I feel the IPFS blog post gave me a glimpse of how blockchain can be cool. In certain cases, the need for decentralization is so strong that it makes sense to build a blockchain system for it (or other secure P2P network thingy).
For example, authentication/identity using blockchain technology seems interesting to me.
The only two known usage of blockchain that actually seem to offer a clear advantage over some other strategy (running the thing centralized, not having coordination at all, etc) are A) solving double spend (a la Bitcoin) B) solving zooko’s triangle (a la Namecoin, or the clone you mentioned from ipfs).
Identity on blockchain beyond resolving zooko’s triangle (I.e. stably mapping pseudonyms to pubkeys) typically does not offer an advantage over (partially) centralized identity providers. E.g. putting anything related to government ID on a blockchain is pointless because you might as well have the ID issuer run a central or federated service.
Bitcoin (and it's successors) are a decentralized solution to the double spend problem. If "decentralized" is a requirement, then a cryptocurrency can be an excellent solution. Other known solutions (like "just trust everyone") don't scale well (an understatement!).
If "decentralized" is not a requirement then there are other solutions to the double-spend problem.
Because the trust is distributed. One single person can't cause the entire system to break down or steal all them money. With blockchain coins, the incentives are aligned. The weird thing that happened with BTC that I don't think Satoshi could forsee is that the more valuable it got, the less usable it got. This is one of the unsolved issues: how to create decentralized consensus very very quickly that can't also be attacked via a PoW that is too easy.
Do you know of any lines of research that are out to prove mathematically that it is impossible to have these desirable characteristics simultaneously? I.e. any improvement in consensus efficiency necessarily gives up some amount of decentralization, appropriately defined.
This is the sort of thing that really needs to be questioned.
1. How much security do we need for this transaction?
2. For this block of transactions?
3. Can we have varying levels of security?
What we are ultimately trying to know is, is it profitable to double spend? If the answer is yes, then no one should be transacting, and anything they do transact is a gamble. If the answer is no, there's much less risk, and the farther the answer is no, the safer the transaction.
But we likely don't need as much security as we do now. In fact, it's very easy to handle at a user level.
A. Put the transaction on the blockchain.
B. Wait for additional blocks.
C. If your transaction is huge, wait for more additional blocks. Wait a week, a month. This is an important transaction. When the blockchain has not reverted for such a long time, finally do the transaction in the real world.
If you are transacting with yourself, you don't need any security at all. If you are transacting with a bar and the bar knows you, much like a tab, you don't need much security. If you are transacting with an anonymous person, you want high security.
So security is currently handled on a blockchain by blockchain basis, where it should be a transaction by transaction basis. What if you can't wait a month? Then you should put heavy fees on that transaction and it should be put in with other higher fee transactions.
4. How does security change with transaction size? Does it make sense to have limits?
5. How does security change with total transaction block size? Does it make sense to have limits?
6. When the coin price goes up, how does that change these factors?
7. When the mining reward in coins drops, how does that affect security?
8. When Bitcoin, in 100 years, moves to 100% transaction fee system, what happens to security? What would the transactions fees look like?
9. In 50 years when the block reward has been halved 5 times, either the price of Bitcoin moves to $1 million, or the security drops. Is that okay?
I don't trust the collective anonymous users of Bitcoin more than I trust my bank and the court system though.
If someone hacks into my account, my bank will likely reimburse me for any losses. There are controls in place to stop them from stealing it al. If someone just transferred it to their own account, I could use the courts to get it back. If I use a credit card to pay a scam, I can do a charge-back.
With cryptocurrencies, it's just "bye money". They're not going to fork for you. There's no logic to stop people in Russia transferring my entire account. It's too hard to find criminals to get any relief. It's just your fault for using cryptocurrencies and not having 100% perfect security.
Not to mention, the chance of my bank stealing all my money is nil. They'd be sued and arrested, and the FDIC would reimburse me anyway.
> There are controls in place to stop them from stealing it al. If someone just transferred it to their own account, I could use the courts to get it back.
What if it's taken thorough wrongful civil forfeiture? Will you be able to afford to navigate the courts to get your assets back after they've been seized?
Not always, but wrongful civil forfeiture is just one of many possible ways to steal. In other cases using the court system will be possible. With bitcoin, it is never possible.
So if you think the risk of permanently losing your assets via legal channels is, let's say, 99-to-1 compared to the risk of losing your assets to cryptocurrency attacks, then wouldn't it make sense to hold 99% of your assets in the bank and 1% in cryptocurrencies?
Cryptocurrencies don't have to replace all existing financial instruments to be a useful hedge. They can just be one tool of many to diversify your risk profile.
Especially consider that for people living outside the developed world, the risk of having your assets stolen through legal channels is going to be much higher.
If you think it is indeed 99-to-1, then perhaps. My perception of the trustworthiness of most crypto projects is certainly much lower (see the endless parade of crypto horror stories on https://www.reddit.com/r/SorryForYourLoss/), so personally I would think the odds of a crypto project going under or just simply losing my wallet keys is way higher than the chance my bank or my government will steal my money or my stocks or whatever. Then again, I do live in western Europe so YMMV if you live in Venezuela or someplace like that.
