.
| gizmo385 wrote:
| > If you're living in a dysfunctional government then at
| least crypto protects you from random seizures/freezing
| of your assets.
|
| How so? We've already seen large scale shutdowns of
| crypto projects by centralized authorities like OpenSea.
| I highly doubt dysfunctional and authoritarian
| governments are going to swallow allowing their citizens
| to use these platforms without also ensuring that they
| have a measure of control over it. And if an
| authoritarian government wants to steal your assets,
| they'll just install malware on your device and take your
| keys, then you've lost everything. Or they'll just
| disappear you until you agree to hand things over.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > If you're living in a dysfunctional government
|
| 1. There are very few such governments on earth, all
| things considered
|
| 2. You still need to somehow convert those "assets" into,
| you know, actual food, and clothing, and... In a truly
| dysfunctional government rubber-hose cryptanalysis is a
| thing that exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-
| hose_cryptanalysis
|
| > The underlying statement you are making bere is that we
| shouldn't be building technology that helps people
| undermine their governments' ability to control their
| citizens' assets.
|
| No. The underlying statement is: you're building
| something that doesn't work the way it's advertised.
|
| > That's the crux of the argument here.
|
| Well, if you invent arguments, pretend your opponent said
| those argumetns, and then bravely fight those arguments,
| then surely, that's the crux.
|
| So. Back to my original statement: "Crypto makes non-
| functioning governments significantly worse. Good luck
| proving the NFT on your house proves you're an owner in a
| dysfunctional government." It's an objective fact that
| doesn't rely on your imagining of what a dysfunctional
| government is.
| mthoms wrote:
| >There are very few such governments on earth, all things
| considered
|
| I'm not going to wade into any of the crypto arguments
| here but your repeated downplaying of
| dysfunctional/authoritarian/corrupt/failing governments
| seems entirely disconnected with the reality that tens,
| perhaps hundreds[0], of millions of people live every
| day.
|
| Just because true democracy is a hard thing to define
| (per your previous comment), doesn't make oppressive
| governments any less oppressive.
|
| There are lots of valid complaints about Crypto and
| NFT's, but the argument that poor government is not
| _that_ bad of a global problem "all things considered"
| is an absolutely _terrible_ one.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom
| and https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/economic-
| freedom-of-...
| dmitriid wrote:
| > but your repeated downplaying of
| dysfunctional/authoritarian/corrupt/failing governments
| seems entirely disconnected
|
| Again: stop inventing the arguments that are not there.
| The only people who are downplaying dysfunctonal
| governments are the crypto shills and crypto peddlers.
|
| If you actually took care and _read_ what I wrote instead
| of imagining what I wrote, you 'd see that never did I
| downplay dysfunctional governments.
|
| > doesn't make oppressive governments any less
| oppressive.
|
| Literally nowhere I said this.
|
| > but the argument that poor government is not that bad
| of a global problem "all things considered" is an
| absolutely terrible one.
|
| If only there was a single person here who made this
| argument. Also, an oppressive government does not a
| dysfunctional government make.
|
| So, in the course of just a few sentences you made these
| claims:
|
| - that I downplayed
| dysfunctional/authoritarian/corrupt/failing governments.
| I didn't
|
| - that I somehow argued that oppressive gvernments are
| not that oppressive. I didn't
|
| - that somehow authoritarian/oppressive is equal to
| dysfunctional. It isn't, necessarily.
|
| What I _did_ write was:
|
| - the vast majority of people in this world do not live
| in _dysfunctional_ governments
|
| - crypto makes the problems with dysfunctional
| governments _worse_ : your "assets that goverment can't
| steal" have to be somehow converted into
| food/clothing/shelter etc. which makes you a target for
| Rubber-hose cryptanalysis etc. Any other "assets" are
| worthless because your "non fungible proof of ownership
| on blockchain" on your house, car, and other physical
| items are woth exactly zero even in a functional
| government, much less in a dysfunctional one.
|
| So. "All things considered", what's your opposition to
| what I wrote and not to what you imagine I wrote?
| xigoi wrote:
| Nuclear fusion is meant to solve our energy problems, not to
| make them as bad as possible.
| knorker wrote:
| Then you've not heard what blockchain apologists say on the
| issue: That they are stimulating demand, and speeding up
| the development of renewals.
|
| Which is like keeping your tap water running into the
| sewers at full blast 24/7 and saying you're stimulating the
| desalination industry.
|
| Also sounds like Zorn in Fifth Element, when he's talking
| about the benefits of destruction. When your argument
| sounds like one made by a fictional over the top Hitler-
| inspired absolute evil character, then maybe you should
| reassess your life choices.
| yunohn wrote:
| I love the irony of comparing blockchain (energy burning)
| enthusiasts to nuclear (energy generating) physicists.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Every business needs customers!
| jeroenhd wrote:
| > Illegal images being sent to your wallet, forcing you to go to
| prison in some places.
|
| My god, I hadn't even considered that, but they're right, there's
| currently n established blockchain the requires permission to
| send anything. That's fine with money, but with NFTs that
| actually represent something that could be a serious risk.
| kamranjon wrote:
| I realize that it is said to be prohibitively expensive to
| store an image on-chain - but if an actual illegal image was
| stored on-chain would that be irreversible? Basically I'm
| wondering if making the entire ledger illegal to posses is as
| simple as ponying up the cost? Could that bring down an entire
| crypto currency? Sorry if this sounds naive, I am just not sure
| what is currently possible.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| It has already happened, and nobody cared. Very early on, the
| bitcoin blockchain ended up playing host to some illegal
| images, but nobody took down bitcoin or bitcoin nodes for
| storing them.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| It would be practically impossible, the only way you can
| remove something from the blockchain is to ask all nodes to
| revert to an earlier version and purge the offending blocks
| and any blocks related to them.
|
| This is also why using public blockchains for storing
| personal information is such a stupid idea, illegal even if
| the GDPR is involved in any way. Blockchains are designed so
| no information can be altered or redacted, and that's often
| an overlooked problem.
| neuroma wrote:
| I forget the name but there was an NFT set that was dropped
| straight to wallets. It was various pixilated dicks. Kinda
| funny and cute I suppose. They had rarity traits etc.
| Joeri wrote:
| Someone can send you illegal material through the regular snail
| mail and call the cops as soon as the mail is delivered. Is
| this really that different?
| samatman wrote:
| That's the point of this sort of (hypothetical?) attack: poor
| Bob now has a poison envelope on his private key, he has
| something which roughly constitutes 'ownership' of illegal
| bits.
|
| Does our legal structure support immediately transferring it
| to a null wallet as a disclaimer of ownership? Bob doesn't
| want to be the one to make that case law. Nor does he want to
| hand over his private key, or clean his wallet out of
| everything but the evil image and _then_ hand over his
| private key.
|
| Basically there are no good options, although burning the
| offending data by sending it to /dev/null should emerge as a
| valid defense. Will it?
| jakear wrote:
| "I swear officer, the only proof I have of ever being sent
| those images is this folder filled with infinitely detailed
| top-down photographs of each one of them lying face-up in
| my trash can""
| samatman wrote:
| A tidy summary of the issue, that.
|
| But hey, if it was a Bored Cryptokitty, then Bob can't
| sell it and no one can buy it anymore, so clearly, he
| doesn't own it.
|
| The same principle _should_ apply to evil bits, the real
| kicker being that the whole rigamarole is now written to
| a shared database whose, er, immutability is part of the
| product on offer.
|
| Man, the Twenties are gonna be lit.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I don't have to pay ethereum gas to hand the proof over to
| the police or to burn it if they don't care. The mail system
| also doesn't keep a public, permanent record of all things
| mailed to me that any political opponents might use to imply
| things.
|
| There are also countries where you don't want to let the
| police know you own crypto because of laws against
| alternative currencies.
|
| Real world comparisons don't really work well with public
| blockchains.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Well, if you don't have a wallet then you can't receive it,
| and if you _have_ a wallet, you 're suspect anyway ?
| berkut wrote:
| I personally wouldn't want to put possible key disclosure
| laws to the test in this situation.
|
| With post mail I'd imagine that scenario is somewhat timing-
| critical, whereas I'm not sure how feasible it is to delete
| things if they are in the blockchain (consensus for deletion?
| How does that work?) and the police seize all the computers
| in your house.
| srqwe wrote:
| Where do you live that you can be arrested for someone sending
| you illegal material you didn't request?!
