One thing I have noticed when listening to the interviews of NFT companies is that, when describing NFT is the future, the arguments from these founders are examples of people/artists made money by selling NFT online. It has become more and more a theme for cryptocurrency technology has well: the reason you should be in is that other people have made money rather than the benefit of the technology itself. It is not a good sign.
Imho it stems from a lack of understanding and faith in the financial services industry, probably exacerbated by the financial crisis.
A large % of people now believe that the finance industry only exists to work against them and make an elite minority rich. There's a strong sense of "Fuck You, I Got Mine" from the last generation, so the current generation is saying "Fine, I'm going to invent my own system... with Black Jack, and hookers!". Crypto/DeFi is creating a sense of euphoria and hope against a backdrop of helplessness where people are thinking "I will never own a home", "I will never be able to afford to retire" etc, so why not take a punt on the next big thing?
I was intrigued by some comments on HN the other day that dApps are where all the 'innovation' in crypto is today, so spent some time looking in to it.
After many hours I couldn't find anything even remotely interesting.
"I will never own a home" is not the only reason. The whole financial system is "fuck you this and fuck you that, incl. when you least expect and depend the most, and we won't tell you why". Yesterday here were news about PayPal terminating an account without explanation again (by the way, even when they don't ban you, their verification and customer services are a disaster anyway). This bullshit has to stop. Every person on Earth (even those with questionable reputation or even convicted felons) should be able to wire/accept some reasonable amounts of money (I don't advocate letting terrorists make million-dollar deals) freely, no questions asked, like in cash. It's a basic thing in today world, like eating and shitting.
By the way, perhaps cryptocurrencies may devaluate or even die out if a viable alternative letting everyone unconditionally and anonymously transfer and accept conventional amounts of money is introduced. Perhaps this may destroy the ransomware market which is about sending huge amounts of money in cryptocurrencies.
I'm very cynical about cryptocurrency but that's a stretch. Criminals did that damage to companies and infrastructure, and they would do it without cryptocurrency if it was worth it. I guess dollars sell drugs to kids too and fuel murder for hire.
Anyone who doesn’t think cryptocurrency has facilitated monetizing cyberattacks needs to wake up. You can be pro-crypto and still acknowledge that the rise of ransomware has hone hand in hand with the ability to monetize it at dramatically lowered risk. This, in turn, broadened to scope of companies that were interesting to attack.
You could have cryptocurrency without ransomware attacks, and you could have ransomware attacks without cryptocurrency . It is disingenuous to say cryptocurrency is directly responsible. Cryptocurrency didn’t cause ransomware, it made it worth the effort on the part of the attackers, but so could have a different confluence of events.
Criminals will abuse any technology that benefits them.
It of course facilitated, but if it didn't exist, online credit card payments would had facilitated the same way so crypto is not at fault. You can be against crypto and still acknowledge that the advocates of a tech/tool are not responsible nor turning a blind eye to the bad uses of it.
This is nonsense, online credit card payments would not be able to facilitate multi-million dollar transactions and allow the proceeds to just disappear like that.
I think it's reasonable to link the two, but not conflate them. Crypto has certainly made ransomware a much more viable attack vector. A crypto address is easier to hide behind than a bank account number or mailing address or drop location.
so you are a proponent of a cash-less society? If Crypto is responsible for this new attacks, fiat is responsible for all others. Including the most violent ones.
A cash-less capitalist society looks like Canada and the Nordic countries, where cash use is abnormal and most transactions are with debit and credit; Ie, quite well tracked.
That would result in the filing of a Suspicious Activity Report because the breakdown looks like it was done precisely to avoid the reporting threshold.
1) The fundamental problem is that countries, especially the US, have basically made companies exempt from criminal proceedings. Any criminal activity conducted as part of the company rarely leads to prosecution of the people in the company, and companies themselves aren’t really ever prosecuted for criminal acts. So any penalty to HSBC wouldn’t be criminal but civil and financial.
2) The articles say that HSBC laundered billions. This likely means it was $3-4Bn at most, but let’s assume it was $19Bn (because if it was $20Bn they would have said tens of billions). These transactions were probably earning HSBC a few basis points. I can’t say for sure since I’m not aware of the market price of criminal transactions, but I suspect the premium was not much higher than a regular transaction for the simple reason that it would make the transaction appear obviously criminal. But let’s say it was 200bp (so 2%, and that’s likely an order of magnitude higher, but for arguments sake). Then HSBC probably made about $400mm - costs (remember, assuming a very high $19bn in transactions). So a $1.9Bn fine is extremely high, being 5x HSBC’s revenue from the transactions assuming very favorable numbers, and not considering the non monetary penalties, such as probation, etc.
3) Finally, if Apple is found guilty of illegally promoting a monopoly through their App Store policies, would a fine of $7Bn be considered laughable, considering it’s about 5 weeks of Apple’s income? And in Apple’s case, the company operates fairly cohesively, and the App Store almost exists for the sole purpose of encouraging hardware sales, so there’s actually an argument to be made to base the penalty on Apple’s total income as a company. OTOH, banks tend to have fairly independent divisions, because they are highly regulated, unlike the likes of Apple, and there are all sorts of restrictions preventing the divisions that are making the kind of transactions from even interacting with most of the rest of the company. Apple collaborated more with its competitors to illegally suppress employee pay than this division of HSBC likely collaborated with any other division in HSBC (and they likely had to actively evade scrutiny from the middle office).
I’m not trying to argue that the punishment was appropriate. However, what I am arguing is that if a non banking company was found to have done something similar, they would have faced punishments that were a much tinier fraction of what HSBC faced. And that’s even before we factor in the fact that banks are orders of magnitude more regulated than nearly any other industry, with them being required to set up entire departments that account for over 10-20% of their workforce purely to ensure they can meet government regulations. Something pretty much no other industry, especially the tech industry, has to do.
Any shortcomings in the punishment imposed on HSBC was a result of leeway’s given to companies in general.
The fundamental problem, as you've described in 1) and reiterated in your conclusion lays bare a, mostly unspoken, fundamental societal injustice that's common to many countries.
It really feels like protectionism for the status quo. Which is totally understandable and predictable in the context of basic human behaviour and motivations; the king of the hill will not make it easy for anyone to displace them.
What I find interesting, as opposed to surprising as such, is the myriad ways in which politicians explain these situations away in simultaneously calling the slap-on-the-wrist a big deterrent to such behaviour in future, and playing this slap-on-the-wrist as if it's somehow in the interests of the voting population.
It's hard to prove that something does not exist. Significant amount of money has been recovered, although it's easy to argue that effects are not enough for the effort and inconvenience of normal customers.
Maybe if we would question why we (don't) need money in the first place, and why people turn to terrorism, we wouldn't have problems in the first place.
Let everyone have a home, eat and drink as much as they need, receive proper education and healthcare, and thrive working for something they see interest in not a paycheck/boss and you'll see terrorism will be entirely rid of.
In the meantime, i agree it's a reasonable expectation that people can exchange money freely with the caveat that there should be taxes. As much as i hate taxes because they will fund police terrorizing my neighborhood, big corporations for their next nature-destroying megaproject, and cameras everywhere in the big cities, they are important as long as we live in a capitalist system to ensure we have basic public services.
A system like GNU/Taler is really interesting because it promises buyer's secrecy while retaining public accounting for receivers so that they can be subject to taxes. Cash is better of course as anonymity is guaranteed on both sides, and that's precisely why the chief scammers are pushing for the abolition of cash... so much of informal economy/solidarity would disappear overnight i'm having nightmares over it.
> Let everyone have a home, eat and drink as much as they need, receive proper education and healthcare, and thrive working for something they see interest in not a paycheck/boss and you'll see terrorism will be entirely rid of.
Are there sufficient people interested in cleaning toilets, dealing with the mentally ill/infirm, working in crawl spaces and attics, working on a farm an hour plus from everything?
Imo flip these "punishment" jobs into "reward" jobs. As it is, we give the jobs no one wants to people who don't have any other options - or are struggling to exercise their options. We use them as boogeyman for kids when we remind them how important school is.
If everyone is taken care of, these jobs should come with some extra benefits - both socially and financially. Remember all those bs commercials thanking essential workers toward the beginning of Covid? What if society really appreciated its essential workers and compensated them like it did?
Cleaning toilets is somewhat unpleasant, but there's immediate feedback on your performance (the before and after is clear), and people should appreciate the people that keep them clean. There should be an understood, and spoken, sense of "Thank you" for the people keeping them clean.
Perspective -> feeling - > actions. I don't think this is a particularly difficult issue to navigate, but it would require a shift in perspective.
Very fair. I don't think you can remove compensation. But, I think the post still had some good thoughts and good aims. They need some tweaking. Your post highlighted an area that needs tweaking, and mine tried to build on both posts.
That tweak is a universal basic income (or other broad based benefits that establish a floor for quality of life) which would attempt to reduce the impact of one's lineage on one's options.
What if monetary or material compensation was replaced with simple respect and appreciation though? As it is, the people who do the dirty jobs of society are often treated like they themselves are filth.
And yet there are functional societies out there today, much as there were in the past, that are not capitalistic societies. Treating people like shit and forcing them to do dirty jobs you don't want to do under threat of starvation is not an inherent property of the human condition.
Which societies operated like that? I am not aware of any, that could operate as a country of decent size today. Note that this supposed country would also need to be able to defend itself, if it has possession of anything valuable (such as water, arable land, weather, etc). And also be able to deal with immigration and outsiders coming in, and kicking out people who would mess up the system.
What kind of idealistic misunderstanding of history do you have that non-capitalist societies were some kumbaya utopia? Korea historically had slavery and extreme class differences. Europe had nobility and serfs who were not far off from slaves (and could be tortured or executed). Ancient Sparta and Persia had slaves and going way back into biblical times (though this still happens today in some places), people could be stoned just for not believing the right things. People today make the mistake of assuming things were altogether better in the past just because one particular aspect they dislike today was better before. Hierarchy and treating each other terribly are an inherent part of being human, and it's taken centuries of work to get to a point that we can even pretend otherwise.
Which makes it a moot point. The common thread across capitalist, socialist, monarchist, whatever-ist societies with suffering is that humans are involved. Neither capitalism nor socialism is inherently bad; some humans are, especially in aggregate, hence we always need ways to enforce order. The fatal flaw to any utopian society is that the more it depends on trust, the more some people will abuse it and coordinate with others to abuse it. The less trust you have, the more force you need to enforce your worldview on others (which radical liberals and conservatives essentially push for). There is no magical world where we all live in harmony
I don't understand your point. The corollary to "there is no perfect society, suffering always exist" is not "therefore all societies are equally bad". No, liberalism is an improvement on feudalism. Capitalist “liberal democracies” are an improvement on capitalist absolute monarchies.
All I'm saying is we can do much better than this.
You can't go back and forth between theoretical and real-life. I don't accept the claim that democracies are always better than monarchies. Monarchies and authoritarian states are great in theory, if they enforce the worldview you want. Look at how America's republicanism has allowed its own self-degradation through lobbying and regulatory capture. My first point is that everything in the real world is case by case and it's intellectually dishonest to go for such grade-school arguments as saying that democracy = good, monarch = bad. Capitalism can be good or bad. Monarchies can be good or bad, etc. My second point is that the only common theme is that some humans are bad actors, therefore it doesn't matter how your society functions, there will always be people who exploit the system. The only reason you think monarchies is bad is because historical monarchs have been abusive. But there have also been abusive democratic leaders. Humans are the problem, not the systems we create.
Disagree entirely. Ironically it's your "systems don't matter, it just depends on whether the people in charge are good or not" that is grade-school level. x)
First, I didn't say democracy good, monarchy bad... My point is precisely that western bourgeois democracy is pretty flawed. It is however better than the absolutist monarchies of the 1700s and 1800s.
>some humans are bad actors, therefore it doesn't matter how your society functions, there will always be people who exploit the system. The only reason you think monarchies is bad is because historical monarchs have been abusive. But there have also been abusive democratic leaders. Humans are the problem, not the systems we create.