Many/most people don't worry about having large amounts of cash stolen, whether by authorities or criminals precisely because they trust the banking system to keep track of their money.
> One single person can't cause the entire system to break down or steal all them money.
Funny - I have never seen someone in the traditional financing system do that and not get caught. Closest things were ponzi schemes like Madoff (and he did get caught)
I have, however, heard of dozens of exactly this incident happening with cryptocoin exchanges (wallets, services, the most general term for all combined slipped my mind)
If you want to trust a conglomerate of folks who have a vested interest in keeping you small and poor to solve your problems, then there is no advantage. If you do not, then the advantage is exactly that it is not centralised.
Why are you so convinced that cryptocurrency solves the "outside forces much larger and more powerful than me have influence over the system" problem? It exchanged a solution to some problems for a new set of problems to be solved.
I can rephrase it: why do you think it impossible for vastly resourceful entities to acquire so much power they can control the decentralized system - in a softer way, probably but still.
Imagine a world tmr where bitcoin is everywhere. You ll have mining conglomerates in the cheapest electricity providers working as cartels to help each other and protect their interests (so can envision centralizing a blacklist of addresses they dislike, coordination on software version etc), de facto cartels of whales (like todays "billionaires" people describe as a collaborative force), and large lenders who concentrate capital and therefore still can buy out whatever they want (today called banks).
How do you think the blockchain solve any of that?
It's easy. Copy-paste the blockchain and start over with a fork. When the system delegitimizes itself, a debt jubilee lies around the corner. This stuff is just glue now - a cheap way of making a financial system.
What keeps people small and poor is the insistence that people should save in monetary terms.
It's not rocket science. When you keep your wealth in monetary terms, you don't get to have it in physical terms. Money represents how much real wealth you could have if you spent it. It's deferred consumption. There is no real wealth in something that didn't happen.
If you’re fine with all the downsides of trusting you bank, the bank’s central bank and currency issued, the bank’s government, etc then that obviously makes Bitcoin less appealing for you. Remaining upside includes reduced friction for things like international settlement. Don’t tell me that international settlement is easy with traditional banks - I am a financial system power user and it is not.
I think this is an accurate assessment but I think authentication and account management should be seen as separate from 'identity'. Authentication can be useful without being associated with a real-world identity; for example, it can be useful for spam-prevention as an alternative to signups with captcha. You could theoretically log into multiple services which you don't trust by signing messages using your private key without revealing your passphrase to any of those services.
Authentication using the blockchain makes a great AI-resistant alternative to signups with captcha. The same account could be used by multiple independent services and this removes the need for a signup process altogether. It also removes the need for password management since you can use a single account/passphrase to log into various services without revealing your passphrase to any of these services; you can simply sign a message to prove to any service that you control an account (and know the passphrase) without actually revealing the passphrase to any of the third party services.
This post is talking about what is essentially a signing setup. If your private key is stolen in such a setup, the person who steals the key becomes you.
Yes but it also makes it a LOT less likely that your passphrase would be compromised because it is never sent to any service over the wire; with blockchain signatures, your passphrase never needs to leave your own machine. So the service providers you log into never have any opportunity to even see your passphrase; they only see your signatures which proves that you know the passphrase. You could use a different program for signing login messages so that you don't even need to insert your passphrase inside third party UIs. You'd use one trusted program of your choice to handle logins for all the different services; just copy paste the signature into the different services.
There are some stateful blockchains which allow changing the passphrase but of course there is no 'forgot my password' feature; a malicious actor who manages to steal your passphrase could potentially use it to change your passphrase and lock you out of your account but at least you don't have to live in doubt if you suspect that your passphrase was compromised.
The idea behind the blockchain auth approach is that you would only need one passphrase for all services but you would have to secure it carefully since losing it would cause you to be locked out of all services associated with that account.
If someone does steal your identity in this way, there's no way of getting it back. You can't appeal to any authority, because there's no authority to appeal to in a decentralised system. You literally have to start again and create a new identity.
So you're gambling bigger: less likely to have your identity stolen, but complete loss of everything to do with that identity, with no recourse, if it is stolen.
It can't be much worse than relatives claiming you as dead so they can have your house, and then every government system denies you any service because you're "dead"
As the saying goes: not your keys not your wallet. This is the fundamental issue with the anonymity. You can prove you have access, but you cannot prove it belongs to you. The centralized/decentralized conversation often doesn't touch this aspect. When it comes to ownership, at some level, there needs to be a central power to enforce it as ownership is in itself a vague concept.
Ah, so then possession becomes ten-tenths of the law. I'm not sure this is a system that we want. A system that allows for every day trading (buying something at a store) that requires a second piece of equipment to verify your identity that, if someone steals, there is no means of recourse. Sure, multiple wallets, something something, but this just sounds like a nightmare of record keeping where you offload a single point of failure to somewhere else (password manager to remember all your wallets).
You could store that second piece of equipment on your person, like an ultraviolet invisible ink qr code tattoo on your right hand or your forehead since no one can see it except under a black light.
> The same account could be used by multiple independent services and this removes the need for a signup process altogether.