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Possession if child porn is illegal in many countries. If
| digital wallets convey any kind of ownership (which anyone
| using cryptocurrency or NFTs would argue in favour of) then
| that implies receiving child porn makes you be in possession
| of illegal material. I'm no lawyer, but I'm pretty sure not
| reporting such content to the police immediately would be a
| crime, and even if you do the right thing the police might
| still suspect you if you're unlucky.
|
| Someone malicious could definitely send a collection of child
| porn through the mail and report you the second it arrives.
| If they can time it right, you could definitely be in trouble
| and the police would likely take all of your digital storage
| and search for more. It's a lot harder to do such things
| anonymously in the real world, where security cameras and
| physical mail boxes are a thing, but I wouldn't be surprised
| if someone would actually pull off something awful like this.
|
| Of course, the police probably won't arrest you if you
| immediately report the illegal contents and hand over the
| evidence (or destroy the evidence without involving the
| police), but that's not as easy with the blockchain.
| Transferring the NFT out of your account would likely involve
| paying some kind of transfer fee (ethereum gas is quite
| expensive) and the police aren't going to pay that for you.
| You won't be finding or suing the sender of the child porn
| either, because this stuff isn't hard to do anonymously. Even
| if you do manage to transfer the illegal content out of your
| wallet, the blockchain will forever keep a public record of
| the content you once owned, so even if you do everything
| right the accusation of paedophilia will forever be easy to
| make.
| meltedcapacitor wrote:
| Is it fine with money?
|
| A ransomware operator could send the loot from an operation,
| channelled through a well publicized address, to someone they
| don't like which makes their account undistinguishable from
| that of a fence as seen by blockchain analytics firms
| maintaining the blacklists of addresses legit players do not
| task to. Or they could blackmail someone by threatening to burn
| their account by sending tainted funds.
|
| Politicians could be sent unwanted donations to dirty their
| reputation by making it looked they're supported by the wrong
| people.
|
| ...
| jeroenhd wrote:
| You can already do that though the regular old banking
| system, no difference there. Banks monitor and take action
| when they detect money laundering systems in their transfers,
| and they use graph analysis that's not dissimilar from the
| analysis law enforcement uses for tracking anonymous wallets.
| The mixers in the cryptocurrency world exist as school kids
| acting as fencers in the real world. A crime ring could
| definitely "taint" a politician's bank account if they wish
| to do so, but the manual oversight of the banking system
| probably wouldn't flag them.
|
| It's not that this isn't a problem with cryptocurrencies,
| it's just that it's a problem that already exists in the real
| world.
| rutierut wrote:
| This is such a bad take, almost everything here is wrong in some
| way, e.g. see the other comments.
| emptybottle wrote:
| I wish they would expand on their objection to using tezos.
|
| https://hicetnunc.art is an active alternative to opensea, and
| the gas fees on tezos are far smaller (pennies)
|
| Whats the downside?
| jsheard wrote:
| Isn't it the case that these alternative blockchains are only
| cheap because practically nobody uses them? There's a recent
| example from the Polygon blockchain, which was also sold on
| having gas fees on the order of a penny, until the recent
| launch of a Polygon blockchain game which drove enough
| transactions to push the gas fees up to half a dollar.
|
| https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/01/06/polygon-under-accid...
|
| They don't seem to really be solving the scalability issues,
| but rather just kicking them down the road, at which point yet
| another blockchain will pop up to "solve" the issue.
| [deleted]
| jollybean wrote:
| In neither of the articles did someone even mention even a use
| case for something even remotely value creating.
|
| I suppose for some, enhanced control and privacy of full
| decentralization has value, but it's a very niche scenario.
|
| Web 1 brought us the internet. It's already decentralized, and it
| changed everything.
|
| Web 3 enabled us to interact a lot more with user-generated
| content. FB, YouTube. Nice, but it has some downsides.
|
| Web 3 ... so far mostly Crypto and NFTs have some possibly
| interesting characteristics but are mostly giant pyramid/MLM
| style scams.
|
| Web 3, so far, is a lot of hot air and a mostly hollow effort,
| it's like Tech Buzfeed. We should be doing better than this.
| boffinism wrote:
| Moxie says 'Ys are often X'. This says that's a 'lie' because
| 'Most Ys are not X'.
|
| Hands up if you see the flaw here.
| yunohn wrote:
| This article also claim that "Z solves the problems mentioned"
| but Z is actually 100 different potential proposals.
| butz wrote:
| So in theory, it might be possible to build a "pirate bay" on
| blockchain (presuming that it has capability to store huge
| amounts of data) and resist DMCA takedowns?
| bambax wrote:
| > _The sooner Opensea dies, the better._
|
| From my understanding of the space and the original article, it
| seems OpenSea will not die and this is pure wishful thinking.
| tobessebot wrote:
| This is the dilemma in a nutshell. There are lots of incredibly
| smart people working in the web3 space who are aware of its
| limitations, but for every one of those, there are 1000 people
| just trying to make as much money as possible.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| OpenSea could very easily die. They have momentum, but not a
| lot of moat. They also don't have a lot of community good will.
| A well funded competitor could take them down quickly.
|
| Might not happen, but as of now it definitely could.
| paulgb wrote:
| According to a Twitter employee, Twitter will piggyback on
| OpenSea verification for verified profile pictures. If it
| ships, that will be a big moat.
|
| https://twitter.com/thesmarmybum/status/1478505321433735169?.
| ..
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| Not particularly. What verification means there is
| verifying that a certain Bored Ape is really on the
| "official" Bored Ape contract. It's verifying the contract
| address and nothing else. The NFTs themselves can be traded
| anywhere, there's no lockin for OpenSea there.
|
| It's trivial for Twitter to add another contract address
| verification source.
| paulgb wrote:
| Will OpenSea verify an NFT minted on a non-OpenSea
| platform? I had assumed the answer is "no" but I'm not
| 100% sure.
|
| > It's trivial for Twitter to add another contract
| address verification source.
|
| It's technically trivial, but then they are putting
| themselves in a position to verify the verifiers. It
| seems like they are outsourcing verification because they
| want to avoid the overhead of deciding what a verified
| NFT is, which is something they would have to do if they
| invited in more sources.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| >Will OpenSea verify an NFT minted on a non-OpenSea
| platform?
|
| Yes. All the popular NFTs were minted on their own
| contracts, not on OpenSea.
|
| My suspicion is Twitter will move to verifying for
| themselves in the long run. I get why they don't want to
| do it to start, but the hassles of dealing with any 3rd
| party will grow over time.
| paulgb wrote:
| I found the form to get verified; it doesn't matter where
| the collection was minted but you have to reach a volume
| threshold on OpenSea.
|
| https://airtable.com/shr6kWzFZ4gWdYE6C
|
| I would bet against Twitter ever entering the NFT
| verification game. They are already in over their head
| with account verification, IMHO.
| bambax wrote:
| > _A well funded competitor could take them down quickly_
|
| Ok, maybe, but that would mean they would be simply replaced
| by more of the same. It would not mean a return to a
| decentralized system.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| Sure. My expectation is Coinbase will clobber them, and I'm
| not excited about that from a decentralization viewpoint.
| They _will_ have a moat since they 're also where a lot of
| people keep their money. Money will never have to leave the
| platform, which is an advantage.
|
| There are projects in the works for decentralized
| exchanges. There are challenges there, but they will
| eventually exist. I doubt they'll ever dominate, though.
| timeon wrote:
| > Money will never have to leave the platform
|
| I wonder if they even need the blockchain.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| It's a fair question. They don't _need_ the blockchain
| until the money /nft leaves the platform. But to keep
| credibility, they'll need the NFTs to show up in on-chain
| addresses. They may end up only doing that on-request.
|
| The NBA TopShot collectibles work on a blockchain, though
| the media being traded (NBA game clips) can only be seen
| on the official platform and you can't sell the
| collectibles on any other platform. And they're their own
| on-ramp by taking credit card purchases for the
| collectibles. As things stand, there's really no good
| reason for them to be on a blockchain at all, and
| personally I don't consider them to be a real NFT. None
| of that has stopped them from being successful, though.
| arunoda wrote:
| > Just to clarify, this is what the author wanted to do. You can
| create distributed apps easily using Fleek or by manually
| uploading to IPFS, Arweave or Filecoin.
|
| Seems like the author has never build an app before. There
| nothing easy even with the current tech. It's much harder with
| the tech they mentioned.
|
| Even with that, there's a centralized system anywhere. Liek
| Arweave's DNS system etc.
| sovietmudkipz wrote:
| The thing I think that sucks that hasn't been covered is how you
| have to have a wallet specific to each blockchain I want to
| interact with. I have to know what blockchain the web3 property
| uses.
|
| Why can't I have a like universal wallet? I don't want my NFTs
| divided among 4-5 wallets, especially as new chains are created
| as time goes on. Kinda a sucky user experience.
|
| That's my nit
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| So far I've read barely one article that mentions web3 _and_
| manages to describe the fundamental concepts and problems.
| Instead, most people writing about this seem to assume that the
| "problems" web3 is supposed to fix are completely self-evident,
| and then everyone who is in favor of the current "vision" of web3
| simply assume that blockchain is the correct technological
| answer.
|
| It doesn't seem that hard to state relatively quickly and simply:
|
| Current ways of handling data online generally result in large
| centralized databases under the control of relatively or
| extremely large corporations, which gives these corporations too
| much control over (a) what data is accessible (b) what can be
| done with the data (c) the lifetime of the data.
|
| Sensible folks generally acknowledge that this either is a
| problem, or is likely to become one.
|
| So the central issue is: how do we have data available online
| without it under the control of corporations that run centralized
| databases?
|
| ----
|
| In response to this, cryptocurrency advocates point to blockchain
| technology and say, in essence, "look! there's an example of a
| technology that does exactly that"
|
| However, for this to be the best solution to the problem requires
| a few things to be true that are either untrue or not known (yet)
| to be true. * was blockchain designed to handle
| arbitrary data blobs, or was it designed to handle transaction
| records? * does pretending that any arbitrary data
| blob can be treated as a transaction record help or hinder
| solutions? * are there other ways to distribute data
| storage and access that don't depend on the fundamental
| technologies/concepts inherent in blockchains?