That's just silly. A well designed system has institutions, checks and balances that prevent bad actors from wrecking the system. An absolutist monarchy has none. Can't you see how that matters? Taking your argument to its conclusion, then absolute monarchies, bourgeois democracies, direct democracies, soviet-style totalitarianism... it's all the same! All it matters is if you're lucky that the people in charge are good.
As long as there is money and private property, i agree with your point. Jobs that nobody wants to do by pleasure should be the highest paid and most respected. However that's not how capitalism works (quite the opposite). Like another commentator pointed out, i'm opposed to financial compensation (and all forms of money) as an organizing principle of society. However as long as money hasn't been abolished your point makes perfect sense.
Specifically about COVID though, I don't know about where you are, but here in France "thank you" for health workers was perceived to be very insulting. Because when the government continues to dismantle all forms of public services and keeps on overworking hospital workers (most of whom have months or even years of paid vacations they could never take because of understaffing) and destroying all their social benefits, it's hard not to take this as "fuck you".
> i'm opposed to financial compensation (and all forms of money) as an organizing principle of society.
What does this mean? It is the nature of animals to evaluate and rank each other, least of all for mating purposes. Not using money will not change that, and another proxy will be used.
> Specifically about COVID though, I don't know about where you are, but here in France "thank you" for health workers was perceived to be very insulting.
It was the same in the US. The thank you and hero nonsense was seen through by all, but I guess plausible deniability is worth it amongst the managing class.
> It is the nature of animals to evaluate and rank each other
Not at all. Competition is not the norm in the natural world. There's the entire field of ethology to study if you'd like to know more.
If you need a quick intro, "Mutual Aid" by Peter Kropotkin is really dated science-wise (it's almost 120 years old) but is still a pretty good read. If you're into TV stuff, i'd recommend Adam Curtis' series "The trap" and "The century of the self" which explore the topics of how competition and self-interest have increasingly been guiding principles of (at the time) western societies and how we've tried to apply such principles (eg. game theory) to other fields where they in fact do not apply.
Primates and other mammals do it. Birds do it. Unless all those David Attenborough narrated shows I’ve watched are wrong or misinterpreted by me, there seems to be extensive use of competition in many species.
Or one can look at data from myriad of dating apps and websites. I would not believe anyone if they told me they did not rank possible partners in life on a variety of metrics such as health, wealth, tribal affiliations (family/other network), intelligence, humor, etc.
I think this thread is a perfect demonstration of idealism vs realism. Some people are idealistic and believe what they wish were true, even with little to no supporting evidence and mountains of evidence to the contrary. Other people look at reality first and base their beliefs on that.
> I would not believe anyone if they told me they did not rank possible partners in life on a variety of metrics such as health, wealth, tribal affiliations (family/other network), intelligence, humor, etc.
I certainly do, and this is commonplace to the point of cliche. Think of Indian or Chinese arranged marriages where the parents openly and blatantly choose and approve of partners based on what you said: health, wealth, family, etc. It's a documented fact and I've seen it personally that some Chinese parents even disqualify women over 30 or so as partners for their children (to the point there's a word for it: "leftover women"). In the West some people are squeamish about consciously evaluating and ranking people, but everyone still does it, even if it's subconscious, unless you literally throw a dart at at list and pair with whoever you hit. We just talk about it indirectly: having a "type", being "compatible", having similar interests, getting along, having things in common, avoiding "red flags".
I at least certainly have based my relationship evaluations based on conscious ranking and metrics, and it's led to the incredibly happy, successful relationship I'm in now.
Do some reading on the question and make an opinion for yourself. There is some competition throughout nature but it's really far from an organizing principle as it has become with the capitalist system.
> I would not believe anyone if they told me they did not rank possible partners in life on a variety of metrics
That sounds really close to the definition of a psychopath, and is definitely not how most people live their lives/relationships. Adam Curtis in "The trap" touches on this topic and how only psychopaths and economists used to behave like according to "measurable rational self-interest". With the commodification of everything (including oneself through social media) it's fair to bet more people behave like that nowadays than previously, but it's still really far from everyone.
Why would you not believe me if i told you i have feelings and affinities that cannot be measured or ranked and do not reflect a material interest? Why is it so hard to accept that not everybody lives through live the same way that soulless suit-heads do?
You sound like you're arguing from a point of insecurity or emotion rather than making a rational argument.
> Why would you not believe me if i told you i have feelings and affinities that cannot be measured or ranked and do not reflect a material interest? Why is it so hard to accept that not everybody lives through live the same way that soulless suit-heads do?
Why would you not believe that I have a long, committed, happy relationship today that I arrived at through consciously ranking and evaluating qualities of my current partner and other people that I met? Why is it so hard for you to accept that humans are inherently judging and comparing creatures? Why do you think that to just think about important life choices like a partner doesn't make you a "soulless suit-head"? If you want to live your life that way, go ahead.
The fact that you and even most people seem to let your subconscious steer you with important life decisions doesn't affect me. But I don't see why you have to indirectly call the other user names (psychopath, soulless suit-head) just because they do things differently than you. Are Indian and Chinese parents who perform arranged marriages also psychopaths or soulless suit-heads just because they choose matches for their children based on a variety of metrics? Does it make Chinese or Indian culture soulless or psychopathic since they've been doing this way before the "commodification of everything"?
What ethology tells us is that, yes, but a little more.
Competition IS relevant, but it's in the context of other drives like group-oriented behavior, and it is cooperation that some people seem to have a hard time understanding. Cooperation and group behavior is every bit as powerful and rewarding as competition is, and every bit as natural.
I feel like we get into trouble when we try to isolate one side of things and dismiss the other. You're correct that western societies (probably not exclusively western societies) have erred, in leaning way over to the 'competition' side.
You could say law of the jungle except for jungles don't operate in this simplistic way. More like law of the capitalism, which tries to deify one behavior and demonize the other.
I'm not convinced Kropotkin is the final answer here, but he sure serves as a good window into the 'cooperate' side which is unreasonably suppressed in western society.
There's people interested in caring for others and/or growing food on the countryside. Cleaning toilets is a task nobody does by pleasure but i don't see a reason there should be a specific class in society handling undesired tasks for the others.
Why can't we take turns doing what HAS TO be done? I've lived in communities for about two decades now and it's never ever crossed our mind we should designate someone to clean the toilets for others. I'm happy to do it every now and then if you're happy to do the same.
I would rather pay someone to take my turn for me.
There’s a whole theory of competitive advantage [0] where I’m better doing some things than others. I’d rather do the thing I’m good at and use the money to pay others to do stuff I’m marginally worse off doing.
I’ve lived in communities for a few decades and every day it crosses my mind that I want to establish a price for someone to come clean my toilet.
When my parents were alive, in their retirement, they'd hire 'Merry Maids' to come and clean for them. As near as I could tell, they were very nice about it, and I remember being over there and the amusing interplay as the maids tried very hard to not impose on the family visiting going on, while the kids tried just as hard to arrange where they were at to not get in the way of the maids :) it was a very Alphonse and Gaston, 'oh no, after you!' sort of thing.
I feel like the real litmus test here is: given that the maid is cleaning your toilet, would you freak out if the maid took a dump in your toilet AND then cleaned it? That cuts to the heart of whether they're a fellow human doing exchange-value with you as a true equal, or whether they're a class that should not be using the employer's private toilet.
I would bet you maid services like that are very strict about not blurring that line, knowing that some people are paying to set up a class dynamic they expect to be honored.
> would you freak out if the maid took a dump in your toilet AND then cleaned it? That cuts to the heart of whether they're a fellow human doing exchange-value with you as a true equal, or whether they're a class that should not be using the employer's private toilet.
Ha, no of course not. I also think it’s not a very good test because almost no one would care. Me not being able to afford to buy things or not being skilled enough to command a high wage doesn’t mean I’m not equal as a human being, it just means I can’t afford things.
I would expect that maid services are very strict because some people are super picky about their toilets. I know people who won’t let family members use their toilet, much less some stranger. It’s not worth the risk for a maid service to lose the work. Not really a good indicator of valuing humans.
Maybe a better test would be whether I allow a maid to drink from my water or something like that.
> I would rather pay someone to take my turn for me.
You're not wrong, but it's not (all) about efficiency but rather about solidarity and social cohesion. As an example, in Japan, children clean the school:
> I would rather pay someone to take my turn for me.
Yeah, that's precisely what's wrong in our society that it appears normal to pay for inconveniences to disappear. Except of course for most of us who don't have money so we get paid shitty wages for making other people's inconveniences disappear. If such jobs were the highest paid, that would be less of a problem of course. But the highest paid jobs under capitalism are the least useful to society at large because they don't produce anything (CEOs, managers, financial/legal advisors, marketers, etc).
> I’m better doing some things than others.
That makes sense. However some tasks such as cleaning are not skilled labor. Yes it requires (some) learning, but by the second time you've cleaned a toilet you pretty much know how to do it for the rest of your life. Cleaning a single toilet takes about 5 minutes and is not much effort (contrary to doing that for a living)That makes sense. However some tasks such as cleaning are not skilled labor. Yes it requires (some) learning, but by the second time you've cleaned a toilet you pretty much know how to do it for the rest of your life. Cleaning a single toilet takes about 5 minutes and is not much effort (contrary to doing that for a living). Have you considered why you're so reluctant to do it?
> I’ve lived in communities (...) my toilet
We're probably not living in the same kinds of communities then if you've got a personal toilet. In the communities i've resided in everybody's got their personal room but everything else is communal.
> that's precisely what's wrong in our society that it appears normal to pay for inconveniences to disappear.
I disagree, it’s what is awesome about our society. It’s a feature, not a bug.
I’ve gotten all the character I’ll get from cleaning toilets and I’m happy that someone else is willing to do it for me.
There’s no way toilet cleaner will be a high paying job because the skill set is so low. As with most manual labor. Low skill set means lots of people will do it means low wages.
I understand how to clean a toilet and the time involved. I choose not to do it. I won’t make me a better person to do it. I have considered why I’m reluctant and understand pretty completely. I grok why I don’t want to clean toilets. I’m comfortable with my understanding in this area.
It’s also ok that we value these experiences differently. I don’t have to convince you to pay someone to clean your toilet. I just have to convince you to continue letting me, and others, pay for toilet cleaning.
> Low skill set means lots of people will do it means low wages.
High supply relative to demand or low demand relative to supply means low wages.
It is possible (and very real in many areas) that there are low numbers of people willing to clean toilets in a given area compared to the demand. It could be due to government assistance providing them enough such that they do not need to clean toilets to meet their needs.
It could be better job opportunities opening up nearby such as higher paying factory work. It could be that they move away from the area due to higher real estate prices. There are myriad causes for a low skill task to have few willing suppliers for the labor to perform that task.
>Have you considered why you're so reluctant to do it?
It's funny, I had a conversation with a roommate that went something like I said I hated dishes, and that I'd rather be outside in the cold, under the car lifted on jackstands, draining the oil and replacing it and servicing the oil filter, coming back in and cleaning up. For both our cars. And my roommate seemed shocked. It seemed like such a bigger task to them than just quickly cleaning the dishes and throwing them in a rack to dry. But I just hate doing the dishes. And I don't mind changing the oil in the car.
> Except of course for most of us who don't have money so we get paid shitty wages for making other people's inconveniences disappear. If such jobs were the highest paid, that would be less of a problem of course. But the highest paid jobs under capitalism are the least useful to society at large because they don't produce anything (CEOs, managers, financial/legal advisors, marketers, etc).
This might be able to be rectified under the current system by giving money to the lowest paid, so that they can go to school and learn a trade which they find has a more acceptable price:undesirability ratio. Ideally, everyone will have the option to not have to do tasks like cleaning toilets, and hence everyone will have to do it themselves or pay a lot to get someone else to do it.
Depends on the reason. You may be temporarily/long-term disabled. Or maybe you were having a really bad week and you'll be happy to take your turn next week (maybe you even said so in advanced and arranged to swap your shift with somebody else?).