This is only marginally better than SSO with Google/Apple/Facebook/whatever. It dodges the "Google closed my account" problem, which is a meaningful improvement. But I'm not fully certain why you need the public key to be part of a blockchain for this to work. Couldn't you just publish your public key identity on any number of considerably less wasteful systems? As far as I can tell, the only advantage here is the mapping between the name "UncleMeat" and my public key would be able to be reused across services... but in so many cases I don't want my identity to be consistent across services.
- Resistant to centralized censorship (as you pointed out)
- It allows you to use the same passphrase for all services without compromising security since your passphrase never needs to leave your own machine; it is never sent over the wire. You just send signatures to different services.
- The cost associated with purchasing tokens needed to initialize an account on the blockchain would serve as a spam prevention mechanism; an alternative to SIM cards which most centralized services rely on today as a cost barrier to limit the creation of spam accounts.
- Superior integration potential between different services/systems provided by different companies/groups since they can all refer to the exact same account on the same blockchain and provide new ways to unify data between the different services.
> Resistant to centralized censorship (as you pointed out)
I'd wager that most people don't care about this much, though it is real. Still, this can be achieved with signature-based authentication that doesn't require the tremendous waste of BTC. Just... tell the service your public key and sign a message when you sign up. Your key pair doesn't need to be associated with some distributed system for that to work. This has been around for decades and not exactly caught on.
> It allows you to use the same passphrase for all services without compromising security since your passphrase never needs to leave your own machine; it is never sent over the wire. You just send signatures to different services.
This is true for all signature-based authentication, which does not necessitate a blockchain.
> The cost associated with purchasing tokens needed to initialize an account on the blockchain would serve as a spam prevention mechanism; an alternative to SIM cards which most centralized services rely on today to limit the creation of spam accounts.
This sounds like an anti-feature to me. Especially since it'd be foolish for a service to only support authentication via a blockchain. Imagine telling my grandmother that she needed to buy some btc in order to sign up for the service that hosted my wedding photos.
>> This sounds like an anti-feature to me. Especially since it'd be foolish for a service to only support authentication via a blockchain. Imagine telling my grandmother that she needed to buy some btc in order to sign up for the service that hosted my wedding photos.
This is different because your grandma would have to buy the tokens once and signup once and she will have access not only to the 'wedding photo service' but a large number of other services. It's more like paying a small amount of money to get access to an ecosystem of services. Like how people pay money to buy an iPhone and this gives them access to the Apple App Store and all the apps therein.
There will also be network effects associated with the blockchain price going up with adoption. People who signed up early to the right blockchains will have priority access to certain software ecosystems and exclusive services which are only accessible to the richest among them (for example).
> People who signed up early to the right blockchains will have priority access to certain software ecosystems and exclusive services which are only accessible to the richest among them (for example).
This seems even more like an anti-feature TBH. Imagine not being allowed to use the future equivalent of basic services because you were not "early enough". Sorry grandma, no wedding photos for you because you didn't buy these specific three coins out of the thousands started every month.
> People who signed up early to the right blockchains will have priority access to certain software ecosystems and exclusive services which are only accessible to the richest among them (for example).
I cannot possibly imagine a world where services will choose to only permit authentication via some expensive blockchain such that they deny themselves access to markets outside of the global rich.
And telling my grandma "don't worry, the coins you don't understand will go up in price" is not going to help.
This is the core question: why is signature-based authentication using public keys associated with BTC wallets superior to signature-based authentication using public keys not associated with BTC wallets? As far as I can tell, the only benefit here is that now my identity on my photo sharing service can be linked to my identity on my wine rating service. Why do I want that?
The benefit is that many third-party services and many users don't want to have to trust a centralized auth provider. The blockchain provides redundancy and security guarantees which don't require trusting company employees. Not to mention the financial incentives which are associated with being an early adopter of a blockchain project and the network effects which come from that.
I'm convinced that decentralized communities will eventually corrupt and destroy all centralized services and agencies by manipulating their employees and members... Because they can. People will always find a way to create new problems to make themselves necessary. In these political games, decentralized anonymous communities have the upper hand. Unlike centralized projects, you can't corrupt decentralized projects. What can be corrupted, will be corrupted.
To understand why it's the future, you need to look at the big picture. You're assuming that centralized auth providers are secure and trustworthy. This is not going to be true in the future. Trust in institutions and organizations has been eroding and will continue to erode.
OK let’s try again. What precisely is the difference between signature based auth that uses a key pair associated with a wallet and a key pair that the user submits the public key for when they sign up? Why would the latter be vulnerable to additional insider threats?
“Services will make more money because blockchains are trendy” isn’t a meaningful difference.
> - The cost associated with purchasing tokens needed to initialize an account on the blockchain would serve as a spam prevention mechanism; an alternative to SIM cards which most centralized services rely on today as a cost barrier to limit the creation of spam accounts.
Doesn't seem like that to me. If I get banned I can just move my cash to another account and start again, and assuming multiple services does this I can amortize the cost over all of them.
The rest seems to me like something mTLS could solve better.