|
| ----
|
| Why anyone feels they can be certain that the answers all
| indicate that blockchain is the obviously correct technology to
| use for distributed trusted data storage and access totally
| escapes me.
| jollybean wrote:
| Fully agree that these articles often fail to put things in a
| broader context.
|
| But I'll take it a step further than 'Blockchain is not the
| answer' and indicate that Web3 itself probably isn't an answer
| to that much in the first place.
|
| "this either is a problem, or is likely to become one."
|
| Web 1/2 approaches have tremendous advantages.
|
| As the original article stated - people don't want to run
| servers.
|
| People don't want to manage confusing things.
|
| We want everything mostly SaaS.
|
| Some of those push a bit too far, like Apple locking you out of
| your Mac - but this is probably best dealt with with
| legislation.
|
| The privacy and control benefits of self hosting are limited to
| mostly niche use cases, and of course, blockchains have
| problems, as you mention.
|
| Web 2 is just a few bits of legislation, a few rational
| consumer choices, and a few fewer crappy companies away from
| being fairly ideal.
|
| Don't use iCloud, avoid Google for anything other than search,
| don't 'depend' on Facebook or Twitter and already you're doing
| well.
|
| Dialogue and experiments are great, but NFT/Crypto so far is
| just a lot of MLM noise.
| StrLght wrote:
| >Some countries have unstable currencies and to use USD you need
| to pay a hefty fee.
|
| And the solution to this is using unstable internet money which
| are being accepted by a handful of stores? Sounds about right.
| aaomidi wrote:
| > My personal pet hates for crypto are:
|
| > Illegal images being sent to your wallet, forcing you to go to
| prison in some places.
|
| Lol
| JofArnold wrote:
| > This is a lie. Most NFTs which sell for millions use IPFS,
| Arweave, Filecoin or others for decentralised storage of data
|
| Nope - do your research better before you use the word "lie".
| BAYC did it until very very recently for instance. Definitely as
| of 27th September they were using cloud functions as you can
| clearly see in my gist here:
| https://gist.github.com/JofArnold/bf2c4a094fcdd4aee2f52983c7... I
| know there is/was plenty of others too because I looked deeply
| into this around the time.
| [deleted]
| dylkil wrote:
| Ok but currently they are using IPFS so does it matter if they
| once used the cloud? Go here[1] and scroll down to tokenURI and
| input 1 and you will get an IPFS hash back.
|
| [1]
| https://etherscan.io/address/0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061c2e118...
| JofArnold wrote:
| I'm aware which is why I said "very very recently"* (I just
| so happen to have checked when Tweeting this the other day so
| it was fresh in my mind
| https://twitter.com/JofArnold/status/1478071171597975554).
|
| I don't think the fact they are now using IPFS makes it any
| more credible either; IPFS is not a new thing and the
| valuations were huge already by September. They should have
| done it from the start. Furthermore that they can mess around
| with the base URL is not cool.
|
| * Although thanks for posting that as without that fact I
| admit my story was incomplete.
| kristofferR wrote:
| This is a okay response, although the language ain't great.
|
| Half of Moxie's post were using the evil YC company OpenSea as an
| argument against decentralization, which seemed strange. It's
| like arguing against decentralized email because so many use
| Gmail.
|
| The arguments against Infura etc. especially fell flat, as they
| are just proxies to the decentalized blockchain, the only value
| they provide is providing exactly the same decentralized
| blockchain data as your own node would. It's not as decentralized
| as running your own node would be, but to call it centralization
| is still wrong.
| rvense wrote:
| > It's like arguing against decentralized email because so many
| use Gmail.
|
| Which Moxie does often do, including in the web3 article.
|
| I respect Moxie's opinion on (de)centralization, but I just
| have different priorities to him. I am personally more
| concerned about one company (Facebook or Signal, although I do
| use the latter) owning and controlling access to a platform
| than I am about perfect end-to-end encryption and forward
| secrecy.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| The point is that when the proxy is a monopoly, it basically
| becomes the new, centralized source of truth rather than the
| _actual_ decentralized source of truth.
|
| If 90% of wallets utilize the OpenSea API what the blockchain
| says doesn't really matter anymore. OpenSea is effectively the
| new source of truth.
| bambax wrote:
| This response is technical and appears a little naive to me. The
| reason why NFTs are currently hot is because there's a gold rush
| and people fear missing out. I don't think anyone who buys an NFT
| wants that NFT; they just hope to flip it for more money than
| they spent, or maybe diversify their portfolio (use it as a store
| of value). I could be wrong of course, but I seriously doubt it.
|
| Which means, the technical solutions to the questions raised in
| the original article this responds to, will probably not have
| time to be implemented before the rush is over.
|
| Also, one of the main points of the first article, if not the
| main one (and certainly the first one) is that _centralization is
| a feature, not a bug_. People want a central authority and not
| bother themselves with running their own server /infrastructure.
|
| So the only way for OpenSea to "die" is if it's replaced by a
| different, but similar, central authority.
| dade wrote:
| > I don't think anyone who buys an NFT wants that NFT; they
| just hope to flip it for more money than they spent.
|
| Is this not just how financial assets in general works? Anyone
| buying Amazon's share are not buying it because they want that
| share. They buy it because they hope some time down the line
| (weeks, months, years) they can flip it for more money than
| they spent.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Yes. But the intrinsic value of a piece of art is tied to
| someone wanting to own that art for the enjoyment of it. The
| intrinsic value of a stock is tied to the earning power of
| the company you own a small piece of. NFTs have no earning
| power.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| In theory, an Amazon share is a share in future profits of a
| productive business.
| piaste wrote:
| NFTs cannot pay dividends and do not have boards of
| governance.
|
| A share without votes and without dividends would be worth
| $0.
|
| (Also, many NFT shills and/or shovel salesmen fervently
| insist that they're selfless patrons of the arts, rather than
| simply trying to make ponzi cash)
| zrm wrote:
| > centralization is a feature, not a bug
|
| This is not what the original article says. Here's the first
| conclusion:
|
| > _We should accept the premise that people will not run their
| own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust
| without having to distribute infrastructure._
|
| In other words, centralized trust _is_ a bug, but that 's a
| different thing than centralized servers.
|
| The problem with existing NFTs is that they not only don't have
| decentralized servers, they also don't have decentralized
| trust. They're just not what they claim to be at all.
|
| I would also point out that "centralized" isn't a binary thing.
| Having literally everyone run their servers is not really what
| anybody wants, but neither is having one company run a single
| server for everyone in the world, which isn't really what
| happens. Even with a "centralized service" like Facebook, they
| have multiple servers distributed all over the world.
|
| And if the servers didn't have to be trusted, they also
| wouldn't all have to be run by a single company. Having a
| billion servers for a billion users is not what anybody wants,
| but we already have a thousand servers for a billion users. And
| if the servers are not to be trusted anyway, why do we need
| them all to be run by the same entity?
|
| Full atomization rarely works. Federation works.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| >The problem with existing NFTs is that they not only don't
| have decentralized servers, they also don't have
| decentralized trust. They're just not what they claim to be
| at all.
|
| This. And take away the techno-libertarian glamour, it
| becomes just another technology that might have useful
| applications, or might be a huge waste of time, resources,
| and increases complexity and decreases transparency.
| syntheweave wrote:
| The fact that BitTorrent has worked for decades without
| centralizing, and likely never will centralize, stands in
| quiet opposition to the entire "centralization is inevitable"
| line of thinking. The trackers, the obvious centralizing
| force, have always remained content-focused, rather than
| making the transition to platform control. Trackers are
| roughly federated, as you note; there are a lot of nodes, but
| relatively few trackers. And I believe most blockchain style
| systems would shake out similarly.
|
| The authentic dev communities building blockchain tech are
| throwing their weight behind the idea that they will in time
| transition towards technical solutions, having _already_ set
| a course for the social solution. So from their end, this
| criticism is always technical in nature. The initial source
| of trust is going to be in mathematical realities
| guaranteeing certain outcomes: if not cryptography, then
| tokenomics. Of course there are a huge number of "P.T.
| Barnums" who have jumped ahead to create solutions today, and
| these solutions tend to platformize. That's the discontinuity
| making it a circus.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > The fact that BitTorrent has worked for decades without
| centralizing, and likely never will centralize, stands in
| quiet opposition to the entire "centralization is
| inevitable" line of thinking.
|
| Except for all the centralized points you'd be correct.
| BitTorrent requires bootstrap nodes. While these _can_ be
| specified in a torrent file but many clients have some hard
| coded values for bootstrap nodes. If bootstrap nodes are
| unavailable and a torrent doesn 't contain new values a
| BitTorrent client can't do much.
|
| Then there's _finding_ content which doesn 't just
| magically happen. Torrent search engines exist because BT
| doesn't have a built in search system like other P2P
| networks.
|
| Finally there's the central locations where clients are
| developed and distributed. BT clients don't just manifest
| on people's computers. They don't magically update
| themselves.
|
| Cryptobros talk of decentralization as if shit just exists
| in a luminiferous ether. You just wish hard enough and
| things manifest on your system from it. Centralization
| doesn't automatically mean Facebook controls everything.