Or maybe you just don't care to exploit other people you live with, in which case you're free to go and do that elsewhere because that's the norm in all of capitalist societies.
Why would someone that wants to exploit other people leave a place that lets them exploit others?
I’ll cut to the chase. My point is your concept of society does not work at scale. You will have people that want to use the system, you will need to use force and adjudicate in the system, and you will need something more than good vibes to serve as incentives.
> Why would someone that wants to exploit other people leave a place that lets them exploit others?
Because we'll kick them out. I'm always up for doing things i don't particularly enjoy because there's value in them, but I certainly don't want to live with someone who treats me like a slave.
> you will need something more than good vibes to serve as incentives
Sure. But you'll probably concede that we live in a world run by psychopaths where children in schools are taught how to become psychopaths themselves. The first thing we teach children is "copying is cheating" and we're wondering why we're fucked? I'm not saying there's a time and place where everything will be perfect and we can all live happily ever after (i'm not a hippy), but there's very rational reasons for the ways everything around us is bad, and very rational courses of actions to fix those.
Abolishing property as State-mandated religion doesn't mean that some people won't have more than others (this would be ridiculous). But at least it would mean that nobody would sleep on the streets while there are empty homes, and nobody would starve while there is wasted food. Both ridiculous situations are the consequence of private property and require considerable amounts of force and resources to apply. It obviously is not working at scale, as we can see from environmental damage and previously-unimaginable levels of inequality.
> Because we'll kick them out. I'm always up for doing things i don't particularly enjoy because there's value in them, but I certainly don't want to live with someone who treats me like a slave.
It’s hard enough to get many married couples to live like this, and even harder for small extended families. I would assign something very close to 0% as the probability for viability of this on a country or global level.
They are ostracized or otherwise lose social status within the community. Functional human societies have existed and do exist in the absence of capitalism.
I do not know what definition of capitalism you are using, but I was strictly addressing the ability of society to function without compensation.
I am not aware of any functional society exists today without the use of compensation on a notable scale, certainly not notable enough to be able to defend itself.
Considering that functional societies exist, regardless of their size and technological state, without monetary compensation as a primary motivation, I am forced to wonder how much our narrative that we cannot have technological civilization without forcing a class of people into handling unsavory tasks via threat of starvation and death is just part of the self-perpetuating mechanism of our particular societal organization structure.
Which societies today function like this, that could be scaled up to country level tasks and responsibilities? Regardless of size would make it a meaningless claim, as the parameters are greatly different between a tribe of 100 vs 10,000 vs 1,000,000,000.
> Which societies today function like this, that could be scaled up to country level tasks and responsibilities?
None that I'm aware of, though I am not entirely convinced it is impossible for the reasons I stated. I am forced to wonder: what is the virtue of scale like that if it is largely built on the back of human suffering?
An interesting question is how the salaries would shift. If everyone can fulfil basic needs without much, will the jobs that no ones interested in doing be the ones on a high pay grade?
edit: just saw that you replied to "maybe money isn't needed at all" so my reply is not really relevant
I thought it was common knowledge that the quality of life for people in the upper quintiles is based on the people in the lower quintiles not having options.
Hence the hotels and fast food and other low paying fields complaint about not finding workers since the government gave them an option.
If everyone was fluent in English and could type well, then the price of rote white collar office work would go down and the price of hard labor and public facing and more undesirable work would go up. Which is what has been happening in the last decade.
> Let everyone have a home, eat and drink as much as they need, receive proper education and healthcare, and thrive working for something they see interest in not a paycheck/boss and you'll see terrorism will be entirely rid of.
It's a nice thought, but I don't think this is actually true. Osama bin Laden and a number of the 9/11 hijackers were actually well-educated, well-off engineers of various sorts, for example.
Love to see you being downvoted into invisibility for suggesting that Another World Is Possible. Our techbro overlords are aiming for Rentism, but they'll accept Exterminism if they can't get it.
>A large % of people now believe that the finance industry only exists to work against them and make an elite minority rich.
And what on earth makes them think cryptocurrency doesn't exist simply to make an elite minority rich? Just because it might be a different minority doesn't change the equation. And oh by the way, there is absolutely 0 government protections in the new system. Don't get me wrong, over the last 70 years a lot of the protections in existing financial institutions have been watered down, but I'll still take an FDIC backing on my bank account over: "oh no we got "hacked" and all of your wallets are gone, sorry about that!"
Same. I lost a small but nonzero amount when a fraudulent crypto exchange went bust. There's a reason FDIC protection exists. This is going to be unpopular, but the value proposition for cryptos isn't there yet IMO. It's either "get rich quick" or "buy drugs online". It really isn't "convenient way to transfer money" yet. I'd rather invest in companies that are actually doing something useful. The value of those seems generally less likely to evaporate overnight. Why would I want to own dogecoins when I can own shares of companies that are changing the world?
Is it lack of understanding of the financial industry or the opposite? I observe that through Bitcoin much more people have become interested in (austrian) economics. I think especially in times when everyone says that the problems e.g. central banks are “solving” are too complex to understand for 99.99% of the people, an uptrend in a much more simple theory (that is hence also more compatible with Occam’s razor) is a good thing.
For me the ultimate problem with deflationary currencies is that you get rewarded for doing nothing. Every year as keys to wallets are irreversibly lost, or the value of the real economy grows relative to the supply of BTC, your Bitcoin gets more and more valuable.
Many Bitcoin hodlers actually have an expectation of becoming extremely wealthy, despite having done nothing for society, because they've been swept up in the speculative mania and volatility.
Gold bugs don't generally have this expectation. Gold is no longer a broadly accepted currency, and even the most vocal of gold bugs are only expecting a 2x or 5x return in the next few decades, assuming the $ does collapse. They only preach an expectation that N bricks of gold, where N will buy a house today, will buy them a house 50 years from now. The attitude is one of wealth preservation rather than speculation. It's a reasonable expectation assuming the demand for and supply of Gold remains balanced.
You get rewarded for your risk, its not nothing, its second key building block for a financial system. Those that have time, trade risk for money, those that have money trade money for reduced risk over a period of time. If this wasnt the case, people couldn't retire safely, there would be no one to trade their money for lowered risk.
What is interesting is that this setup has been exploiting youth for a long time. Its only now that, with crypto, GME, AMC, the younger investors can ramp up the volitility in the market, creating more risk for older more established investors, who then need to pay to reduce their expose to that risk.
There a lot more to this that further blurs the morality of positioning yourself within this power struggle, but ultimately, its just market forces at work.
At the end of the day, this revolution could be stymied by actually providing the next generations with a foreseeable path to home ownership, a family with good education and healthcare, and the american dream, without having to yolo it all, even on an engineers salary. But it seems the next generation is only path to enact change is by staking their assets for generational speculation war.
In the situation where a deflationary currency is a country's currency, there is no risk. Neither is there investment, there is merely sitting on currency to gain value.
Deflationary currencies shouldn't be an issue if real prices adjust at a similar pace. The theoretical problem with deflation is mostly that wages are sticky and you can't lower someone's pay very easily. But if everyone has the expectation of deflation it would probably work fine.
Expectations about inflation/deflation are important drivers of these phenomena (not the only ones of course) and if we break the paradigm with cryptocurrencies then it's possible the stickiness problems of deflation could be solved.
None of that addresses the parent's concerns that idle cash grows in value, effectively benefiting from the economic output of others without even the need for investment.
I would say it is even worse than doing nothing when one considers the environmental impact of mining BTC. These people have an expectation of reward for increasing energy usage and pollution in the world for basically no benefit to anyone but themselves.
> so the current generation is saying "Fine, I'm going to invent my own system... with Black Jack, and hookers!".
This is extremely apt, because in the end they went "in fact, forget the system!" and realized you can just make money from the hype without actually building anything usable.
> After many hours I couldn't find anything even remotely interesting.
This has been my issue with dApps as well. It's always "thing that does some stuff with ETH" which is only valuable and interesting if you already assume ETH is valuable and interesting. I guess most people make the leap of faith by putting money into them, but on sheer technical merit, dApps just aren't that interesting.
I agree in a lot of cases, but a couple months ago I saw a pretty interesting idea on HN: https://sarcophagus.io. While I think there are some issues with this protocol, it convinced me there are some pretty interesting problems that can be solved with new and unintuitive social/technical means with dApps.
(un-disclaimer: not affiliated, not an owner, not a user)
Definía sort of a system that feeds on itself, not a great model I think. Tokenizarion of real or digital items makes sense for many reasons though, the most basic of which is that it is a system of record keeping that is persistent, trusties, and programmatically immutable where immutability is needed. For digital items, tokenization can make sense from a data durability standpoint, since tokenized data can be stored on chain with its presentation context, for example an in game asset could be globally accessible and playable far into the future beyond where the game would otherwise be available. This and other potentially useful cases are mentioned in some medium articles at prufio.medium.com.
For dapp, I found the idea of doing asset swap pretty interesting. It’s like the interest swap or the currency swap but with crypto assets and tokens to form a swap pool that functions like a standalone exchange, which anybody can start using the crypto infrastructure.
What crypto presents is the opportunity for lay people to take financial power from the finance establishment. I think that’s why people are so excited.
> A large % of people now believe that the finance industry only exists to work against them and make an elite minority rich.
Yes, because that is the very definition of capitalism: people own, others work. That's the reason modern forms of slavery, colonization and patriarchal control were developed, historically.
A lot of people i meet from the younger generation don't care at all about owning a home. They feel concerned that the privileged elites are ruining the show for everyone and by the next decade we'll be more and more struggling for drinkable water and basic survival.
Punks were derided for their "No future" stance, but it looks like the entire world has gone "No future" and just keeps fucking up as much as they can. Spending billions of KWh on blockchains so rich people can speculate on buying their own number (correct me if i'm wrong but to me a NFT is just a number) is just part of this.
We have to stop this madness, abolish private property and the capitalist industry entirely and go back to communal living and producing stuff based on actual needs, not dumb single-use Internet of Shit products and other planned-obsolete non-flashable-single-purpose computers.
> After many hours I couldn't find anything even remotely interesting.
The only interesting "dApp" i've seen so far is radicle.xyz, a decentralized forge built on top of git. Still i'm skeptical of tying money and financial incentives into my software development practices, but at least those folks (free software people) had the decency to make crypto-payments optional by adding opt-in Ethereum integration. Clever move.
> Spending billions of KWh on blockchains so rich people can speculate on buying their own number (correct me if i'm wrong but to me a NFT is just a number) is just part of this.
You say this as if numbers have no utility. Is an IP address "just a number"? What about a /8 cidr block? How much energy should we be allowed to spend to secure global address space and provide a secure implementation of identity for all people? This is one of the actual concrete uses of NFT tech, (see Urbit Azimuth.)
> We have to stop this madness, abolish private property and the capitalist industry entirely and go back to communal living and producing stuff based on actual needs, not dumb single-use Internet of Shit products and other planned-obsolete non-flashable-single-purpose computers.
Good luck making a non-disposable world where nobody has domain over their own numbers or is allowed to have their own distinct and unique identity secured by a leading consensus protocol. I for one am glad that you and others of a like mind are not empowered to tell me or anyone else that I can't have my own number if I want it, or to secure it with as many megawatts and global collaborators as I can muster.
Because you know what happens when private property is abolished? Spoiler, only the well connected and powerful will hold private property, and overall the scope and impact of inequality even broadens.
Edit: I'm getting downvotes but not sure which part you disagree with! Have you ever lived in an area where private property was abolished? (They tried this in Lithuania and USSR and that's exactly how it turned out! When nobody is allowed to own resources, who decides how they are allocated?)
"To each according to his need" sounds great until you get to see what an actual functional implementation of that looks like, and it turns out that Stalin is the one who is in charge of it all.
> Because you know what happens when private property is abolished? Spoiler, only the well connected and powerful will hold private property
If only a few people can own private property then you haven't abolished private property, you've just limited who can own it.
This was the main issue caused by the massive state control of Marxist Leninist countries like the Soviet Union -- by centralizing all control within one single political party you essentially just replace an economic elite with a political elite. Couple that with the democratic centralism you often find in these single party ML countries and suddenly you have something that's a lot less like the communal living the OP was referring to.