Well, I found it to be a decent solution to support actual artists (esp. Photographers or folks like eBoy fame) who were already selling their digital art in genuine and honest capacity.
But when some random guy without a story renders a thousand animated dogs from a script and the actual art is how to push it via Reddit bots, my support for artistic value creation has reached its limit.
I think the NFT thing is kinda ridiculous. But then so are plenty of other marketing shenanigans. Maybe it could have worked?
But once it was picked up by the grift/hype/fincrime machine that has eaten cryptocurrencies, it lost all semblance of plausibility to me. It has gone from something like "I bought a small piece of a creator whose work I treasure" to "ZOMG MAKE MONEY FAST".
As an example, take the guy who was big on what he calls investing and I call gambling, who proposed to his girlfriend with an NFT:
For me it's the same deal with cryptocurrencies in general. Interesting idea, and I want to visit the alternate reality where it was developed gradually and sanely by the sort of curious, well-meaning person that got into it early on. But the sort of value-based innovation I care about got stomped long ago.
My interpretation of what they were saying: NFTs are a worthy means of supporting artists but have been tainted by the other breed of artist (the scam artist).
I would extend that by suggesting that NFTs should be a valid means of supporting new artists. The problem arises when people dump garbage into the market to make a quick buck. This will ultimately diminish the long term value of NFTs, meaning there is less value for those who are trying to make a living from their art (and even for those who are trying to make a living investing in art).
Honestly I don't think NFTs - as it exists - was ever a good model.
I know there's a hypothetical resale mechanism, but it's fundamentally operating on a lottery system - artists are buying a ticket hoping to hit it big, and that favors a self-destructive mentality.
A Patreon-like system still has an element of luck, but the steady monthly income makes it much easier for an artist to say "this is working, I should keep going" or "I guess I should start looking for a/keep my day job".
It wasn't ever meant to be a lottery. It was and remains just a way to sell ownership rights to stuff without physically transferring any stuff. The fact that a speculation market bloomed around it was just a weird circumstance.
I am an artist. Have shown in galleries, museums and rubbed shoulders with all sorts of dealers etc in Manhattan art world. What you see in the nft space is pretty normal.. for every genuine, talented artist there are 1000 copy cats just gaming the market trends. For every genuine, professional art seller/buyer there are 1000 used car salesmen looking to flip hype and bad taste for quick profit, screw over naive and poor artist and the big elephant in the room, money laundering.
The recent Met gala.. socialites and wealth parading the halls hanging Caravaggio and Van Gogh, who died destetute.
Real art is what you agree in your mind is real art.
If you are trying to find something to filter out art that will not skyrocket in prices that's different. You need to find out what people are buying and only buy those. Each subgroup will be buying different types of art so research is required.
Anything is real art. A rock you brought in or a painting made by a computer. As long as you see it as art, special and perhaps get an emotion from it.
I was pretty torn about crypto, I saw most of what this essay describes but I also did find it as a potential global currency / computer system outside gov't control that could enable more as a result. BTC v. $ has been discussed to death but the BTC case isn't COMPLETE nonsense imo, in a world where trillions are generated out of thin air to prevent debt defaults and everyone supports it.
However once NFTs became a thing and the crypto whales started pimping it I saw the truth. These people have no vision beyond finding some story to get someone else to pay more for their crypto tokens down the line, full stop.
You don't need to be a billionaire to count as "bored rich", which I take to mean anyone who has too much money lying around and can't find better uses than shitty computer-generated "art" (note that this doesn't include people who buy these with the sole purpose of flipping them to a greater fool).
There are a surprising number of bored rich people, especially when you consider all the new-found crypto wealth. Most of them probably haven't contributed any of their excess wealth to help the hundreds of millions of people who are still starving, so if NFT is one way to extract some of that, so be it.
>> (note that this doesn't include people who buy these with the sole purpose of flipping them to a greater fool).
Hate to burst your bubble, but that is 99.99% of the NFT market. There is maybe 5 people total who bought a NFT for art appreciation reasons, but aside from that rounding error the only reason anyone owns one is as a speculative investment.
In the US, a billionaire has more money at the end of the day if they just pay taxes on it than if they give it to charity and take the deduction.
The only other way a charity helps a billionaire save on taxes is if they use the charity's assets (e.g. boats, helicopers, real estate) as personal assets. But that's felony tax fraud. A billionaire wouldn't be likely to risk prison for that kind of chump change.
The crooked thing about charities is the people who run them, focus on fundraising, and pay themselves a huge salary. But those people aren't billionaires.
Now, you could rent your real estate to a charity you control at an inflated price, or sell them other services, but I think that's probably an edge case.
Yeah, charities aren't full tax avoidance for the rich. It's more of a dick swinging contest amongst the wealthy with some tax breaks to take some of the sting away. At least some good may come from these contests though. Even if 90% of the funds go to pay charity management salaries it's better than nothing.
It isn't about having money, it's about control of that money. Zuckerberg doesn't "have" the money he gives to his foundation, but he still controls it, vs taxes which he wouldn't.
Better Zuckerberg than using the money to send our young men to their deaths in Afghanistan, or pay people to have kids and not work, or to have it siphoned off through fraud by government workers, or wasted by their negligence, or...