| Stuff comes together at locii and those are by nature
| central in a network. They can be disrupted, blocked, or
| just disappear and then the network falls apart.
| eqmvii wrote:
| Hey, I'm sure plenty of people are buying NFTs with their own
| money, too. Nice trick to take $X and turn it into 0.98$X and
| an asset "worth" 0.98$X.
| riffraff wrote:
| The thing goes deeper: this gives you a big opportunity to
| launder money. It's the same with art, but at least in the
| art world there are some regulations.
| samatman wrote:
| If you consider the Free Port of Liechtenstein a regulation
| then ok, sure.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Which is probably why he wrote "some regulations," not
| "completely and entirely 100% perfectly regulated."
| rtkwe wrote:
| The wild thing is going to be the moment the IRS comes around
| and starts asking people about their sales and it turns out
| many of the huge sales are wash trades inflating the value of
| tokens.
| jakear wrote:
| It won't be that wild because we won't know about it.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| > I don't think anyone who buys an NFT wants that NFT > I could
| be wrong of course, but I seriously doubt it.
|
| You're wrong. I hold many NFTs that I want just for the sake of
| the art. Sorry to disprove your theory. One of my favorites is
| the Bonsai collection by ZenFT: https://www.zenft.xyz/
|
| Some people use NFTs as simple mementos (free to claim, and
| collect): https://poap.gallery/
|
| People enjoy collecting and displaying NFTs:
| https://oncyber.io/nawkzst People enjoy using their NFTs as
| avatars in Web3 games: https://www.webb.game/ People use NFTs
| to access exclusive areas on Decentraland
| (https://decentraland.org/) and Sandbox
| (https://medium.com/sandbox-game/cyberkongz-vx-partner-
| with-t...
|
| People use NFTs for token-based access to websites or online
| services. People use them for real world events. People spend
| countless hours hanging out on Discord in various communities
| and servers and they build together.
|
| > People want a central authority and not bother themselves
| with running their own server/infrastructure.
|
| People don't want a central authority. Most people don't really
| understand the implications of the technology they use.
| Awareness is higher than it's ever been, however, in the age of
| censorship and deplatforming. It's not sustainable or desirable
| for all of humanity's communication and value exchange to be
| routed through a handful of trillion dollar tech monopolies.
|
| It's not desirable that so much of the web be dominated by
| these entities. It's not good for democracy, it's not good for
| humanity.
|
| > So the only way for OpenSea to "die" is if it's replaced by a
| different, but similar, central authority.
|
| Only those who lack imagination or skill would assert such a
| thing.
| tasha0663 wrote:
| The idea of NFTs as access keys makes me wretch. How can we
| make DRM worse? I know, let's make it speculative and even
| worse for the environment. (Re: proof of stake, I'll believe
| it when it happens without Ethereum forking again)
| TimJRobinson wrote:
| NFTs can actually be the opposite of DRM. They are
| ownership without exclusivity.
|
| It is literally impossible to prevent piracy, but we still
| want people that create art/music/games to get paid - NFTs
| are the solution to this problem. The artist gets paid,
| fans get indie bragging rights, and everyone gets to enjoy
| the content.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > NFTs are actually the opposite of DRM. They are
| ownership without exclusivity.
|
| Their is no ownership without exclusivity.
|
| (And NFTs are exclusive; they just happen to _currently_
| mostly be used as pointers to non-exclusive items with no
| other meaning, but there is nothing inherent in the
| technology restricting them to that use.)
| TimJRobinson wrote:
| > Their is no ownership without exclusivity.
|
| Why not? Plenty of people own parks and gardens that are
| open to the public. Art in galleries is all owned by
| someone but many are free for public viewing. Everyone
| getting to enjoy the thing while the creator still gets
| paid sounds like an awesome future to me.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Why not?
|
| Because "ownership" is the right to exclusivity.
|
| > Plenty of people own parks and gardens that are open to
| the public
|
| You can choose not exercise the right to exclusivity (or
| to do so selectively), but if you don't have it, you
| don't own anything.
|
| > Everyone getting to enjoy the thing while the creator
| still gets paid sounds like an awesome future to me.
|
| Sure, patronage of public art can be great, but it's not
| ownership (except maybe "ownership" of an exclusive right
| to receive some defined form of credit for the
| patronage.)
| scubbo wrote:
| Those things you have described are still exclusive in
| that the owner _could_ prevent public access if they
| chose to.
| 8note wrote:
| the control is exclusive. the owner can always put up a
| fence, or tell people to get off their lawn
| gitgrump wrote:
| Why would I bother with an NFT when I can already
| effortlessly copy bits? Digital property is not physical
| property and I'm not sure why people are still so intent
| on shoehorning the characteristics of the latter into the
| former.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| It's not DRM. It's token-based authentication. Are you
| against token-based authentication? Are you against
| Software-as-a-Service? Are you against membership-based
| organizations as a concept? Are you against board voting by
| stockholders? If you're not against these analogous
| concepts, why would you be against NFT-based versions of
| this?
|
| One difference with NFTs is you retain the right to resale
| and transfer at all times. Which is totally different than
| DRM.
|
| As for Proof of Stake, it's already live:
| https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/beacon-chain/ It was shipped
| in December of 2020.
|
| The remaining component is the Merge, which merges the
| Proof-of-Work chain with the Proof-of-Stake chain:
| https://ethmerge.com/ . That is coming this summer. The
| Ethereum community is almost 100% behind the merge, so it's
| highly unlikely that ETH forks over it, and even if one
| occurred, the forked chain would not succeed.
| 8note wrote:
| Isn't the authentication your private key? The nft would
| be authorization, which sounds a lot like digital rights
| management to me. The power is still with the record
| company to decide whether a sold copy is still valid
| gizmo385 wrote:
| > That is coming this summer.
|
| Hasn't that date been continuously pushed back? Like the
| parent you replied to, I'll believe when I see it. And
| regardless, the mining infrastructure spun up because of
| the gold rush on Ethereum isn't going away at thia point.
| Those miners will just move to different chains.
|
| And while proof of stake does partially minimize some of
| the environmental concerns, it introduces other problems
| that aren't great (like all of the power being
| systematically consolidated into the hands of early
| adopters and the wealthy).
| bambax wrote:
| > _You 're wrong. I hold many NFTs that I want just for the
| sake of the art._
|
| This is an old debate and not really the subject at hand, but
| I'll still bite (against my better judgement).
|
| You don't need to own an NFT to enjoy the art. That's the
| fundamental difference between art in the real world and
| digital art (NFT or not). When you own a piece of art you get
| to look at the original; this is a unique experience in the
| case of a painting, and sometimes a rare experience in the
| case of limited editions of photos.
|
| But the digital art is the same whether you "own it" or not.
| From an esthetic experience (not a financial one, obviously),
| it's pointless to "own" digital art.
|
| The only thing that would influence the esthetic experience
| of digital art is the medium. Buy a better screen. Better
| speakers. Etc.
|
| > _People spend countless hours hanging out on Discord_
|
| Sure. That I don't doubt.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| You don't need an original art work to enjoy the art
| either. You can print out photorealistic copies. You can
| buy a fake Rembrandt. You can buy a fake Gucci purse. It's
| perfectly okay to do that...however...
|
| What you lose is a direct connection to the original
| artist. Art is as much about the story of that artwork as
| it is the art itself.
|
| If an artist mints an NFT and that NFT has has provenance
| that's generally accepted by the community at large, then
| it has all the properties of an original physical artwork.
| Except that you can be more sure of its origin, because the
| blockchain history is immutable and you can trace the
| transactions back to the original creator.
|
| Music NFTs have been created, although they are certainly
| still nascent, it's possible to create an MP3-based NFT
| that has the same or better quality as a CD album. One
| could imagine NFT albums being minted just like CD and
| record albums of yore. One could imagine people collecting
| the NFTs just for the sake of actually owning the rights to
| backup and play that music without having to stream through
| Spotify or YouTube. One could imagine the user retaining
| the right to resell that album just like they had the right
| to resell a used CD back in the day.
|
| I already gave many examples above about how NFTs can be
| used beyond the basic use-case of attaching a JPEG (access
| to services, access to software, use in cross-game or
| cross-app experiences, etc).
|
| Some people are collecting them as Proofs of Attendance
| (POAPS), which are free NFTs used as badges. They're quite
| popular and fun to collect. I do so for the pure enjoyment
| of them. Sometimes the badges above are used for things
| like giveaways. If I want to reward loyal community
| members, I can issue a POAP for attending a particular
| video chat, and then give out random rewards to anyone
| holding one of my community's POAPs. That's cool, and fun.
| I've been in communities where we create our own POAPs as
| funny shared inside jokes.
| 8note wrote:
| If the music is on the blockchain, and the uploader
| didn't own the rights to distribute the music, isn't
| every blockchain host commiting copywriter infringement
| by distributing the music to anyone that reads the
| blockchain?
|
| Don't you still have the ability to listen to the cd post
| sale because you can always load up an older version of
| the blockchain where you did own it?
| kylebyproxy wrote:
| To my ear, this all sounds like you're saying
| participation in NFT is performance art, which I hadn't
| really considered before, but I can kinda make sense of
| the appeal in that light. It just seems in bad taste to
| me that a person would claim ownership of someone else's
| work. But to each their own.