I'm not saying abolishing private property will be some magical fix all, but I also don't think using the soviet union as an example of why it won't work is a good example. You could have a society where usage of resources is governed by consensus rather than "lol stalin said so" but consensus is obviously a lot harder to do on a global scale than a small communal village
Thanks, that was probably my point. Consensus is hard. Ethereum is one of the global systems that currently exists for tackling the consensus problem. Shouting at clouds is on the other hand, not tackling the consensus problem.
Someone or something has to be at the helm of the command economy. I'm definitely not saying we should "go back to communal living and producing stuff based on actual needs" but I am saying that without a rigorous system for distributed consensus, you really don't have a chance of achieving this.
"I will never own a home" going by reddit and certain message boards the sentiment is pretty much "if boomers are rentseeking with land and shiny rocks then I'll rent seek with money"
Land in desirable locations is a scarce good and land owners extract an economic rent via rising land prices which makes housing unaffordable. That same dynamic exists with cryptocurrencies with a limited supply. You buy early and the value of the cryptocurrency rises as more people start using them.
In both cases the hoarding instinct is drowning out productive activity. When land becomes too expensive you cannot afford to live on it. When Bitcoin becomes too expensive you cannot afford to pay with it. Of course this is under the assumption that you need a fixed amount of land and the equivalent to that would be that you also need a fixed amount of Bitcoin.
The primary difference though is that with land people voluntarily decide to move there because the location is attractive. Cryptocurrencies aren't popular enough to justify choosing them over government currencies. People are buying cryptocurrencies because they are going up.
> A large % of people now believe that the finance industry only exists to work against them and make an elite minority rich.
And that's because it is true. The vast majority of the financial services industry is designed to screw people over.
The only thing an average citizen can do is let them skim off as little money as possible. Buy stocks in solid companies, and hold on to them for a long time. Index mutual funds with minimal administration overhead. Things like that where you can invest a portion of your life's savings without getting screwed over too bad.
> The vast majority of the financial services industry is designed to screw people over.
I don't know where to begin with a comment like this. It's being so heavily reinforced by social media, but is so hyperbolically outside reality that I honestly don't know where to start.
It's similar to saying that the vast majority of the medical industry only exists to make people sick. Do people die on the operating table? Sure. Do people contract illnesses in hospitals? Yes. Is the VAST MAJORITY of medicine DESIGNED to make people ill? Convincing someone who believes this is impossible, because it's such an extreme view it cannot possibly be based on logic or evidence.
The financial system is a vast and complex. It's as old as the first Egyptian farmers. Do you honestly believe it was DESIGNED to screw over humanity since inception?
Is it so impossible for you to imagine the utility of bank accounts? Futures contracts? Mortgages? Bonds? Stock Exchanges? Fiat money? If these are all just elaborate scams, why does every society on Earth use them since literally 3000 BC?
The most useful aspects of the financial industry are the most heavily regulated... by government.
Banks have rules on what they can use the money in your savings account for. They have government backed insurance.
Regular stocks are also heavily regulated. Financial reporting requirements, disclosures, auditing, etc.
Why does all this regulation exist? Because people we getting screwed over, and it was bad enough the government had to step in.
The mortgage industry was not heavily regulated enough, and what happened there? A large financial crash. And who got bailed out? The banks, many of whom were somewhat complicit and profiting off the situation.
Who didn't get bailed out? The little people.
This is still happening now. Most hedge funds, high frequency trading, the lure of day trading, and may other schemes exist to siphon off money from regular people.
Think for a minute about the hedge fund manager who gets tens of millions in bonuses. Where does that money come from? Ultimately the companies and other investors. That money could have gone into higher wages for the workers, but instead is being funneled to a few elites.
Since ancient times, the powerful have sought to retain and grow their own power. They use whatever means are available to them. It can be the use of force, but things have gotten more sophisticated.
> Why does all this regulation exist? Because people we getting screwed over, and it was bad enough the government had to step in.
I think the analogy still holds here. Medicine is highly regulated because people sometimes die as a result of medical intervention, and as a result of that regulation (hopefully, but debatably) less people die, but that doesn't prove that medicine is designed to kill people.
Banks have offered checking accounts (now usually via debit cards) for a long time. Everyone understood how they worked, and if you wrote a check, it would be refused payment if you didn't have enough money in your account. This is the classic bounced check, and the merchant would be angry with you.
Fast forward to the 2000's. Banks changed the rules, and now (unless you explicitly disallow it) if your check was going to bounce, they will instead charge you an overdraft fee. Even if your account was in the negative by one cent.
All in the name of profit, because the fee would be like $35. And of course, this hit the poorest people the most. And let's not talk about check cashing services, which really screw over the people.
Now if banks stopped there, that would be one thing.
However, one of the "innovations" that Wells Fargo came up with (it was innovated for the profit margin, for a little while) was to re-order transactions any way they saw fit.
Suppose you have $5 in your checking account. This morning, you deposit $50, and in the afternoon, you withdraw $30, secure in the knowledge that you have $55 in your account. Seems safe, right? You're doing the right thing, and playing by the rules, you'll still have $25 left. You are still out and about, so later, you take out another $5 for a meal. No problem, you still have $20 left.
But Wells Fargo changed the rules. They decided that all the transactions coming in on the same day could be ordered (serialized in database terminology) in whatever order they decided. So they would process the $10 withdrawal first, charge you a $35 overdraft fee, and then apply the deposit, leaving you at -$10. Then, when you take out another $5, this is allowed, but because you're already negative, they charge you another overdraft fee, so now you're sitting at -$50.
That is innovation in the modern age of the financial industry.
Yours is a ridiculous answer. Modern hyper-financialised globalised capitalism has nothing in common with bronze age Egyptian farmers. Obviously one doesn't need to justify everything in the past 5000 years to be allowed to criticise financial industries today. Silly fallacies.
The only thing that really works with cryptocurrencies and adjacent technologies is to use them for pyramid schemes and using them for illegal payments like buying things on the darknet or paying ransomware. The rest is just empty promises and short term hype.
NFT is just the last in a long series. Before that we had the Lightning network that would revolutionize payments and make cryptocurrencies actually usable, ICOs that would revolutionize startup founding etc...
I wonder how long the cryptocurrency world will manage to maintain this facade of being a miracle tech in order to justify the insane amount of money poured into it, while at the same time continuously failing to deliver on everything.
Cryptocurrencies have also been used as a way to escape hyperinflation and retain savings despite a coercive and highly restrictive government, eg Venezuela.
When a system becomes corrupt and dysfunctional and normal transactions and savings become ineffective or illegal, cryptocurrencies have proven themselves as a viable means of escape. The value of that is hard to understate.
I agree that a lot of other applications are overhyped, and that there is a lot of bloat and excess in the crypto space. I think their core use case and value is in providing an extremely difficult to block form of value storage despite restrictive and irresponsible governments. The value of that depends on how restrictive and irresponsible your government is being.
In cases like Venezuala, what's the long-term goal of holding crpyto though? That the country somehow collapses and is rebuilt with a normally inflationary currency with a less restrictive government? Or is the idea that you build up savings to eventually leave the country?
It doesn't really seem like a long-term solution or one that'd help more than a small amount of people.
The idea is to not have your money lose half its value on a daily basis. Or to have relatives send you money from abroad. There doesn't need to be an endgame, it just fulfils a need of these people.
Usually this is where someone from Venezuela comes along and tells us that this is a tiny minority, and most people want US Dollars because they can actually use those.
The government controls the traditional US Dollars remittance systems. They can force absurdly bad exchange rates. Crypto shines where the government is messing with banking and currencies.
I'm from Argentina, people who want to trade US dollars usually do it on illegal unofficial markets with better rates. I think it's likely that it's the same in Venezuela.
That's nice, but you appear to be bringing up theoretical conditions as a counter to actual observed behaviour.
Crypto might well potentially shine under such circumstances, or under your view of what such circumstances might be, but the truth on the ground is apparently different.
> Crypto shines where the government is messing with banking and currencies
but isn't any cryptocurrency still directly tied to some fiat currency? Unless everyone uses crypto then at some point it gets exchanged for dollars at which point the low value of the dollar in a place like Venezuela is realized and you're stuck in the same situation but with more hassle.
To be honest, that example is also the weirdest one to actually break through, and together with Snapchat the ones who took it farthest into almost unusable and still made bank.
(Yo, and I think a number of other tried even further down that street but has failed AFAIK.)
Imagine if Google Search achieved success not by providing a search engine but by publishing a whitepaper outlining how PageRank would eventually work, then selling $GOOG tokens to let people speculate on the hype (but not actually entitle them to anything regarding the company, so it's like venture capitalism, but worse).
Then nothing happens for a decade or so, and then Google finally publishes a first version of their engine that takes 30s to search among a couple hundred websites. Effectively unusable, but hey, it's the early day! Bullish!
I also disagree that cryptocurrencies are "hard to understand", it's only hard because their promoters feel the need to obfuscate with technobabble how dumb and ineffective 99% of proposed blockchain solutions are. It's hard to understand because there's nothing to understand.
Plus whenever someone criticizes Google for doing something bad, others could jump in and say “well they’re supposed to move to Don’t Be Evil next year, so it’s ok”
You are projecting an existing, well understood stack on a fundamentally different platform. What works on Earth would be silly to assume it should be the same on the ISS and vice-versa.
> Then nothing happens for a decade or so...
I guess you took the comfortable position to choose starting point of the internet as 1998, but what about 1980's or 70's? It was rather slow progress, just as you described.
> I also disagree that cryptocurrencies are "hard to understand"
I was referring to financial apps in general. For most people to think about interests and investments is a challenge even with fiat currencies.
I agree though that a major crypto/blockchain revolution hasn't happened yet and probably it will never replace the current internet, but it will co-exists and be much more significant than today once a group hits a sweet spot with UX, utility and adoption.
Another example is videogame development: Initially there was pure sweat, blood and passion (around the 80s for PC gaming). But nowadays most of the people in there are for profiteering.
Once the bean counters enter a tech field, they suck all the fun.
Honest question - why are they there then if not to make money? What other reasons exist for selling NFTs if not to make (quick) money? I'm genuinely curious here :)
He did say "not to make a quick buck" and not to not make money in general. As an artist, it's cool when you're getting paid for your work, but it doesn't mean it's the primary motivator for everything you do.
NFTs act as unique instances of objects that can be “digital shadows” of real physical objects, or their own thing, wrt the blockchain they exist on.
For the art world, they are a new medium and can be used to secure provenance. In the rest of the world they are being looked at as mediums for selling tickets or keys to access unique experiences (an art piece/door/puzzle that activates or lights up if presented with a valid NFT as a simple example) among many theoretical use cases.
A lot of crypto stuff doesn’t make sense unless we get Decentralized Identities (DIDs) right, so things like NFTs can be associated with with a user.
Artist share their work on Instagram, Tumblr, and tons of other social networks for free.
Why do they do this? That doesn't make any more sense either.
About your question:
hicetnunc.xyz is basically like Instagram but with an easy option to support the artist by buying their creations directly from them as a NFT.
They can showcase their creations, get discovered, and make some money on top.
as in any other space it is hard for most artists to get attention for the work that they doing. If you want to get attention you have to share some of you work for free. However, the images you see on those platforms are usually not high resolution and don't come with any usage rights. Those are then the things artists get paid for hopefully.
another is that every problem becomes an opportunity. things too slow ? new layer on top of the old. Not enough privacy ? side project that will connect with the old. Everybody jumps on everything to grab their share, get funding and start working but it's all stacked potential.. but nothing stable yet.
1. I read a post on HN extolling a new use of some technology. I understand how it works but don't get why.
I do not jump on the bandwagon.
2. I read about the same technology but not on HN - maybe an online newspaper. I recognise there is an upcurve. Maybe I should have jumped when I read it on HN.
3. Beeple makes a fortune. My son and I enjoy watching him on corridor crew. I think I still don't know why but it can't be that bad. I do not jump on the bandwagon.