I have a rule, which is that by the time I dream up an idea, plenty of other people have already had the same idea. So, when I proposed selling NFTs of the rehearsals of my band, and told my son about it, he said: "Dad, a million people are already doing that sort of thing."
Is your band famous in any way? Or does it have a cult following of some kind?
If not, who would buy an NFT of your jam sessions? The pioneering garage rock band The Stooges released a remastered edition of 1970's Fun House some years back, and included 2 CDs of rehearsal/studio sessions and outtakes.
They were widely panned for it, with some reviews saying that even the most ardent Iggy Pop fan wouldn't need 5 versions of "TV Eye".
I must be getting old because I just don't get NFT's. They look stupid and I don't get why anyone would buy them. Declining tech companies and startups seem to be trying to crowbar them into their products much like Blockchain when it was new and shiny. Perhaps younger me would of seen something I can't anymore.
The thing about NFTs is that many people who buy them "don't get NFTs".
All an NFT is is a token that represents ownership, like if the title to your car or house deed was on a blockchain.
NFTs have some sane use causes like designating the owner of a valuable asset or creating electronic tickets that can be resold or transferred without some centralized entity like ticketmaster.
Prior to NFTs existing, would you purchase the ownership rights to a gif or tweet? Probably not. And that is what is dumb about the excitement around NFTs, some people with more money than sense seem to think that now that you can represent ownership on a blockchain some things, like crappy jpegs, have suddenly become valuable assets.
Yep. It's a completely made up problem. It's maybe useful in enforcing existing IP law (i.e., I can prove that that picture is mine), but even that is questionable (proof of ownership of digital IP has already been proven satisfactorily for courts of law to rule on it).
The fact there is a new way of proving ownership doesn't make the thing owned valuable.
As far as I'm aware, the NFT doesn't itself convey any transfer of copyrights (or any other form of IP). That has to be done by a separate document (and therefore it's that document that transfers the rights, not the NFT). So I don't see how the NFT is doing anything to help enforce existing IP laws?
NFTs don't actually prove ownership of anything but themselves. Owning a hash of a URL has no connection to the real world, and can't prove that the NFT was created by the author of the artwork.
It makes me doubly furious that NFT is advertised as caring for artists. In fact, NFT makes it easier than ever to sell stolen artwork. NFT itself doesn't contain any copyrighted material, and selling metadata/URLs is not illegal, so it's likely that fraud through NFT is de-facto legal if you just carefully word it as selling the NFT of the artwork, and not the artwork itself.
I'm not saying it does; I AM saying that it's an additional public record that can be used to bolster a case in the event of unclear ownership. And even that is "maybe" useful, hence my use of that phrase.
This is the equivalent of someone seeing how much a Picasso sells and wondering if they should become an artist. For every success, there are 10,000 failures.
That's true, but in the Picasso scenario I actually need to learn to do art. In the NFT case, apparently a 3rd grade level of photoshop skills would do.
Don't mistake extreme technical skill as being the sole reason humans value things. Sometimes, it's just about being the first to effectively convey a new idea, and the crudeness of the execution doesn't matter. And there are plenty of extremely skilled artists that spend decades mastering their craft whose work is effectively worthless, because they're not actually breaking new ground.
In hindsight, I was making a joke that seeing the value of an NFT has convinced me to make NFT's - and that this is the very cycle which has made NFT's valuable.
I was not actually implying that I would literally start making NFT's right now.
I did however forget that jokes and humor were against Hackernews rules, and for that I thank you kind sir for the reminder.
I imagine it could actually develop into a similar situation for physical art. There is an original work that is worth a lot because humans are weird like that, and an entire industry of experts who try to sort out the actual original NFT that was minted by the artist over the duplicates and fakes.
For example, we know the original creator of Nyan Cat came out of the woodwork to retroactively mint an NFT for it, https://foundation.app/@NyanCat/nyan-cat-219, which sold for 300 ETH. Obviously, anyone can create an NFT with the same gif, but we are reasonably certain that the actual created this ONE and declared it be the original.
Obviously, this is a very odd thing to try to wrap your head around, but is it really that different from valuing original physical artwork?
Thing is, NFTs don't represent ownership, absent some external legal documents which tie ownership to the NFT. (And even with such external documents p perhaps not; see e.g. the statute of frauds which restricts in what form land ownership can be transferred.)
I can sell NFTs of bridges all day long; doesn't mean anyone is buying a bridge.
An NFT is decent evidence in favour of the keyholder being the creator of a work, if there's no earlier evidence of somebody else being the creator of the work.
When people first started talking about them I thought that was the idea - a kind of people's copyright registry on the blockchain. Which seems like a fairly reasonable idea, as far as it goes.
Edit: To be clear, I mean a copyright registry that is used for the sort of thing copyright registries are used for, ie. adjudicating copyright disputes. I am not saying an NFT of the Mona Lisa is good evidence you painted the Mona Lisa (unless you minted it in 1502), and I'm definitely not saying the current market in NFTs is sensible.