| Nemi wrote:
| What you are saying is not that you like the art for it's
| artistic value, because it has been established that you
| can look at it whether you own it or not. What you enjoy
| is the "ego" part of saying you "own" the NFT in
| question, just like people that buy expensive paintings
| when they say they are not buying it for the money, but
| instead that they are an art lover. You are doing it
| because it strokes your ego. Let's at least get past the
| part of the argument where we pretend that looking at the
| art is question the main driver. I am not even saying
| that the ego part is inherently wrong, just different
| than how you describe it. It is non-monetary at least,
| but I can see how describing it this way is not as
| altruistic sounding as "loving the art" is.
| mthoms wrote:
| I agree with the general point (I think) you're making
| but I think there is some nuance here. It's not _just_
| ego, at least not for everybody.
|
| There is extra enjoyment to be had knowing that you came
| into ownership of something according to a set of agreed
| upon rules. That is to say "legitimate" ownership.
| Legitimate NFT's can make one feel part of a community so
| there is value in that.
|
| Perhaps most importantly, "legitimate" ownership
| generally implies that the artist(s) were compensated by
| you (somewhat) directly. That, in itself can enhance the
| enjoyment. There are more factors at play than merely
| ego.
|
| I'll give a personal, real-world example. I own ~$1000
| item that I bought as part of fundraiser for someone
| struggling with medical bills. I was also friends with
| the creator and wanted to support their work. So, even
| though I paid much more than I would have paid had I just
| bought it directly, I get a great deal of extra
| satisfaction out of owning this item. I supported two
| different people whom I admire by purchasing it. That
| makes me happy.
|
| I'm not a huge fan of NFT's (as they exist currently) but
| I don't think it's correct that enjoying ownership of NFT
| art, or art in general, is solely ego-based.
| kortilla wrote:
| > You don't need an original art work to enjoy the art
| either. You can print out photorealistic copies.
|
| Something tells me you don't care much for paintings if
| you think this is in any way a similar media.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| Basically, you are saying NFT creators can create any
| type of digital artwork in any type of media that they
| want, and NFT collectors can collect them for any number
| of reasons. Maybe some of that is stored on chain, maybe
| some is not.
|
| So then, what is a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) actually good
| for? The answer seems to be proofs of provenance,
| ownership, and authenticity.
|
| Provenance is defined as the place where something
| originally came or began, or a record tracing the
| ownership history of certain items that helps to confirm
| their authenticity and value. How many things in the
| world need a proof of provenance? Paper towels? No. Corn?
| No. Cars? Yes, maybe. Art? Yes, as established, but not
| everyone likes art like they do their cars, at least in
| the West. So, market sizes matter. A good idea is only as
| good as the market, and NFTs aren't an idea that is
| actually sold, it's an idea on an idea of selling
| something. Like marketing, NFTs are more like a meme than
| a product or service. (I realize some people consider
| marketing to include market analysis, which is something
| else entirely.)
|
| But, who runs the car provenance proofs? Do we put all
| the data about the car on the chain? That would be too
| much data for current chains. I suspect, like the speed
| of computers, an increase in throughput will just result
| in more junk on the chain. How much junk can a chain
| take? Not much, I'd hazard. How do you sell your car NFT
| to grandpa when the car chain is full of junk? You
| probably don't.
|
| But, there isn't really much in which I need to prove
| ownership. My house and my truck have titles. It's
| pointless to make NFTs for them, given the state runs the
| database and the state is pretty good at this by now,
| especially given they take money from me for property tax
| and plates. I don't care to prove ownership of anything
| else. What I have in my possession is enough proof. The
| police would take a photo of my 3d printer as proof of
| ownership if it were stolen and then located in my
| neighbor's house.
|
| The whole idea about using NFTs to share(holder) out my
| house or truck is also pointless. To make me pay someone
| that held an NFT on a share of my house is going to be a
| challenge. There's probably a contract somewhere that
| would do more good in forcing my hand to pay up, like the
| mortgage company would do if I had a mortgage and
| defaulted. But, is it useful? I guarantee attorneys will
| get involved if that happens.
|
| Authenticity? Who cares? In this age of mass consumption,
| the focus of NFTs on art defines a very small market. In
| fact, I'd say the desire by some to "collect", of a
| certain generation maybe, is pretty pointless. It reminds
| me of my friend buying a bunch of Hot Wheels in his 20s
| because he thought not opening them and playing with them
| would make them worth more in the future. He had a huge
| collection in his attic. I don't trade things like this,
| but many do, and I appreciate that they may think NFTs
| help with their "hobby".
|
| At the end of the day NFTs are made for the imagination -
| which is why the conversation always turns to gaming.
| They cater to it like nothing else. They make people
| think that "value" is a real thing and that it can
| somehow be "preserved" by using a series of calculations.
| I get that some people love the idea of NFTs so much,
| they can't help but spread that love to others. The only
| problem I see with that is that there really is no killer
| use case here. Instead, we get things like NFTs of blocks
| of tungsten that can only be touched once a year or
| saving that "special moment" in game that will be
| forgotten by the mind in a year.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > If an artist mints an NFT and that NFT has has
| provenance
|
| It has zero provenance
|
| > that's generally accepted by the community at large
|
| Ah yes, that's why art isn't counterfeited en masse
| because community something something. Oh wait...
|
| Also. "Community at large" is literally "we need an
| institution of trust".
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| If someone says they enjoy thing A and don't enjoy thing B,
| we should take that at face value rather than arguing about
| the logic of that position. Some people don't enjoy owning
| original art either, and who am I to say they're
| objectively wrong to not enjoy it?
| [deleted]
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Discord, being closed and centralized, is a very "web2"
| software to use ?
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Discord is centralized. Yes, and? We are not in the end
| state of Web3 yet. Web3 is nascent and new. And we have to
| use some of the existing infrastructure to bootstrap it.
| Just as the internet was bootstrapped by the Department of
| Defense (via ARPAnet). Ideally we transition to a
| decentralized chat service at some point (some communities
| do use Matrix or Status), but in the meantime, we can't let
| perfect be the enemy of good.
| fivea wrote:
| > (...) is that centralization is a feature, not a bug.
|
| Please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't centralization in
| blockchain-related applications a critical problem which
| defeats the whole purpose of said tech?
|
| I mean, if a Blockchain is controlled by a single entity,
| doesn't that entity have all it needs to rewrite it however
| they wish?
|
| And also, is there any difference between storing a record in a
| centrally-managed Blockchain or a record in plain old
| relational database managed by a third party?
| bambax wrote:
| This is all discussed in the original article ("My first
| impressions of Web3"). The post here is a response to the
| article. My comment says that the response may have missed
| the point made in the article.
| fivea wrote:
| > This is all discussed in the original article
|
| I read both posts, and I still have this question.
|
| Is it possible to provide a clear and simple explanation?
| Is there any answer at all which is not the expected
| "you're right, centralized crypto is pointless at best and
| a scam at worse"?
|
| Otherwise this sort of reply feels like a blatant attempt
| to dismiss a concern through hand-waving for which there is
| no good answer without addressing any of it's points.
| resonious wrote:
| If by "centralized crypto" we mean "everyone using
| OpenSea" (or similar custodian services) then the point
| is that OpenSea _doesn 't have full control over the
| data_.
|
| I can build a competitor to OpenSea that has access to
| everyone's NFT ownership data because it's in a public
| blockchain. If Twitter decides to shut down their
| service, it's gone.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| Then how did OpenSea remove the NFT from Moxie's wallet?
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| His particular wallet pointed to OpenSea by default for
| his NFTs.
|
| There are other wallets that do not, and the NFT never
| left Moxie's address.
| outside1234 wrote:
| They stopped hosting the URL that the blockchain pointed
| to
| jakear wrote:
| This isn't correct. Moxie hosts the image, OpenSea hosts
| the endpoint the wallet queries for ownership listing.
| The whole system is glorified CRUD, OpenSea always has
| full control.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| The original article by Moxie explains this.
|
| My understanding is, _some_ centralization doesn't defeat
| the purpose of the blockchain. e.g. if a centralized
| server stores and modifies the blockchain but it's
| public, then clients can verify the blockchain, and fork
| it if they don't agree with the server.
|
| But too much centralization, which seems to be the case
| now, basically does defeat the purpose. Because if
| everyone is using the same client and server or if people
| are interacting with these services insecurely exposing
| their wallets and data, then these companies could switch
| their backend to not use a blockchain or just steal
| coins. Most people probably wouldn't even notice, and
| even if they did there's nothing they could do.
| eternalban wrote:
| No, Moxie correctly pointed out that the _trust model_
| and _physical infrastructure_ are distinct architectural
| elements, and, it is good /ok to have decentralized for
| the former but centralized for the latter. The reason why
| was the long preamble about evolution of platforms vs
| protocols, and user preference for 3rd party managed
| convenience.
|
| -- ps
|
| So the question is whether it is possible to have
| effective solutions in that design space. Email in fact
| fits these design parameters: end users can use PGP and
| PKI to have private and authenticated communication, but
| as Moxie knows far better than me, it hasn't happened
| because now we have shifted the burden of running
| 'something' back to the end user again, who is now
| responsible for participating in a 'decentralized trust'
| system.