4. I realise I want to know the why makes sense. I play with some tech. I still know how but not why. I do not jump on the bandwagon.
5. The bubble bursts. I retro-think my inaction into foresight - I am glad I did not jump on the bandwagon.
But, just maybe, perhaps why is less important than try.
your inaction was perfectly fine. There's always a few lucky people who benefit off these things, millions don't and you don't see them.
It's like becoming a TikTok star. One guy creates a meme, gets ten milion views, lives in a mansion in California. Millions of kids think they can do the same thing and drop out of school. Not worth it. I remember reading a blog post by a Wall Street banker talking about the pre-2008 culture. He said that it was common for people to get promoted because they made money, even if they didn't know why. Justifying bad decisions based on lucky outcomes retroactively isn't a culture you want to emulate.
"According to a Harris Poll/Lego survey covering the United States, Britain, and China, 29% of children aged eight to 12 want to be a “YouTuber.” That’s three times as many as those who want to be astronauts.
Other polls suggest an even higher percentage of teenagers aspire to fame and fortune via YouTube or another social media platform. An eye-grabbing news report out this month suggested a whopping 54% of Americans aged 13 to 38 would become an “influencer” given the chance, with 12% already considering themselves influencers."
There's been an entire industry of so called "content houses" popping up. Okay maybe not literally millions are dropping out of school but it has become a real thing with a non-trivial amount of teenagers and 20-somethings ditching careers for what is basically entertainment gigs.
Reminds me how many people on HN... over a decade ago? were taking about dropping out of school to do startups. Ignoring that their heroes often dropped out because they didn't have time to deal with the school and their existing business, and not before they even started the company.
Fair enough. I have a lot of respect for Andressen (with some caveats held as well) and his ability to spot oncoming waves.
The whole all-in on crypto is one area I am still unsure on (even after coinbase went public for however many billions). Great investment - but is it great foresight ?
On the other hand I will support his call "double down on democracy".
I mean Coinbase can be a good investment regardless. It's like investing in a lottery company, that's a good investment, but it doesn't mean buying lottery tickets is...
I think try >> why [0] is one of the unwritten mantras that the cryptocurrency space is going by. If someone would see a roadmap to tokenize sharks with lasers [1], they would do their best to get funding for it and a team to implement it.
Why would you do that? Because try >> why
This doesn't apply to all people in the space obviously, some have a very strong philosophy as to why something needs to exist. With that said, I do think a lot of people are on the hype train that adheres to try > why
[0] with >> I mean the math operator "much bigger than", not a bitshift.
What would jumping on the bandwagon mean in this case? If you think you could've been Beeple, that bandwagon left in 2007 when he started making Everydays, or maybe in 2019 when his work was associated with Louis Vuitton. If you think you could've been Christie's, that wagon left long before that...
People who are already rich/famous in some way are benefitting from this stuff. Are regular joes making anything worth while?
This mania might have one last leg up, but that's it.
The main thing to remember with markets that have ponzi characteristics is that there are tons of latecomers and few early adopters. While the early adopters might HODL in the face of a 70% downturn, the late adopters won't. They FOMOd in because they couldn't stand seeing their friends make easy money any longer. They don't have conviction because the only reason they're in is because they didn't want to miss out.
This doesn't just apply to NFTs but to everything from crypto to meme stocks (AMC, GME, BBBY, EXPR), to SPACS and to ESG stocks, to shipping and commodities, and to leveraged or speculative ETFs.
When this bubble pops many assets will be priced way below their actual value. This overreaction won't make any sense on the way down just like it hasn't made any sense on the way up.
For this it doesn't even matter if NFTs provide real value and are here to stay. It doesn't matter whether a market behaves like a ponzi because it's fraud or because it just got too much social media coverage. The only thing that matters is whether a large enough percentage of the market consists of latecomers who will panic sell. If so, any bad news and POP!
Just a little correction. NFTs, and crypto in general are critiqued as ponzis, but they are more accurately described as pyramid schemes, whereby early adopters rake in the lion's share of profits. Ponzis are where later investor money is used to pay out early investor money in a fraudulent never ending cycle.
I think pyramid scheme would be a better description if people had different incentives depending on when they got in. With a pyramid scheme people who invite many others personally benefit, and those who join but don't invite others don't gain anything. Think multi-level marketing.
I mean NFTs fit that bill perfectly. Incentives for the late comers are to buy continually more dubious tokens that are produced by the initial round of creators. Those buyers then create a new market of lower tier creators who create even more valueless creations, and so the cycle continues.
Crypto without NFTs have no creators and instead relies on the network effect of public interest to raise the value of their initial purchase. In this way, it's more akin to inventing a product and selling it on to another person and promising them that it will be worth more if they do the same.
Does that not describe crypto? Bitcoin is only making millionaires if more and more late investors are buying in and driving up the price for earlier investors.
A true Ponzi scheme requires intent and organisation (at least at some point; some things normally categorized as Ponzi schemes start off with the intent of being legitimate hedge funds or similar). Crypto things, particularly bitcoin, tend to behave rather like a self-organizing Ponzi scheme, but pedantically, they're not one, quite.
If (when) new people stop buying into a pyramid scheme, all they have are worthless tokens nobody else wants.
If new people stop buying into AAPL or GOOG, all shareholders have is a share of a massive pile of cash and a business which generates billions in profit every quarter. For related reasons, people are likely to continue buying into AAPL or GOOG, AAPL and GOOG can buy back their own shares or find other investors easily if a major investor wants out, and even if for some strange reason nobody at all wants AAPL or GOOGL, shareholders would still expect to get back what they paid in dividends in the long run by holding.
Of course, the businesses can still underperform expectations or fail, but there's a difference between an investment that underperforms because the company isn't good enough at making money and an "investment" that will eventually fail because there isn't actually anyone making money out of anyone other than "investors"
If you consider the market a casino there is no difference. Buy low sell high. But if you approach the market like an investor you try to estimate the intrinsic value of the assets and liabilities of a company, their cash flows, their growth prospects, and their management. Then you find those companies where the market price doesn't match what you think the business is worth and you go long/short those businesses where you think the mismatch is the greatest.
I am hardly surprised. While Bitcoin maybe had theoretical uses as a currency a decade ago, the NFT hype never made any sense whatsoever to begin with.
Crypto (and NFTs in particular) remind me of the tale of The Emperor's New Clothes.
I accept that maybe Ethereum could be valuable (I don't really understand smart contracts well enough to say..) and if they move to proof-of-stake that will make it more sustainable. Likewise, the sheer anonymity of something like Monero might be valuable for the black market.
But everything else just seems like people seeking a "greater fool" to sell to.
If etherium gets down to femtocents per transaction then that would be cool. A usable distributed ledger would be nice for many purposes. But at dollars per transaction, there’s no real use cases.
Imagine if my sql db was free but charged me $10 for any write transaction. That would suck. When the price gets to an operational level, people will use it.
I think the price it will eventually get to is Napster/BitTorrent-level.
I dump a ton of crap on blockchains and just set the transaction fee low until someone takes it
Also check out gas tokens as a concept, you can prebuy gas when gas prices are low and subsidize your future time sensitive transactions when gas prices are high
I’ve dumped stuff at low transaction fees and had it stay there forever.
Try setting 1 cent as your transaction fee and see if anyone picks that up.
This works great if you already prebought way back when, but is not suitable for any current use case I can think of. And certainly not usable by many.
There’s not many situations where $10 for a few bytes is needed, even with the cool feature of free storage forever.
For comparison, 1GB is 2 cents per year on AWS deep glacier. And I trust AWS to be around in a hundred years more than ethereum. Not to mention that storing 1GB costs a fortune in transaction fees.
You forgot an edge case where something has inherent value (like a cup) but has overblown valuation (used by some king), and is sold at an auction to bigger fools.
I’ve yet to find a scenario in which a smart contract truly improves upon a traditional, centralized database solution, NFTs included.
As long as the system relies on externally originated information for proper functioning, we’re back to the issues of trust the technology was intended to resolve.
That is why digital currency actually still seems like the only appropriate application of the blockchain, although it may never see widespread adoption.
An actual casino without the need for a central authority can be implemented on smart contracts, and is the only real application of smart contracts that I see that is better than a centralized solution.
As far as I understand it, producing entropy, which is needed for fair distribution of odds in games of chance, is not achievable directly on the blockchain.
Instead, the job of producing non-deterministic inputs is offloaded to an off-chain source, an oracle, which still requires some degree of trust in an external entity.
My information might be out of date, though, and some implementations might have resolved this issue without destroying the integrity of the entire system. And I will concede that gambling seems to be the most popular use of the tech so far.
You can just make the participants of a bet provide each a random number, and xor their results. If even one of them picked a real random number, the result will be random.
This is the basis of most distributed random number selection algorithm, which existed since a lot before blockchains.
In a smart contract, it could look like something like that:
1- each person which want to participate in the bet pick a random number, then send: their bet (0 or 1), the hash of the random number, and of course money to bet.
2- after some specified time, the first phase finish and no new person can bet. now everyone has to send their actual random number to the smart contract
3- after some specified time again, every random number gathered which had the correct hash are xored. If the popcount of the result is even, 0 win. otherwise 1 win. Everyone who send their random number and guessed correctly get a share of the total amount.
edit: note that I'm not overly familiar with smart contracts, so if this cannot work I would love to be explained why.
With your scheme, on Ethereum at least, miners have an advantage since they choose which transactions to include in a block they mine. So a miner would only process the random numbers sent in 2. if it results in a win for them.
Of course there is more than one miner etc., but having a positive expected outcome is enough to be worth it to play.
NFTs bring the willfull ignorance of the anti-crypto crowd into stark relief. I had a roommate 10 years ago who was a video artist. She would do gallery showings and sell videos for hundreds of thousands of dollars. She had been doing it since the 90's. Her videos could be downloaded from her website, so what was she selling? Certificates of authenticity, that certified that the holder owned the art.
All criticisms of NFTs could just as easily be applied to the way that all digital artists have always sold their art. Where were you, ten years ago? Why weren't you yelling at my roommate for being a scammer?
Not to mention stamp collectors, antique collectors, art buyers, retro video game collectors, etc. Most of this stuff only has value for being an original thing with limited supply. You can get all the practical value from cheap copies. Also gold, diamonds, etc.
I admittedly don't really understand this in depth but it has seemed to me that there's a need for some general purpose decentralized signature or authentication mechanism. I can see NFTs functioning in that kind of way although I'm not sure the current implementations are the best ones nor has the hype bubble necessarily been focused on best use cases. I wouldn't be surprised if NFTs evolved into something far more mundane, a historical footnote on the way to something else.
"the NFT hype never made any sense whatsoever to begin with"
I felt the same, but now regard NFTs as the first meaningful application of blockchain.
First, let's talk about land registries. In developed countries, the state administers a land registry. There is a strict, human-administered API against this registry. It allows users to inspect the full history of land; cause property splits/mergers; execute land exchange; and there is capacity for extensions like water-rights and native title. There is formal governance around some of these operations - conveyancing; council approval.
NFTs have the potential to do something similar, initially for artwork.
Imagine if every time an artist created a painting, they issued a NFT against it, and got this authorised by an authority. That authority does not yet exist, but Christie's and Sotheby's could set up in this space with low effort. Each time a transfer of the artwork occurs, both the NFT and the physical artwork change ownership to the new owner.
This would have a snowball effect, and quickly become the new standard for provenance. Insurance companies would insist that works were marked on the exchange. A stolen artwork would be nearly worthless. It would be pointless to duplicate artwork, because the sold duplicate would effectively destroy the original.
Extension: firearms. Firearms are valuable goods, and would soon be forced onto this registry. Perhaps the state would encourage this transition by asking that firearms ranges mark the transition of guns to and from the range premises by marking this on the chain.
Extension: wine. There is a live problem in China, with rubbish wine being fraudulently marked as premium Australian varieties. Each bottle could be chipped in the cap with an on-chain identifier. In the wine shop, you could use your phone to scan the identifier, and witness custody of that wine back to the producer.