> An NFT is decent evidence in favour of you being the creator of a work, if there's no earlier evidence of somebody else being the creator of the work
It's really not at all reliable. I could create an NFT for the "Joeboy" HN account right now, and ostensibly become the owner of your HN account since such an NFT does not already exist. Obviously, this makes no sense, the NFT is meaningless.
If there was no evidence of the account existing before you registered the NFT, I think that would be a reasonably credible bit of evidence in your favour.
No, you could create an NFT that supposedly represents that but unless people buy into the idea, no is becoming the owner of anything.
If instead Ycombinator would release each user as an NFT, and allow people to buy/sell then, then yes you could become the owner of an HN account via NFTs. But until then, the one who knows the password is the owner.
People seems to have some sort of problem with trying to understand NFTs were all thoughts and logic go out the window as soon as NFTs are mentioned.
It's not at all there is rampant fraud in the NFT market. So much so Deviantart made some detection software to help alert artists their work is being stolen.
All that can be definitively proved outside of other methods is who created the token.
It sounds like you're talking about cases where, as I said, there's "earlier evidence of somebody else being the creator of the work". Intheabsenceofthat, I think the token would be a decent piece of evidence in favour of the token owner.
So would posting it anywhere online essentially. Twitter would work for the same usecase. Or the old sending it to yourself through the mail thing.
NFTs also don’t put the image on chain usually instead just linking from the metadata so a fraudster could register a bunch of placeholder NFTs and then later put stolen art where the link points to. Hey Presto you can steal art and “prove” the actual creator is the fraud.
Well, posting the actual content publicly would obviously make it public, which registering a hash on the blockchain would not. "Sending it to yourself through the mail" would probably be the competition, and I would say a cryptographic hash is at least as good as a postmark, as well as cheaper.
Anyway. I wasn't talking about NFTs as they exist today. I'm just saying the original concept (as I understood it) seemed basically reasonable, before everybody went insane.
> An NFT is decent evidence in favour of the keyholder being the creator of a work, if there's no earlier evidence of somebody else being the creator of the work.
The second clause shows why the first is not true: the other evidence is what gives you the information you need. In every context where it really matters it comes down to what a court would accept and … uh … I would not want to be the one having to tell a judge that something is proof of ownership when anyone on the internet could submit the same record.
I can't say for sure what a judge would make of a cryptographically secure hash of a piece of content that there's no record of prior to the hash's registration on a blockchain. I think if somebody tries to claim authorship of eg. a screenplay I've written, such a hash should be pretty good evidence in my favour.
> Thing is, NFTs don't represent ownership, absent some external legal documents which tie ownership to the NFT.
NFTs are the ownership-tying documents - specifically, asserting ownership over some property, just like any other deed/title to some property (be it tangible or abstract/intellectual). NFTs, like any other sort of deed/title, require recognition, validation, and enforcement by society at large to have any real value.
That is:
> I can sell NFTs of bridges all day long; doesn't mean anyone is buying a bridge.
I can sell deeds/titles to bridges all day long (complete with thick paper and fancy seals); doesn't mean anyone is buying a bridge.
> All an NFT is is a token that represents ownership, like if the title to your car or house deed was on a blockchain.
No. An NFT is just a few bytes of text pinned to a blockchain. They are essentially useless, and every useful property of an NFT can be achieved using asymmetric encryption or digital signatures, the blockchain component is just wasteful hype.
If an external source - say the Twitter account of an artist - can authenticate that the holder of the NFT is who the creator of the art work wants to be recognized as the owner, then social consensus will lead to widespread value assignment to that NFT.
The ability to hold and trade the NFT on the public blockchain makes that asset accessible to a large number of autonomous on-chain markets, like dApps which allow a person to take out self-executing loans that use the NFT as collateral.
> If an external source - say the Twitter account of an artist - can authenticate that the holder of the NFT is who the creator of the art work wants to be recognized as the owner, then social consensus will lead to widespread value assignment to that NFT.
In other words, you don't need the blockchain because the actual value comes from a different system. The only thing it's adding is overhead and unreliability.
It fails to establish that this is unique to a blockchain: we do, after all, have decades of experience building distributed applications and it’s not like banks haven’t issued loans before and the hypothetical benefits have to be weighed against the added costs of relying a very slow, expensive database with no mechanism to correct bugs or fraud.
"makes that asset accessible to a large number of autonomous on-chain markets, like dApps which allow a person to take out self-executing loans that use the NFT as collateral"
What market undergridded by banks provides these features.
The blockchain provides extremely high assurances of up-time and immutability in its protocol rules - which assures accessibility and protection from third party interference. This is ideal as a digital asset registry.
NFTs don't sell ownership rights. NFTs are equivalent of buying photographs of a celebrity. You may own NFT that represents Taylor Swift, but she aint going on a dinner date with you.
Not to mention you are not the only one to hold it either as someone else can Taylor Swift NFT and sell it to.
It is exactly same as buying and owning cards of your favourite celebrity. They are worthless even compared to cowdung and have absolutely not practical value.
One has to be high on drugs to buy ugly gifs for thousands of dollars.