|
| It appears the problem is reducible to (and thus is
| fundamentally about) _identity_ and _associated
| attributes of an identity_.
|
| So what we really need is a decentralized identity
| infrastructure with 'last mile' interfaces to your
| physical political jurisdiction for those who want
| "legal" attribution for fully decentralized interactions
| (possibly built on centralized infrastructure). All other
| "Web3" systems can be built on top of these.
| [deleted]
| politician wrote:
| I agree that we need decentralized identity
| infrastructure similar to sovrin.org, but what we're
| going to get is "Login with Facebook" and "Login with
| Apple ID".
| 6510 wrote:
| Real-name system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-
| name_system
| politician wrote:
| It's fascinating to learn that historically surnames were
| issued by governments.
| dmcgee wrote:
| Is a blockchain strictly necessary for decentralization
| at all? If the issue with decentralization is control and
| governance rather than technology, why not have a
| cooperative model that still functions on a centralized
| database?
| DarylZero wrote:
| The cooperative model requires people to coordinate on
| choosing the same human authority figure.
|
| Blockchain only requires people to coordinate on choosing
| the same programmatic criteria for block validity (and
| then choosing the longest valid chain).
| bombcar wrote:
| Which practically ends up the same - see the Etherium
| fork/rollback.
|
| One _potential_ use maybe would be a blockchain that is
| openly run by a company (80+% of nodes or something) but
| if you also run a note it could continue after the
| company ceases to be.
|
| There are other ways to do that but it might almost be a
| reasonable use case.
| DarylZero wrote:
| You can point to that event but it's actually not enough
| to establish that it "practically ends up the same."
| stransky wrote:
| You can ignore the event, but the trust we're to put in
| the blockchain is based on a promise that such an event
| can't happen, but it did.
| rglullis wrote:
| I'm guessing your question is rhetorical, but in case it
| isn't:
|
| Repeat after me: "blockchain is only required if you want
| to solve a problem that deals with permissionless,
| trustless and distributed consensus".
|
| - permissionless: no previous
| vetting/authentication/authorization of any participant.
| If you can a priori authenticate users, you can have a
| decentralized system with Paxos, and you can run a
| "decentralized" governance system based on simple "web of
| trust".
|
| - trustless: no participant is assumed to be
| reliable/honest
|
| - distributed: the network can suffer disconnections and
| partitions, but the overall system can still work.
|
| If you can choose who will be allowed to define
| "consensus", you can use other BFT consensus solutions,
| so no blockchain is needed.
|
| If you have a "cooperative" model, this assumes that you
| can trust the participants, so no blockchain is needed.
|
| If your system can withstand network
| disconnections/partitions, no blockchain is needed.
| 8note wrote:
| Participant needs a better definition. I'd think block
| chain requires trusting _every_ participant.
|
| The private key must always be trusted for what the
| person behind it intends for it to do
| jhgb wrote:
| > - trustless: no participant is assumed to be
| reliable/honest
|
| Shouldn't that be "at least one participant is assumed to
| be unreliable/dishonest"?
| oblio wrote:
| They're equivalent. If at least 1 participant is
| unreliable/dishonest and I don't know which one, the only
| logical reaction is to treat them all the same until I
| can determine the culpable one.
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| Perhaps, but it feels a bit like the Monty Hall
| paradox/game. If you know which ones are more truthful,
| then the odds aren't as bad as "everyone must be guilty
| until proven innocent."
|
| "Innocent until proven guilty," the modus operandi of the
| US judicial system, at least in theory, is the design of
| a system that assumes trust and removes offenders.
| rglullis wrote:
| It's not about "justice" or "fairness". It's about
| "correctness". An "honest" agent with stale data is as
| unreliable as the "dishonest" one.
|
| When dealing with Byzantine-style problems, there is no
| such thing of "who is more truthful?", just "what is the
| consensus that should be agreed on?"
| pmontra wrote:
| The point seems to be: the blockchain is distributed but if
| everybody access to it through only a handful of nodes
| (because they don't want to host their own ones) then it
| could be centralized and nobody would notice the difference.
|
| If there is only one node acting as gateway to the blockchain
| then it could use PostgreSQL and there would be no
| differences in trust.
| ludamad wrote:
| Are there SQL servers intended for direct public usage?
| EDIT: I do understand the ubiquity of SQL servers :) I'm
| asking about ones that expose a good chunk of SQL to end
| users, since theoretically one could build on that
| magicalist wrote:
| REST APIs usually have a database behind them, yes.
| ludamad wrote:
| That's not what I meant, I meant 'direct' as in
| permissioned by end users
| thrashh wrote:
| NFTs aren't permissioned by end users. The person that
| deployed the smart contract still controls all
| permissions (although they can't change it later -- that
| is the only difference).
|
| The reason that you can trade a NFT is because the smart
| contract has an API written by the creator to allow it.
| setr wrote:
| What's the point of this ask? A blockchain's dataset
| isn't arbitrarily editable by its users -- there's a very
| specific set of actions you can do, which are well
| defined, that modify the chain in a very structured
| manner... just as any API sitting in front of a database
| would do.
|
| Obviously you can modify your local copy of the chain as
| you wish, even corrupting the data, but if your chain
| isn't accepted by the public, your changes don't mean
| shit. So you're really only able to (meaningfully)
| execute those public-allowed operations
| [deleted]
| Animats wrote:
| _Which means, the technical solutions to the questions raised
| in the original article this responds to, will probably not
| have time to be implemented before the rush is over._
|
| Especially since those solutions would reduce the influence and
| revenue of the biggest players. It's like trying to replace
| Facebook with Diaspora. It's technically possible, and going
| nowhere.
|
| The article lists success stories for NFTs: "Axie Infinity and
| how it's bringing entire nations out of poverty"[1] Axie
| Infinity is a play-to-earn game. It's like Pokemon, with
| breeding and training and fighting, for real money. Players
| need about US$1500 to play, and earn Smooth Love Potion Tokens.
| This really caught on in the Philippines, and people were
| quitting their day job to play.
|
| The article was from June 2021, when Axie was on the way up and
| Smooth Love Token was peaking around $0.35. Axie is now a Ponzi
| on the way down. This morning, Smooth Love Potion Token is down
| to $0.01897 and dropping.[2] Since all revenue came from new
| players, this was inevitable.
|
| The NFT market is Axie Infinity, OpenSea, CryptoPunks, and the
| little guys. As with most things online, the top 3 have most of
| the market share.[3] Axie is crashing. OpenSea is stalling.
| Profitable NFT resales aren't happening much, and there's a
| glut of new issuers.
|
| By the time the problems Moxie points out are fixed, this is
| going to be over. Especially since for US players there's a 28%
| capital gains tax rate on collectables resold within 12 months.
|
| [1] https://www.notboring.co/p/infinity-revenue-infinity-
| possibi...
|
| [2] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/
|
| [3] https://bitcoinke.io/2022/01/the-nft-market-in-2021/
| mikeodds wrote:
| I'm in it for the money if the prices goes up, I'm in it for
| the art if the price drops
| fivea wrote:
| > I'm in it for the money if the prices goes up, I'm in it
| for the art if the price drops
|
| From the looks of it, if the price drops at best we're in it
| for that sweet sweet URL pointing to Google Drive/imgur.
| doopy1 wrote:
| You're right that there's a gold rush / land grab happening,
| but I disagree that there are people who buy NFTs that don't
| actually want the NFT and see it purely as a speculative asset.
| I think that the internet world is struggling to define what
| "digital ownership" means and looks like in the future and
| there are a bunch of people that are attracted to the idea of
| NFTs as the answer to that. I think there are lots of
| motivations for being involved with NFTs, but of course
| speculation is the most common.
| giantrobot wrote:
| NFTs don't give you ownership of anything. They're simply a
| public record saying someone was dumb enough to trade
| something valuable for something worthless.
|
| Someone posted a link yesterday to an NFT they "own". I saved
| it to my computer, changed the file name, and uploaded it to
| a server. They had and have zero agency to stop me from doing
| so. Their NFT "purchase" didn't transfer any copyrights to
| them recognized by any entity with means to enforce
| copyrights. I can do whatever I want with those bytes I
| downloaded and the owner can't do a damned thing to me.
|
| So what "ownership" do they have? They don't control
| redistribution. They don't physically possess a thing. They
| can't assert some sort of exclusionary control over who gets
| to see a thing.
|
| Some record in a slow expensive database just says a wallet
| to which they have the private key transferred Geoffrey
| dollars to another wallet for the contents pointed to by an
| IPFS identifier. That's one of the more complicated ways I've
| seen to throw money away but it's not ownership.
| shrimpx wrote:
| The huge gap between aspirations and technology continues to be
| the core problem for the crypto space. I keep seeing the excuse
| "it's still early days", but it's been 14 years since the
| inception of proof of work blockchains. 14 years is the gap
| between the founding of Netscape and millions of people using
| iPhones.
| squabble wrote:
| A central authority can be advantageous, until it becomes
| dysfunctional or prioritizes its own interests over the
| interests of those it serves.
| oblio wrote:
| Yeah, but real life doesn't really work efficiently with
| backup plans, that's the problem.