Evolution: complex goods. The next evolution would be to trace the grapes that went into the wine back to the vineyard that they came from.
Reputation becomes very important in this system. This would encourage a new type of auditing profession, who serve a similar role as conveyances, but for chain operations. Once you have that, you could mark carbon credits of goods on the chain, you could have eggs tagged as being free-range or organic, etc.
Blockchain doesn't help in any of the scenarios you describe.
You're still trusting a third-party to release the data. Whether they release it via a blockchain or via a website, what's the difference? The trust model is the same.
You allude to a standard, which indeed is always valuable since it allows people to exchange freely with each other. In your other answers, you seem to take it for granted that using a blockchain means everything is interoperable. But a blockchain is no guarantee that any standard would prevail, especially in the long run. There are already tokens using different interfaces, or even using different blockchains. At this point, "using blockchain" is equivalent to having a public API, no more no less. That's obviously already possible without a blockchain.
So I don't see why you think the use-cases you mentioned benefit from blockchain at all.
It suits the state to run the land registry: (1) a state is a barrier around land, which can be subdivided; (2) the state has incentive to do this; (3) the state can use law and courts to enforce it.
There are other problems that need registries where there is no party with inventive and means to act as the state does above. I think the physical-art and wine examples fit that.
The key quality of blockchain is that it allows groups to form consensus. Even though they compete on some matters, all stakeholders want the platform to succeed. If it doesn't, their investment is worthless.
Hence, Blockchain can act as a synthetic state for enforcing standards and governance of registries. This may go as far as having elections, rulings. The registry data itself could live off-chain. [Sure, there are details to be sorted out here. Maybe the blockchain entity would control all APIs, to allow it to enforce standards against the registries. Those APIs may not necessarily be on the blockchain.]
Due to incentives, I don't think the trust model is the same as a standalone registry. One of the many challenges of dealing with data providers at the moment is they can routinely have low data quality and still get paid. Whereas a state would intervene if a land registry fell below standard.
"In your other answers, you seem to take it for granted that using a blockchain means everything is interoperable"
This is a real problem. I think the foundation problem to solve is how to get somebody to fill a role equivalent to the state in the land registry example. Once you have that, you have a path to solving issues such as this.
You now seem to describe law (as the often quoted "code as law" hints at), and that a blockchain could replace law where it's insufficient. Do you agree that in these cases, just having adequate laws would make a blockchain useless?
> The key quality of blockchain is that it allows groups to form consensus. Even though they compete on some matters, all stakeholders want the platform to succeed. If it doesn't, their investment is worthless.
Isn't that a company (or other kind of association) with shareholders? That's not specific to a blockchain, is it?
> There are other problems that need registries where there is no party with incentive and means to act as the state does above.
Either there are common financial incentives for stakeholders to agree on a registry (you can sell for a higher price if consumers know what they're buying quality products), and it will happen eventually. Or there are none, and it won't. In both cases, having a blockchain does not bring anything. Wine is I think a bad example given that there is already labels such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellation_d%27origine_contr%.... This specific label seems to have its own law, but as soon as you have something resembling trademark law you can have such a label, even if it's designed by a private association of producers. It has its own problems, but I can't think of any that are solved by the use of a blockchain.
To summarize, I do agree with you that we should trace production, quality, and better registries can bring a lot. But there is no blockchain in this discussion, so I don't see how you connect the two.
Just think about the few comments you wrote in this thread, and what you wish would exist in terms of registries, "synthetic state", and so on. How does removing "blockchain" from this equation make any of what you wrote impossible or even slightly harder?
"Do you agree that in these cases, just having adequate laws would make a blockchain useless?"
Yes. There are jurisdictions where there is no prospect of this, but the answer to your question is yes.
"Isn't that a company"
Yes.
"as soon as you have something resembling trademark law you can have such a label, even if it's designed by a private association of producers"
Appellation d'origine contrôlée does not show chain of custody, so it's easily copied. But it may be possible to project a registry into low-rule-of-law regions without rule of law.
"Just think about the few comments you wrote in this thread, and what you wish would exist in terms of registries, "synthetic state", and so on. How does removing "blockchain" from this equation What I am proposing is significantly different. make any of what you wrote impossible or even slightly harder?"
Will do.
An attraction of a non-blockchain solution - it is so much easier to write robust code: put an API around a central server, write good acceptance tests.
I think your examples are good cases for any registry. NFTs aren’t particularly good for this as they are expensive in their current form. Any transaction should be very low cost to process and there would be no value to the NFT itself, but to the thing tracked by the NFT.
So I think the right play would be to not speculate and wait for a government to use blockchain/NFT for registries.
The land registry is a good idea, but is already done without blockchain/NFt so I’m not sure the value of layering this on. For these things to work, it’s better to have a common operator under a monopoly (government) and fees be nominal.
This is how deeds work in the US today, but there’s some clerk filing sheets in a courthouse and processing transactions. This can be improved by databases, etc but NFT doesn’t provide much benefit over a parcel number. As we automate this process, we would not have a market for selling NFTs, we would just need a robot instead of a clerk.
Here are the qualities that I think are special about this model: (1) the platform is organic; (2) critical mass kicks in pretty quickly.
Organic: it would be unrealistic to attempt to solve the wine problem as a one-off registry. But once the infrastructure exists, it becomes trivial to solve the wine problem.
You point out that many of the individual scenarios could be solved by a conventional registry. This is good criticism, thanks.
Maybe the role of the chain is not to be a log of everything, but rather to be a system of governance.
Participating registries need to be onboarded to the chain, and need to abide by the rules to stay onboarded.
Governance consists of humans (proof-of-stake parties) who serve as regulators and magistrates for participating registries. They ensure that the APIs are in good order, and have the ability to excommunicate systems that are not playing by the system. In this model, the chain serves the same role as a nation state, but it does not have land.
The artwork problem is still useful, though, because it is a problem that allows you to bootstrap the platform. Analogy: Amazon was initially about books, but Amazon was never really about books.
Your use case is much cheaper with just a wiki. The NFT layer only adds lots of cost and speculation.
Or a single trusted entity is more likely to organically arise than an NFT market solution.
The issue that these sound decent in theory, but in practice they suck because of costs. And for sustainability, I’d rather deal with the government to run it.
If they would arise organically, they would have already. The problem is that the incentives is for jerks trying to make money than people to collaborate.
As you acknowledge, registries and licenses with APIs are already achievable without NFTs or other types of blockchains, without the expensive computation or assumption that the certifying authority isn't actually the appropriate party to validate their correctness. We already know who owns the Mona Lisa, and since NFTs neither diminish its appeal to art thieves nor provide the Louvre with anything to display in its absence they're no more an advance in protecting art than Postgres.
The only area where I can see something like NFTs working is pure digital goods which can only be enjoyed by the keyholder decrypting them. (This sort of DRM also exists in other forms, but the risk of the vendor deactivating the online validation system when they no longer wish to maintain an old game is a real one)
Computation: proof-of-stake is coming - expensive computation won't be a factor. With that said, if you did everything on-chain, that would generate a lot of activity. (In a separate reply, I have spoken of focusing on the chain for governance, and leaving other details in chain-connected registries.)
Proof-of-stake participants are strongly motivated to ensure the integrity and good reputation of the platform.
By analogy, this is a bit like the Netherlands Water boards. They have power and motivation to do whatever it takes to ensure the dikes are in good order. The population are motivated to support them in this. Everyone suffers if the water gets past the dikes: it destroys the platform.
Pure digital goods are easily duplicated with no loss of utility. For example, you can copy a piece of music and lose nothing from that. The value I see relates to scarce goods.
> Extension: wine. There is a live problem in China, with rubbish wine being fraudulently marked as premium Australian varieties. Each bottle could be chipped in the cap with an on-chain identifier. In the wine shop, you could use your phone to scan the identifier, and witness custody of that wine back to the producer.
I'm not so sure it'll work well for items for consumption. There are several issues
- At any point you can swap out the content of the wine (if you can re-cap it), and sell the genuine wine to someone who trusts the person doing the fraud.
- You're somewhat dependent on many people actually scanning the bottle. You can duplicate a bottle, and if someone doesn't scan it, it's not detected. If you've managed to insert yourself in the supply chain and only care about milking it for profit until you're detected and then running away with the money, you might get away with it for a while.
- I know of at least one liquor from China that marks each bottle with an ID that you can check. It achieves much of the same benefit without blockchain if the supply chain isn't very long and complex
I also don't think PoW or PoS makes any sense with these use-cases where you track items or handle logistics. You probably want some organization setting standards for auditors, and to handle necessary changes to the blockchain algorithm and such. So might as well be proof-of-authority.
"Right, but NFTs don't solve those, either. In a dispute between the court and the blockchain, the court wins."
1) In contracts, you can add a clause that mandates a dispute-resolution process that must take place before either side goes to real courts. These could be codified into the blockchain contracts. If that process is well run, I assume the court will have no reason to over-rule it.
2) In blockchain matters, is there a distinct party to file against? Where there is, do you know who they are? And are they in the same jurisdiction as you?
NFT reminds me that bitcoin doesn't have any legal regulation or protection whatsoever, meaning bitcoins are not legally protected or insured by any government.
It's weird how tech inventions came from publicly funded research, yet it's being adored by libertarians and anti-government people.
It makes no less sense than a painting. If you accept that an original painting has more value than a perfectly good copy, whilst being undistinguishable for anyone except a few experts, you should realize NFT's have the exact same arrangement, except 'originality' is determined by the blockchain instead of an expert.
Well yes, exactly. The original painting has value exactly because it is not a copy. And "owning" the first tweet ever sent? What does that even mean??
At the end of the day "ownership" mostly has any meaning within the legal system. NFTs seem to create something akin to a shadow copyright but which makes no sense. Oh well, maybe I am just a simpleton.
>And "owning" the first tweet ever sent? What does that even mean??
No, no, no. It's worse than you think. An NFT is more like a plastic cup with Pikachu printed on it. You don't own the rights to Pikachu. You just bought a cup with his face on it. With NFTs, there is no contract to own the actual "thing". Just simply the piece of "merch" (the NFT) with the likeness associated with it. Except, a plastic cup still has value to drink from or hold your toothbrushes.
This is true for many NFTs but not all. For example, cryptopunks, autoglyphs, meebits only exist on-chain. Then there are NFTs like artblocks.io where the code to generate your NFT is on-chain and the output is determined by the transaction hash.
At the core, "NFT" is a primitive. It's an entry in a ledger with some properties, it doesn't mean anything. Any meaning is a legal or social construct on top of that, and any perceived value derives from that. And when it comes to the social part, the value really only depends on enough people believing into it. There's a bunch of different things going on, with different people doing different things.
E.g. on some art NFT platforms, a legal license is attached that says that if you hold the NFT for an artwork, you get permission to display that just as you would have permission to display lets say a piece of software art you bought from them. The NFT just is a representation of who holds that license right now, instead of a software license represented by a piece of paper being sold, or an entry in a license database somewhere.
Digital artists have struggled with how to sell a digital thing that can be copied losslessly for a while. Expensive digital art is often sold as some physical thing, e.g. a print, an installation with some screens showing the artwork, or a movie on DVDs. The limited number of the physical things provides a scarcity that apparently has value to a lot of people, leading to higher sales prices, but is also somewhat frustrating if you want the digital thing to be the art. In contrast, when they try to sell just files, that's basically not happening. People will spend hundreds on a print, but not $5 on the digital file the print was created from. And for some, it now turns out that NFTs also provide that scarcity, in the purely digital domain. Sure, everyone can go and download the file, but if you bought the NFT you have a record that proves that you actually bought the thing from the artist. That appears to have value to some people, and they pay the same kind of money as they would for a print etc.
If you don't have an explicit legal thing, it comes down to social convention that this (virtual) thing you are holding has some value to some people. Some collectibles are somewhat of an analogue: Stamps. signed photographs. pokemon cards. Skins in Counter-Strike. All those have no obvious reason why they are worth a lot a money (or not), except that enough people want them and are willing to spend to get them. If a piece of paper with some dudes signature somehow has value to some people, why can't a bag of bits with a digital signature have value to others?