The NFTs that people are making their profile pictures are drastically different from the celebrity and athlete NFTs put out by DraftKings or topshot. The NFTs in profile pics on Twitter (like crypto punks) have randomly generated features making each and every minted nft completely unique.
I feel like there are two vastly different audiences with NFTs. The casual, celebrity/athlete NFTs that are selling multiple of some persons face for fiat currency, and parole who are actively participating in minting NFTs with web3 dApps made by developers with roadmaps and a strong community.
Exactly. If you think your beanie baby is still interesting in 2021, you can put it on a shelf. Showing off your NFT quickly devolves to "cool story, bro."
How? Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying.
Since drivers licenses are linked to individuals, and cannot be traded, the traffic cop that's checking your license will need to compare it to your government issued ID. Then they look it up to see that its valid and linked to you as a person.
How is doing this as an NFT (or other blockchain thing) any better than having a government database they look up?
This is a big problem I have with most blockchain tech: yes, it can be built on a blockchain, but it doesn't need it and alternatives tend to be simpler and cheaper.
I'm overall pro cryptocurrency and blockchain, but if we want people to still take it seriously in twenty years time, we need the use cases to actually make sense. I don't see how NFT's make sense here, unless I'm missing something.
> How is doing this as an NFT (or other blockchain thing) any better than having a government database they look up?
If it's an out-of-state (or worse: international) ID, then the traffic cop (or, speaking from experience, some clerical worker back at the station) would need to deal with some bespoke interface for some external government database - and thus be at the mercy of that external agency. Such interfaces do exist, but they're clunky and antiquated, and it's pretty difficult to get authorization to connect to it. Even for intrastate lookups, a centralized database entails a bunch of infrastructure that's rarely publicly-accessible.
With a (public) blockchain, this becomes a heck of a lot easier and more accessible, since anyone from anywhere can query it with a common and publicly-known interface. Likewise, any agency can post to it without necessarily needing prior authorization and without needing to be at the mercy of other agencies; while there's obviously still a need for agencies to communicate with one another to exchange public keys (and therefore recognize/trust each others' blockchain transactions), that's much less complicated than coordinating a bunch of ad-hoc API connections.
You think that a cop is going to download some custom app (that somebody would build… for some reason) so they can have a preferred interface for their id lookup and police departments are going to approve of this and state governments are going to prefer this so much that they’d choose to implement licensing records using a more complex system that they have less control over?
> You think that a cop is going to download some custom app (that somebody would build… for some reason)
It would more likely be something rolled out by the agency itself. That somebody could accordingly be the agency (preferably just a rebadged and customized version of some FOSS application) and "some reason" would be "not having to duplicate a bunch of effort just to maintain an ID database".
> using a more complex system that they have less control over
I think you're underestimating the complexity of building 50 separate databases and the connections between them, as well as overestimating the control an agency would have over 49 of those databases. And that's just for interstate lookups, never mind international.
Point being: in the grand scheme of things, a blockchain-based approach would be far simpler and offer more control.
> It would more likely be something rolled out by the agency itself.
I don't know police agencies well at all, but I suspect that if a local police force was deciding between "use the state system" and "use some frontend we built ourselves or needed to license ourselves and has no reason to have any tech support", they are going to choose "use the state system".
> With a (public) blockchain, this becomes a heck of a lot easier and more accessible
Only if you assume that every country will actually collaborate and use the same blockchain. Much more likely, in my opinion, is that each country will have its own incompatible blockchain and the end result won't be any different than what you described.
I mean, I get what you're saying and its more likely that an international standard would come into use if no individual country has control over it, but I still think its unlikely.
Which is a fair assessment. I guess what I'm getting at is that at least with a public blockchain such collaboration is actually possible (without every agency needing to trust some centralized provider - which might very well be technically and politically impossible when dealing with international agencies).
Why would a state issuing licenses want to use a distributed system to issue licenses? Licenses aren’t tradable so the defi attributes of nfts aren’t useful here.
Out of the examples you gave, degrees, driving licenses, and permission to an API service are not suitable for NFTs, since they cannot/should not be traded. Presumably we do not want for people to sell their driving licenses or their degrees.
Do people remember what a blockchain even is, at this point?
A blockchain is a chain of transactions. You take away the transactions, and its not a blockchain anymore. Unless we really stretch the definition of a "transaction" or blockchain......
Cryptocurrency has lost the plot. People are talking about blockchains, that don't have mining, or transactions now apparently.
So you limit the types of transactions in your blockchain to "this thing has been issued to this person/id/hash/whatever" and do not have any transactions of the type "this thing has changed ownership to a new person/id/hash/whatever". A bank account that allows deposits but no withdrawals/transfers, its still a ledger, it just limits the operations you are allowed to do (not the operations you could theoretically do).
When a central authority is in charge of adding transactions to the blockchain, ie: DMV issuing licences, what's the advantage of blockchain over a standard database?
Oh, I agree. See my other comment on this page, I said the exact thing you did! Most cases where blockchain is usable, alternatives are still simpler, unless you actually need it to be distributed and zero trust, blockchain probably doesn't make sense.
I was just pointing out how it can be done or how it might make sense, if you needed it for something where blockchain did actually make sense, but in the case of drivers licenses, I don't think it does.