|
| For efficiency what we do is we centralize and wherever
| possible we add safeguards and controls to the central
| authority, as auditors call them, mitigations.
| nrjames wrote:
| You may be correct with OpenSea and Ethereum. The art/NFT scene
| on Tezos seems different, with maybe 80% of people focused on
| the art itself and collecting for the sake of holding for
| personal enjoyment. The prices are much lower, in general, and
| gas fees largely nonexistent. This makes it easier for people
| without significant resources to participate. Check out
| objkt.com, hicetnunc.art, fxhash, etc - the vibe is almost
| completely different than the Ethereum marketplaces.
| mmmeff wrote:
| chrisco255 wrote:
| One point about NFT metadata and the debate about whether it's
| centralized or not.
|
| NFTs don't all have to be maximally decentralized. It should be
| perfectly okay that some NFTs are not on-chain, purely immutable
| artwork. Besides the extreme constraints that places on the art
| (given that data storage on a blockchain not purpose-built for
| storage is expensive), there are some advantages to having
| mutable NFTs.
|
| You can create evolving NFTs by making them mutable. Users can
| upgrade their skins (such as adding a Santa hat during
| Christmas). The NFTs could respond to real-world events (maybe
| the weather or the outcome of a sporting event influences the
| artwork). You can use them as game characters that level up in
| response to playtime, presumably the artwork for the character
| would change as the character levels up, etc.
|
| It's very difficult to do the above in an immutable, pure
| fashion, without thinking of all the possibilities beforehand.
| It's okay that just the mere ownership transfer mechanic is
| decentralized. Yes, a project could theoretically rug its users
| and change the art to a poop emoji, but in practice projects
| develop a reputation over time and those that foster goodwill
| stand to gain more from community loyalty than they'd gain from
| pulling B.S.
|
| Even in the case that a project were to rug its community,
| however, it's entirely possible for the community to create a new
| smart contract that "wraps" the NFT as a new NFT (you deposit an
| NFT from a particular collection, and get back a new NFT and the
| old NFT is burned). And if enough members of a community rallied
| around the wrapped version, then it could be treated as a
| consensus fork.
|
| Escape hatches are one of the features that distinguish Web3 from
| Web2.
| md_ wrote:
| The author seems to miss that one of Moxie's central criticisms
| is that, all else being equal, distributed solutions tend to lag
| centralized ones.
|
| The reason for OpenSea et al. providing centralized services
| isn't accidental--it's not that it's "early days"--but that
| _whenever_ there 's an opportunity to innovate, those innovations
| will first appear for centralized services.
|
| If we hope for distributed solutions to be _on par_ with
| centralized, we are in effect hoping for an inefficient market,
| or one without innovation (giving distributed services time to
| catch up).
|
| This criticism, in a way, has little to do with "Web3" at all.
| Instead, it's justification for the _alternative_ solution Moxie
| has been working toward: one where crypto(graphy, not currency)
| allows the cost and feature advantages of centralization while
| preserving (or in fact exceeding) the user privacy of distributed
| solutions.
|
| (I have _some_ criticisms of Moxie 's vision, but the author
| seems not to engage with the argument's real substance.)
| practice9 wrote:
| > The author seems to miss that one of Moxie's central
| criticisms is that, all else being equal, distributed solutions
| tend to lag centralized ones.
|
| Distributed crypto offerings do not lag much behind in terms of
| features, but they are costly and inefficient, which drives
| most users to centralized solutions.
|
| This creates positive network effects for OpenSea (nft),
| Binance, Coinbase (crypto trading).
|
| L2 / zk-rollups / validiums have potential to change this
| balance of power by introducing low-cost, fast transactions.
|
| Which can be achieved by making transaction
| execution/verification faster through ZK proofs and offloading
| execution off-chain (without sacrificing security). There is
| intense competition in the space (zkSync, Polygon Hermez,
| Starkware, Loopring and others).
|
| Some large players like banks or BaaS companies may create or
| license their own private rollups.
|
| So far most wallets do not support L2 rollups, I've only heard
| of Argent supporting zkSync.
|
| This is of course a hybrid solution, not for purists.
|
| Blockchain critics will have fun criticizing it for the next 5
| years while it scales. :)
| 8note wrote:
| what would be the time required to add transaction
| invalidation to the bitcoin blockchain to undo frauduluent
| transactions?
| md_ wrote:
| It's a fair point, but it's unclear to me to what extent
| these hybrid solutions retain the advantages of blockchain
| and to what extent they give them up.
|
| I'm not at all an expert, but I've been wondering if a world
| where we all regularly use Bitcoin, but only via large,
| centralized L2 networks, would be one which feels exactly
| like the world of today, except (say) Visa or Stripe use
| Bitcoin instead of...fedwire? I dunno?...for clearance. And
| as a user, would that actually benefit me?
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| >but that whenever there's an opportunity to innovate, those
| innovations will first appear for centralized services.
|
| This isn't really true, though. Even in the example he gave,
| NFT royalties, they appeared first in individual NFT contracts
| before they were on OpenSea.
| groovecoder wrote:
| This was the part I latched onto in Moxie's piece too: "A
| protocol moves much more slowly than a platform. After 30+
| years, email is still unencrypted; meanwhile WhatsApp went from
| unencrypted to full e2ee in a year. People are still trying to
| standardize sharing a video reliably over IRC; meanwhile, Slack
| lets you create custom reaction emoji based on your face."
|
| In the Firefox OS days here at Mozilla, I was a huge believer
| and advocate for our desire to push web protocols & standards
| into mobile. But as it turns out, proprietary walled-garden
| mobile platforms move faster than web standards - who knew?!
|
| But, I like the phrase you used - "hoping for an inefficient
| market". At this point in my tech career and looking around at
| what the tech market is doing in the world, I think slowing
| down and getting less efficient might be good for us?
| tasha0663 wrote:
| I have a feeling it's more broadly true that centralization is
| an emergent property of networks. Webs 3 -> n are no exception.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Reasonable rebuttal to reasonable article. I wouldn't accuse MM
| of lying, though, I think it's very easy to miss something like
| whether a thing is normally held on a simple apache VPS.
|
| As for dipping your toes, I'd say it's maybe the hardest area of
| coding to do that in. Generally I find the documentation is
| lacking, everything is moving really quickly, there's a huge
| amount of jargon, and there's a huge number of protocols and
| standards to read about, with very little authority on what is
| worth spending time on.
|
| I have a collection of comments in my side projects where I've
| discovered various surprising things about how blockchain stuff
| works. Others I know have similar pages of notes on how
| particular things in the space are arranged.
|
| Moxie captures why this is so: there's a gold rush, and
| appearances seem to matter more than substance.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| > NFTs are only 3 years old
|
| No they're not.
|
| I co-founded Fabrica.land in 2017, and in mid 2018 we used an NFT
| to perform a real estate transaction. That's already 3.5 years,
| and NFTs were already around. The first transaction was a bit
| "rough", but perfectly valid. Lot of progress since then.
|
| From [0]: The ERC-20 (Ethereum Request for Comments 20), proposed
| by Fabian Vogelsteller in November 2015, is a Token Standard that
| implements an API for tokens within Smart Contracts.
|
| Note: yes, ERC-20 has a few flaws [1], and subsequent ERC have
| improved on it.
|
| [0]:
| https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/standards/tokens/erc...
|
| [1]: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/20
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| ERC-20 is for fungible tokens, not NFTs, as I'm sure you know.
| If you want to trace that idea back, you can go to Vitalik's
| colored coins idea for bitcoin that predates Ethereum all
| together.
|
| But yes, it's true that NFTs are older than 3 years old. I
| thought that was an odd statement.
| 70rd wrote:
| An ERC-20 token with supply of 1 is non-fungible.
| nedstarkin wrote:
| Holy Moly ---"A lot of NFTs do use Google Drive or Imgur or
| whatever."---is this true.
| dylkil wrote:
| Yes, and a lot of people hand their money to lazy scammers who
| use imgur as the file host
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Every user will have to pay for everything.
|
| Ahahaha. No.
|
| More seriously: if "everyone" pays it means there will be a few
| who are going to reap all the profits. Glorious future, indeed
| floatboth wrote:
| Buttcoiners' "future" is all about financializing everything.
| They have ZERO claim to "good old web 1.0 decentralization"
| because the original web was all about information wanting to
| be free!
| timeon wrote:
| Well their answer for freedom is chain.
|
| No thanks. Don't chain on me.
| dylkil wrote:
| those who reap the profits will be network validators, which as
| of today is ~300k validators[1]
|
| [1]https://beaconscan.com/
| meltedcapacitor wrote:
| How is ownership distributed? Out of this 300k are 298k
| aliases of Alice and 2k aliases of Bob? Is there a third dude
| maybe?
| CPLX wrote:
| I feel like someone should take the phrase "This is true at the
| moment, but there is work being done on..." and set it to a
| catchy melody, since it's clearly the national anthem of the
| crypto community.
|
| For the verses of the song I would suggest lines such as:
|
| "The proposed solutions solve this"
|
| "But this is not always true, you can"
|
| "We are actively building alternatives!"
| chias wrote:
| "Toss a coin to your witcher, o valley of plenty..."
| esrauch wrote:
| > A lot of NFTs do use Google Drive or Imgur or whatever.