And of course there's lots of hype and too much money floating around that makes all this more extreme, leads to people throwing money at it in the hope to make a profit, and makes the amounts paid for the headline-making things just seem entirely stupid. But that's roughly the forces at work, if we agree to the specific value judgements or not (very similar to collectables markets again, those seem equally weird to me in the extremes).
Paintings have provenance. If you own a Da Vinci you're literally able to touch the canvas that the master himself touched. Your ownership will forever be apart of that works history, and it's yours to enjoy privately and exclusively whenever you want. It's an indulgence.
Nobody will ask you in 20 years what it was like to own an NFT, because they can all have the exact same experience by just looking at the blockchain on their device.
Humans ultimately value stories and experiences, and anything that gets work out of the way so we can spend more time having them.
The NFT is a token for the story behind it, just like the artwork. It is issued by the artist. It has even better provenance tracing than the artwork, which could be a fake.
You can see that the artist made NFTs on chain. That's actually how you can verify uniqueness as anyone can see this NFT is authentic and not a random copycat.
What is an artist sells a a print verified by an NFT. The person who buys that print wants to sell it again. They make a copy of the print and sell the copy with the NFT. They keep the original print. The NFT doesn't seem like it did anything there other than be used as deception for the second buyer. Is there a way to actually link the NFT to the thing the NFT is supposedly tied to?
That original print will probably be worthless as people will regard it as a copy. You'd also be up against life ruining fraud charges.
But yes there are ways to link NFTs to products. Louis Vuitton and Nike are linking NFTs to their products with things like built-in NFC tags and QR codes plus other probably more secretive things.
Well, the high-end art market is kinda scammy, is it not [0]?
I think it's pointless to pay millions of dollars for an original painting when a decent copy can be had for a fraction of the cost. And it would look just as nice.
Or the owner of Picasso asking you if you want virtual token of his Picasso. You give him some money, and you get to say you own token of Picasso. While the person still owns and can sell the original. He could even get cut out of the further sales of Picasso even after he sold it... And I suppose technically nothing stops new owner of the physical object making new token of this time "his Picasso"...
The overwhelmingly negative attitude towards technology on HN lately is upsetting and nauseating. If you don’t like NFTs, don’t buy them (I don’t). If you don’t like some startups product, don’t sign up. In the Boom thread there are people suggesting it’s fraudulent that they’ve taken longer than originally suggested to build supersonic aircraft. I’d very much like to know who elected the naysayers.
There are tons and tons and tons of bad ideas all the time. The vast majority of businesses fail and ideas fall by the wayside. This forum used to be a place to celebrate risky business ideas and long shots.
I couldn’t care less about the $ amount of NFTs sold today versus last month at the peak - in the end something that didn’t exist now does and clearly it is being used by some people - so congratulations to them and let’s find something we -are- excited about instead of every thread being “what a scam” for every attempt at a new use of technology. If a handful of video game developers use this for game-collectible interchange, awesome! Sounds useful. I don’t care about the vicious judgements of others any more than I want to read about why Facebook was a stupid idea in 2006.
I challenge the idea that the negativity is about “technology.”
The negativity appears to be about bogus businesses built on hype, fraud, exploitation, rigged demos, completely fictional timelines, and bogus business models that have come to dominate what we call the tech industry.
Fraud is actually more common in “tech” than it has ever been. It has huge repercussions for everything from start ups to large companies and, with NFTs, toxic financial products exploiting people in the same way that the dotcom and subprime eras did.
You don’t get to opt out of this. I have relatives who now want to get “in on NFTs.” Our industry has real ethical problems with tons of external impact.
By not sitting in judgment of other people’s decisions which are totally unrelated to me, I am far from “opting out”. I am not the arbiter of what is right, and neither is anyone on earth. c'est la vie
I agree that we shouldn't dump on other people's ideas, but I think one reason there is so much vitriol against crypto and NFTs on HN is the lack of real regulation. The field creates systemic market risk that could negatively impact everyone. The SEC requires investors in high-risk, early stage tech companies to be accredited, so that if an investment fails (which 90% do), accredited investors at least have some cushion. In the case of crowdfunded investments, there are dollar amount limits to protect individual unaccredited investors from getting wiped out.
Public companies are restricted in the types of information they can release publicly to protect individual investors from fraud. Crypto boosters can say whatever they want, whenever they want, to convince people to invest.
With crypto and NFTs, someone making minimum wage could easily invest their entire savings into a completely unproven, early-stage technology and lose it all in a matter of hours.
It's hard to ignore the externalities of these crypto adventurers.
1. The enormous carbon footprint spent on something that is 90% a pyramid scheme is absolutely everybody's business. I don't care that you legally paid for the hardware and the electricity bill, it's about the amount of waste generated on something that barely provides a net benefit to humanity.
Yes, there are other industries that are guilty of the same, but it doesn't mean cryptocurrencies get to evade the criticism.
2. It's hard to ignore the fact that I can barely get a decent GPU these days to carry out my research. It's not the sole fault of crypto, but it adds to the problem. Depending on how Chia goes, the market for storage might be affected as well.
3. When we as a society allow scams to thrive, we undermine the general level of trust. Trust has a very real monetary consequence, and we see the effect of this in different societies.
As someone that did some contributions to the ERC721 NFT standard, I am completely enamored with the unexpected and robust direction the market took NFTs and their platforms
I would pretty much never pay for one, but I love claiming NFTs! I have a nice little gallery now too.
I also find it weird that people can’t separate that, it’s obviously their uncomfortable relationship with money that both got their attention and their ire. They’re trying to see if they should be doing something else with their time or if every decision they made in their life for money was wrong and irreconcilable.
There are plenty of claimable airdrops from prior participation in something
Just have to stick around and participate in the ecosystem
No different than achievements in an online game available to the first few people that did something
Think of the paid NFTs as microtransactions collectibles for people that dont [necessarily] want to participate and just have
I usually only find out I’m eligible for claiming an NFT from casually checking non-NFT related chatrooms from time to time. All luck but I’ve found things I really liked!
I think those of us who have been around for a while are starting to synthesize the idea of negative externalities. It's no longer good enough to say "Move fast and break things". It's "Hold on, what are you breaking and why?". It's not good enough to continue to live in the care free world that didn't pan out where Facebook just brought people together and hackers don't use bitcoin to extort utility companies..
> The overwhelmingly negative attitude towards technology on HN lately is upsetting and nauseating. If you don’t like NFTs, don’t buy them (I don’t).
What new technology ? There is nothing in NFT's that is new technology vise.
The only thing "new" is the money/value part.
Some people (myself included ) see that as an attempt to subvert technology.
To me watching NFT's are like watching TV televangelist.
It bothers me that people use technology I love (web, internet, cryptography,...) and subvert it into what are in my opinion scams.
Ignoring the hype, there are plenty of artists having fun selling work on platforms like hicetnunc for not very much and spending most of their proceeds buying other art. I joined and it's great fun trading pieces, coming up with ideas and seeing if anyone likes them, getting inspired by what other artists are doing etc etc etc.
I feel like these small art playgrounds where artists can sell limited editions of their work will stick around whatever happens to the big $$$ hype train side of things.
This is my experience. Hicentnunc (and the tezos community at large) is the closest I've felt to 00s internet culture/content which got me hooked on programming.
Although perhaps paradoxically, I suspect the barrier to entry is part of this.
That's fair, and perhaps for you that true. But 99-05ish are the internet years that I remember as the most creative. It was well before everyones IRL persona was mirrored online, which is when I saw a dramatic shift in what people created online (at least where I lived). Broadly speaking it become less about experimenting with the medium and more about broadcasting what already existed.
The communities I came across were for the most part making for the sake of making. And plenty of them were building new things and experimenting.
Everyone's experience is relative. Perhaps my experiences are rose tinted by nostalgia.
All that is to say, I observe aspects of some NFT (or crypto) communities feel the same to me - new mediums, new challenges and a new excitement around them.
* However I do still think that there is a huge NFT/crypto bubble and there is cataclysmic amounts fud.
00s internet culture/content I hear everybody talking about it but I don't really get what is? Do you mean more of a feeling of companionship like in an IRC or Group?
Whilst being post-dotcom, where a lot of the internet was worked out technically, culturally platforms were still only just starting out. It was before social network UIs all looked the same and there was a play book for creating a network for X. Small communities were thriving and they all still had control of their ecosystems. Internet "mediums" were still in a state of flux on all fronts.
It was the start of "the masses" coming online and creating profiles - but they came online through things like MSN spaces, MySpace and geocities. Which were a lot less sanitized than today's equivalents. Everyday people experimented with their pages the same way teenages do with their bedroom walls. They looked awful, but the medium was alive.
Both of these made me feel more like making for the sake of making was less linked to ego. And overall every community I was part of was still innovating on the medium as much as their niche (be it art, netsec, photography, local history etc).
The parallels I'm thinking of in particular are both artists rushing to the platforms and trying digital art for the first time (admittedly many driven by $$). Meanwhile community leaders are having to deal with new technical, cultural and governance issues - many of which are novel issues imo.
The crypto market is cooling down from its peak, but data about the NFT market shows that it's still doing very well. For Ethereum based NFTs there's been ~13M in sales in the past 7 days. Sources:
Similar story to Bitcoin, transactions were the first use-case. Later came smart contracts which expanded the number of various applications that can be developed with blockchain.
Collecting art was the first big use-case. More individuals and companies are focused on providing long-term value through utility. One example is NFTs that can unlock access such as someones time, places real or virtual, and communities in a similar way to Discords for patreon members. The art aspect is also evolving into more gamedev themes like artist designed NFTs for digi-physical fashion, avatars, pets, skins, etc.
More virtual worlds will compose these blockchain artifacts together, adding more context to them such as: Audio NFTs becoming background music, text NFTs becoming stories and scripts, 3D NFTs can become props, set environments, avatar NFTs become characters and NPCs, and wearable NFTs getting distributed through achievements.
All that said, I'm excited for some pullback because it reminds builders to tune out the noise and stay focused on building.
NFTs are dumb however some of the NFT markets have one cool thing that I hope sticks around: the artist gets a cut of all future sales.
If you sell your NFT art for $10 and then someone resells it for $1M, you will get some percentage of the $1M.
We've all heard the stories of "collector buys 10 Jackson Pollock's for $10 in the 70s, sells the collection for $100M today". Wouldn't it be nice if the artist could benefit from that belated appreciation?
Like most other things on the blockchain you don't really need the blockchain to do this, however this is one case where it's actually much simpler to implement the concept using a blockchain and smart contracts rather than any traditional method I'm aware of.
We've all heard the stories of "collector buys 10 Jackson Pollock's for $10 in the 70s, sells the collection for $100M today".
Sure, but to be fair, only the smallest fraction of artists would have that happen - and most often, it happens well after the artist is dead. In general, an artist is lucky if they sell art for cheap prices, and even luckier if they sell at a decent price.
And with this, it would generally look more like, "artist sells NFT for $75, and two years later got a $8 payout from a resell." Not to mention that you won't get anything for folks gifting the NFT nor any other non-monetary trades.
And back to the "long after they are dead" detail: Who, exactly, gets the money? I mean, by all means, give the money to any immediate family - sibling, parent, spouse, children - or anyone else that would get inheritance from me. But after that, wouldn't it just all go to the owner much like it does now?
I'm a bit torn about this. For example it is generally believed that say SONY should not get a cut if I resell a CD I've bought. Why should this be different for paintings?
I think that the proper reason why CDs and NFTs are different is that NFTs are non-fungible. You can distinguish an early minted NFT by the wallet of the author of, say, an artwork and a late minted NFT with the same value made by someone else.
I said "sort of". The point is that NFTs shouldn't be compared to CD copies, they are more similar to something like the musicians original handwritten music scores in that there's only one of it (and it doesn't confer any licence rights to the buyer).