| However, I can promise you that one of the first things people do
| when making sure they are not rugged (crypto-term for scammed) is
| to make sure it's not possible for the author to suddenly delete
| or change the image.
|
| I'm curious about this point; if the only thing stored on the
| chain is a URL (including Drive/Imgur) then there's no possible
| way to actually preclude the content from changing right?
|
| It actually does seem very weird that people aren't at least
| putting a #sha1= in the NFT URL to be able to verifiably know if
| the underlying content did change.
| superfad wrote:
| > I'm curious about this point; if the only thing stored on the
| chain is a URL (including Drive/Imgur) then there's no possible
| way to actually preclude the content from changing right?
|
| When you use something like IPFS the url is created from a hash
| of the file contents, so it is not possible to change the file
| without creating a new url.
| le-mark wrote:
| > to be able to verifiably know if the underlying content did
| change.
|
| Indeed that would seem to be the point of the entire exercise!
| vmception wrote:
| I've seen all of the above.
|
| I've inspected NFT contracts and saw they were designed wrong
| with a direct link to a website that could go down
|
| And I still minted or bought them because the community or game
| was interesting
|
| I've also seen extremely clever completely onchain nfts. I like
| those.
| hakcermani wrote:
| seems simple enough right .. to add a ?h=HASH_OF_IMAGE in the
| URL .. maybe the real issue is that fact that the server pr the
| actual image itself can disappear ?
| [deleted]
| yunohn wrote:
| > Both of the proposed solutions solve this.
|
| Moxie spoke about how web3 currently works. Not about the
| hundreds of proposed solutions. And no, proposals don't "solve"
| anything, until they're actually implemented and tested.
| rainsford wrote:
| I think it's even worse than that, because a significant part
| of Moxie's argument is that the current centralized web3
| approaches have structural advantages (especially speed of
| innovation) that will leave the "proposed solutions" constantly
| trying to catch up. And the incredible popularity of the
| centralized approaches seems to suggest users in the web3 space
| value those advantages more than they value adhering to the
| distributed principles supposedly at the heart of web3.
|
| To their credit, the author of the rebuttal acknowledges that
| the Opensea type approaches are problematic, but misses the
| greater argument around _why_ they 're popular and why trying
| to replace them with something "better" will be difficult.
| jack_pp wrote:
| And adopted
| [deleted]
| syntheweave wrote:
| I should note that while I don't know of a "illegal image lives
| on-chain" solution, a solution to "illegal image is sent to your
| wallet" is found in Grin's Slatepacks: transactions have a
| synchronous component, so the receiver has to accept them.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| > This is true, wallets suck so much it's funny. I was sent a
| PS2k NFT the other day which I can't sell because Opensea has
| glitched and my wallet won't show me the NFT, which means I can't
| send it or sell it!
|
| This is not true. An NFT that follows the ERC721 contract
| standard has a `safeTransferFrom()` function that a token holder
| can call to initiate a transfer. You do not have to depend on
| OpenSea:
| https://etherscan.io/address/0x5754f44bC96F9F0Fe1a568253452a...
|
| You can also use an alternative NFT swapping protocol, such as
| the ZeroX-backed Trader.xyz: https://trader.xyz/ (fully open
| source) to initiate a swap.
| tuangeek wrote:
| https://trader.xyz looks interesting. Do you have a link to the
| open source project?
| yunohn wrote:
| Yes, quite ironic that the author denounces OpenSea while
| simultaneously ignoring that they could actually sell their NFT
| elsewhere if they wanted to. This demonstrates the value of
| marketplace centralisation.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| It doesn't. Just demonstrates how nascent this space really
| is.
|
| Decentralized exchanges for fungible assets already exist and
| work extremely well (and I prefer to centralized exchanges
| whenever possible), such as Uniswap
| (https://app.uniswap.org/#/swap), Curve (https://curve.fi/),
| and Sushi (https://app.sushi.com/en/swap).
|
| Decentralized exchanges for NFTs are being worked on. No one
| has quite nailed the full end-to-end user experience yet, but
| it will happen. It's inevitable.
| detaro wrote:
| The problem that the wallet system (which especially the
| web3-folks push as "you login with your wallet, so easy!"
| etc), which is very much supposed to be the user agent is
| hiding it from him, instead of allowing him to interact with
| it _is_ another failure, even if "moving to less-broken
| wallet software" is a solution.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| The real problem is that showing a user what NFTs they own
| requires an indexing service.
|
| Each NFT collection is represented by its own smart
| contract. So the only way to show a user what NFTs they
| have is to either iterate over all of the ERC721 contracts
| on the blockchain and iterate over all of the tokenIds
| calling `ownerOf()` for each one (millions upon millions of
| tokenIds to iterate through) or to maintain an indexing
| service that listens for transfer and mint events and
| updates state continuously for every wallet address.
|
| Another issue is that someone can send an NFT to an address
| with or without being requested, just like an email can be
| sent with or without being requested. On cheaper networks,
| spam NFTs are a real problem. So OpenSea will hide NFTs
| unless they're from a reputable collection.
|
| In my opinion, OpenSea's key strength is their indexing
| service. Beating OpenSea in a decentralized manner will
| require a decentralized indexer. Protocols like The Graph
| (https://thegraph.com/en/) are an example of how to do that
| in a decentralized way.
| ruiramos wrote:
| I guess he depended on Opensea to find someone to sell it to
| yunohn wrote:
| > "Axie Infinity and how it's bringing entire nations out of
| poverty" https://www.notboring.co/p/infinity-revenue-infinity-
| possibi...
|
| No way I can take someone seriously if they think Axie Infinity
| is saving the Philippines/Vietnam from poverty.
|
| Edit:
|
| Crypto maximalists don't understand history, economics, or
| globalism. All while claiming that crypto will solve for
| globalised economies and save people from poverty.
|
| Do they know why these countries are poor? Do they understand
| colonialism and modern slave labor? Or that colonising countries
| dictate the global economy and devalue developing world
| currencies? And that these countries are poor by design, and
| their weakened economic status is a result of colonial history?
|
| How does a "Play 2 Earn" game that is provably negative sum by
| making money from fees - where the poor "scholars" have to rent
| tokens from the rich "lords" and share 30% of their income with,
| help the poor come out of poverty?
|
| This is crypto colonialism for crying out loud!
| [deleted]
| cfup wrote:
| I completely agree with you. Crypto bros for some reasons think
| they are saving the world. The original claim is just pure
| ignorance. To get start with Axie or other so-called GameFI,
| players need to have money first. For people with small
| capitals, they need to participate in 'Guild' and borrow the
| money from the rich (be it in digital or physical world). So,
| it is just capitalism all over again. Spending all your time
| maximizing some games won't save a nation from poverty.
| Mandelmus wrote:
| See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29716900 re:Axie
| Infinity and the " saving the Philippines/Vietnam from poverty"
| bs
| vanusa wrote:
| _Axie Infinity and how it's bringing entire nations out of
| poverty_
|
| Yup, that's quite a zinger there. Seriously, what is with these
| people?
| whb07 wrote:
| Cringe.
|
| The US was a colony to the UK. Singapore was some shanty island
| town that even Malaysia did NOT want to take in because how bad
| it was.
|
| Just like you cannot have a fit body without exercising, you
| cannot become a prosperous nation without hard work and a
| predictable rule-of-law. There is no way around it and to blame
| "colonialism" is nothing but empty words that will help no one.
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| Had the same reaction. Seemed like such a silly thing to say.
| Does he know what the scale of Axie is and what the scale of
| national GDPs are? Seems so ridiculous.
|
| But I also don't agree with your characterization of developing
| nation economies. You have your own blinders on. The degrees of
| freedom a developing country has are constrained ... but not
| mainly by outside market forces ... more their own internal
| institutional structures.
|
| India was isolated from all Western banking for the main part
| for a long time. Also insulated from competition from Western
| companies. That was not a good time for India. Turns out your
| own institutions can fuck up pretty well on their own. Openness
| and liberalization of an economy also come with complications
| but these are not "slave labor" and "colonization". I feel you
| have been exposed to some ideologies but have not actually
| tried to manufacture something in a developing country and seen
| the friction that prevents local economies from leveling up ...
| its not the EU or America stopping Indian manufacturing from
| leveling up ... its India's own internal complexities.
|
| If it was possible to do what you suggest, Taiwan, South Korea,
| and now Chinese advanced manufacturing would not exist.
| Countries just need to get their act together.
| yunohn wrote:
| A lot of your response assumes I was talking about local
| manufacturing - but I was specifically talking about poverty
| and its relation to the globalised economy. Local
| manufacturing solves some things, not all things. But poverty
| is a result of innumerable things, of which manufacturing is
| only a small portion.
|
| There is an inherent arbitrage performed by developed
| economies through outsourcing, and Axie Infinity demonstrates
| that wonderfully. Obviously the story would never be "GameFi
| solves poverty in the USA" because it pays well below minimum
| wage in developed economies.
|
| Aside: There is no basis in humanity that foreign currencies
| are significantly lower in value than western currencies.
| It's purely a result of historical economical forces
| resulting from colonisation.
| bo0tzz wrote:
| > its India's own internal complexities
|
| Many of the 'internal' problems in developing nations root in
| historical colonialism.
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