I tend to agree. There is nothing preventing an artist to sell two NFTs for the same media. Then you would have two competing "originals". Can't do that with a physical object. However it is also progressively harder to prove that a physical thing is actually an original.
If an artist makes prints another dozen of a printed physical work, asks the factory that made a sculpture to produce another one, ... you would have competing originals too (indeed replacing damaged/destroyed prints sometimes happens, the newly printed taking the place of the destroyed one - otherwise it is considered bad taste for an artist to actually do that). Or an installation piece that everyone could copy by following the setup instructions, but is just "original" if the installer has the artists permission to do so. Or an art film that's sold as a single DVD: surely the physical DVD is not the art piece, but the film is, even though the film on DVD is clearly a copy of a file on the artists computer.
Sometimes in art it really comes down to whatever the artist declares to be an original work. (With an NFT you even get a clear order which one was first if you are worried about repeated minting)
Not that I'm a big fan of NFTs or anything, but they really are not that different from what already happens in art.
(There's also NFTs that are images generated by code that takes where in the blockchain it was added into account - that image has not existed before the NFT was minted)
How can you be sure that will happen? If the artist is relatively poor and the artwork/NFT ends up being a marker in some sort of huge money transactions, what recourse do they have to enforce this cut on future transactions?
In the event of huge transactions going on, how plausible is it that the people selecting properties to inflate in this way will choose properties that are encumbered by such an obligation?
I think 'artist gets a cut' is certainly a cool concept, but I think it's purely hypothetical. It will not work out that way in the real world. There will be a mysterious lack of revenue stream to 'artists', even if the scale of speculation continues as it has.
Reason being, this type of speculation is not really about art.
This is actually a thing in the EU (and the UK), because of the Artists’ Resale Right Directive. However, it has very little influence on the livelihood of artists, because the economic value of most art works peaks when they are first sold. So the people who benefit from the resale right are a tiny minority who didn’t really need it in the first place.
It’s not dissimilar to copyright, where almost no estate gets to profit economically from copyright decades after the author’s death. Basically you get rules made for the appealing exceptions rather than the norm.
The traditional method is to just write that stipulation into a normal legal contract. That's already the payment model for some types of art, most notably actors getting a forever cut of backend profit on films. This tends to lead to some creative accounting whereby profit is impossible, but it's still in the contract already. No need for the contract to be on a blockchain. Nothing was stopping Jackson Pollack from writing a stipulation into the sales contracts for this painting that he gets a cut of all future resales.
The only possible advantage of a blockchain here is if you don't trust the law, since the technology itself enforces a smart contract and doesn't rely upon recourse to a legal system. The downside is you have no recourse to a legal system, so if some owner of a digital good sells it off-chain (you give me cash, I give you possession of the wallet), there isn't much you can do.
This is exactly zero change from regular artwork. If I sell a piece of art, the copyright is still mine. You can sign it away, of course, but otherwise they have to get permission to do anything with the image other than display and store it (and the stuff that goes along with this).
- what surprised me is that if someone pays 100M for a painting of sunflowers they are just getting pasteboard and oils - if they want to publish a picture of their purchase they get to pay again !
If NFT resales take off, resales will just happen off chain via contracts. $1Million wire transfer and a concurrent $10 NFT sale. This has the added benefit of some legal enforcement.
If you set your royalty to 25%, meaning that a million dollar sale will have to burn off $250k to you, that million dollar sale will NEVER EVER EVER happen.
Think of it like a processing fee making the platform completely unworkable. Nobody will ever deal with that kind of inefficiency unless they are doing something so desperately illegal that they'd willingly pay that much for the money laundering.
And there's bound to be more efficient ways to money launder. Nope. The artist royalty promise is a pure con.
99% of this cryptocurrency market is a joke (https://henvic.dev/posts/bitcoin/). I'm tired of seeing this. Now we've NFT and an antivirus which has a miner embedded. lol
One thing I learned trading and navigating crypto markets, is that a $0 price type of collapse is not possible with a scarce token. If Bitcoin goes to 0, then anyone can buy all the possibly available bitcoins and then decide what the price will be later on. This makes it impossible for the price to reach 0 unless the protocol is hacked.
A 90-95% decline from the height could safely be considered a total collapse. Some people who got in early will still remain in the green after a total collapse.
The price is not something anyone can just "decide". If the price goes to 0 it's because nobody wants bitcoins. When that is the case, you can't just buy up bitcoins and "decide" that they cost 1 m. Well you could, but nobody would suddenly pay that much.
This has supported my trust in bitcoin from the very beginning. Why do you need NFT for money laundering when you can use cryptocurrency to achieve the same directly?
Can you make an ugly jpg for 0 cent and sell it to your shell company for 10 m? save the first million.
Previously you can send money to mining company for machines, farm bitcoins and then sell machines back to mining company. I am not sure how easy it is now.
It would probably look better if you are not the person making it in the first place, and you need to make it look like you're paying a market price for it.
One reasons could be that Ethereum gas fees for minting a piece are extremely high at the moment.
Tezos ($xtz) based platforms such as https://www.hicetnunc.xyz are thriving.
The fees are next to nothing - especially compared to current alternatives.
something like 75% is on ETH, 95% or so on ETH + BSC (centralized ETH clone) + MATIC (ETH sidechain). The only chain that's not directly or indirectly tied to ETH is FTM.
There are some legitimate use cases for NFTs but art is not one of them.
The best use case I can think of is a kind of DNS domain name system. The domain name is an NFT; it's unique and it provides value as it can be integrated with various systems.
The intrinsic value of crypto and NFT is in software integrations.
You could put DNS in a distributed database (a la blockchain), and there's a benefit there (although no more than insisting all DNS updates are signed, I think). I can't see what additional benefit NFT would offer over that?
Just a few points I could come up with off the top of my head:
- Users could buy and trade domain names using cryptocurrency tokens within the same system without relying on centralized payment gateways.
- No need to rely on a central authority like ICANN to decide who can control what gTLDs.
- Could make way for entirely new security models for TLS certificates; no need to trust certificate authorities. Certificates could be signed using blockchain private keys associated with a specific domain.
- The whole system would be self-contained and all domain purchases would be publicly auditable on-chain; every domain would be paid for using tokens which represent real value, thus preventing misappropriation and spam.
- Different DNS blockchains could compete for relevance/adoption to be integrated with different browser makers; this would encourage decentralization in the browser space.
- Easy path to monetization; imagine how much demand would be created for underlying tokens if each user paid tokens every time they wanted to change the IP address which a domain name points to. This kind of DAO would be profitable by design. You could earn profit just by holding the token.
Websites would also lose their domain if the admin loses the private key, or it gets stolen. There would be no authority to return control to the rightful owner.
I don't think most web actors would be ready to accept that massive drawback.
There are already .crypto domains which work as NFT and just need to pay once as opposed to ENS or DNS domains. Seems the only downside is that it is controlled by a private company.
Was working with a guy to start a card game, it ended, he had other project on NFT. I wonder if I should share this with him. It's weird how easy it is to sell any cool sounding tech to laymen, even if laymen understand the tech a little.
Why isn't everybody able to draw a simple pro/con list to have a minimum of skepticism? Is it because it's marginally better than having a more normal salesman job, to be a nurse or to stay unemployed?
Tech is often like a tulip bubble. Businessmen go into the tulip market because as long as people like tulips, there is money to be made, so it's always money lost when you miss a trend.
I wish there was some rulebook on how to spot trends that will be short-lived.
> I wish there was some rulebook on how to spot trends that will be short-lived.
It's not exactly a rulebook, but if you read enough of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, there are some patterns that recur over and over. It was written 180 years ago, but it's amazing how little the psychology behind manias has changed.
In particular, a good golden rule is to not follow people into an investment that you don't understand because you are blinded by greed.
Stats here fail to track OpenSea, Rarible, Nifty Gateway (three of the largest NFT platforms) and also alt/side chains like Tezos (with Hicetnunc which has recently overtaken Eth platforms in daily activity).
Though likely the headline still stands - the bubble has popped and weekly sales are down to “only” a few dozen million USD per week. ie: we may start to see how this space will look beyond the hype/fad.
That was a barely noticeable bubble. Was it even a market? Just because a tweet and a song got sold, and others sold some art, doesn't mean it was a real market. It was a popular trend which ceased to interest people. Like fidget spinners.
It will probably become trendy again, once Bitcoin hits the 80's, if it ever will.
I'd like to add that being a bubble doesn't mean the object of the bubble is bad. Take the dot com bubble - some of those dot coms are doing pretty well now, like amazon.com, google.com, facebook.com and news.ycombinator.com.
NFTs could become gamechangers, in the literal meaning of the word. The project Enjin for instances focuses on NFTs in the gaming world. One selling point is, that you might be able to collect items in one game and transfer it to another. Collect a rare trophy in Fortnite and show it off in your Steam VR Home, the trophies uniqueness and legitimacy verifiable by everyone. Of course, achieving this is easier said than done, but an appealing vision for the future of gaming.
Also, it has historically been difficult for digital artists to get paid well, considering that copying their work is easy. I'm all for changing that. Yes, the image can still be copied, but ownership is it's own thing and some people are willing to pay for it.
Your gaming scenario still requires EPIC to issue trophies and be the sole arbiter of who gets trophies. People have to trust them to prevent cheating, and not to hand them out in an unsporting way. EPICs game servers will be minting your trophy-tokens.
It doesn't make a difference whether EPIC provide a public API for querying a users profile for what trophies they have, or whether EPIC put that information on a blockchain.
NFTs also don't help digital artists in that NFTs don't prevent copyright infringement. A certificate of ownership can be placed in a blockchain, with a hash, but unless you have a copy of the art to hash then you can't verify it. Once you have a copy of the artwork, you can just ignore the blockchain or claim ownership on a less reputable blockchain. So again, reputation of the organisations minting tokens on the blockchain is key.
> collect items in one game and transfer it to another
This has been touted for years now.
It's not something studios are going to want to support, nor code for - how does this item behave in an entirely different game by an entirely different publishing house? Do I have to write my game to support every single possible one of these? Why would I let you bring your level 9000 sword of whacking into a new game?
And steam can already easily make something unique - they are the authority there, there's no need for trustlessness.
(edit - you know what? Proof of ownership is not the hard part of transferring assets between games, it's likely to be pretty darned easy to do that just with a database. Textures, models, in-game attributes, all that stuff. That's the hard problem there, if anyone even wants to bother.)
And essentially Steam is already doing exactly this, with no of this NFT non-sense. CS:GO skins are unique(if not duplicated by Steam), transferable items, with possibly their own patterns, wear patterns and even customizations that is stickers, which themselves can be modified. And people even trade and sell these on Steam...
I don't understand how NFTs or blockchain in general helps in any way for this, or many other examples of this.
All an NFT is is an encrypted hyperlink in the blockchain. The hyperlink points to a resource on someone's server. I think people forget that the NFT doesn't store the real thing. All an NFT is is basically an encrypted DNS server with some ownership data attached to it.
Right now you could showcase your Fortnite trophy in SteamVR IFF Valve and EPIC decided to integrate this. Using regular boring techniques.
Blockchain doesn't make this easier in any way. All Valve could do is get what trophies you own from the blockchain. But they'd still have to integrate with that particular blockchain and with the systems from EPIC that host the actual thing.
Having a regular database/account system would be way more efficient and easy to use tbh. For example I can already showcase my Tweets on LinkedIn due to regular boring integration. Data from two different companies shared by establishing that I am the owner of both things via a regular old token. Data transferred via an API.
You don't need NFTs to transfer stuff between games, it doesn't even make it simpler. I suppose you could argue that it somewhat simplifies the part where the player proves to the game what he owns, but the real issue is for the games to decide to cooperate in the first place, so if they cooperate on recognizing ownership, and the definition of the trophies, then they are already cooperating.
Feels extremely easy to do if a company like Valve or Discord creates an API and allows companies to use it. Not really sure why it would need to be decentralized.
Even if it turns out to be a loss for the majority of players, I am still happy for the creators that got a chance to monetize their work. I think Beeple truly deserves the fortune he made.