As long as it's done on a public blockchain, validation becomes possible without needing to contact the DMV itself to provide that validation. For example, if you have a California driver's license and I (as a Nevadan) want to verify its validity (say, because I'm running a bar and you don't look 21+), I could check whatever public blockchain to which California posts its ID NFTs, compare that to some reference on the physical ID you're showing me, and make sure the data (namely: name, DOB, etc. - or perhaps a hash of it) matches up; currently that would require either talking to the DMV directly or using some third-party service that does so on my behalf. This becomes even more useful when dealing with international identification, since that tends to involve even more red tape with current systems.
Also, it doesn't necessarily have to be a single central authority adding transactions; a whole bunch of DMVs could very well post to the same blockchain and only trust the validity of ID tokens issued by one another (i.e. with some out-of-band method to associate keys with actual DMVs, much like PGP's "web of trust" concept). This could even pave the way to things like drivers' licenses being partially or fully decentralized, with independent issuing authorities trusting one another based on some external certification process (e.g. "the California DMV has audited Foo Bar Licensing, Inc. and verified that it issues licenses in compliance with the California Vehicle Code, and therefore recognizes FBL-issued licenses as valid").
Allow me to use your example if I want to explain the main advantage of Blockchain derivative technology. Most of people seem to mix up Blockchain and Bitcoin, and think that Blockchain is equivalent to Bitcoin.
Or just skip the extra complexity and have it all handled by a central authority?
Yes, you can use a blockchain to implement it how you describe, but I still don't buy that it has any real advantages. Also, who would run the blockchain?
> a whole bunch of DMVs could very well post to the same blockchain and only trust the validity of ID tokens issued by one another
> with independent issuing authorities trusting one another
If they are the only ones who can issue tokens and they have to trust each other anyway, why does it need to be a blockchain anyway instead of some shared database? Or if you want to keep it distributed, a peer-to-peer distributed hash table or other peer-to-peer database of ID tokens that only the DMV's have write access to. No need for a blockchain.
> if you have a California driver's license and I (as a Nevadan) want to verify its validity
If all the states share a blockchain, then they could just as easily share a database and web interface that you can look up. If they don't share a blockchain, then I don't see how its any different from each having their own system. I mean, even if its a blockchain, how well it works is then up to each state and if there's a centrally mandated blockchain they should be using, then there could also be a centrally mandated database they could be using. It just moves the goal posts around, it doen't in itself solve it. The person checking (bar staff in your example) still need a website or app that they can input the data to derive the hash (as not to leak personal data) and check the hash against the blockchain, this could just as easily work against a central or state database and how well it works, in either case, is still very much dependent on each state.
It seems overly complicated to build this on or as a blockchain.
> Or just skip the extra complexity and have it all handled by a central authority?
Then every agency would have to trust some central authority. Maybe doable for interstate queries (with the associated federal bloat, but that's hardly anything new), but once you go international that becomes a lot harder.
> Also, who would run the blockchain?
Who runs Bitcoin? Ethereum? Cardano? Dogecoin?
> If they are the only ones who can issue tokens and they have to trust each other anyway, why does it need to be a blockchain anyway instead of some shared database?
The amount of trust required for "I'm reasonably sure this agency issued this driver's license" is far lower than the trust required for "I'm okay with this agency having control over my agency's records".
> Or if you want to keep it distributed, a peer-to-peer distributed hash table or other peer-to-peer database of ID tokens that only the DMV's have write access to.
A.k.a. a blockchain. You don't even need to restrict write access; DMVs can readily ignore transactions by non-DMV entities.
> If all the states share a blockchain, then they could just as easily share a database and web interface that you can look up.
That ain't anywhere near as easy, both politically and technically. This is already something they struggle do to, and distributed ledgers make that struggle entirely unnecessary.
> if there's a centrally mandated blockchain they should be using
There wouldn't need to be a mandate. States are perfectly capable of making agreements with one another, and could opt into a public blockchain at their leisure. CCW reciprocity is a good example of this; states have on their own come to recognize concealed carry permits issued by other states, and a blockchain would be a natural fit for recording and authenticating said permits under that dynamic.
Even assuming the need for a mandate, it's a hell of a lot easier for the federal government to say "hey, all states need to use this public blockchain per this standard" than for the federal government to roll out a whole central database that's scalable enough to handle queries nationwide and say "hey, all states need to use this central database".
> The person checking (bar staff in your example) still need a website or app that they can input the data to derive the hash (as not to leak personal data) and check the hash against the blockchain, this could just as easily work against a central or state database
Yes, and that would - again - require either:
1. a central authority that each state's agency trusts to be the record of truth, or:
2. 50 separate databases with 50 separate APIs.
A public blockchain absolves the need for either; agencies can maintain their licensing data autonomously (and, for that matter, data pertaining to those licenses; e.g. recording traffic citations, additional endorsements, etc., even for licenses issued by other agencies) without needing to deal with all that infrastructure.
> Then every agency would have to trust some central authority.
They already have to do that! The central authority has to issue the licenses in the first place. Unless you are suggesting some absurd, decentralized driver's license issuing? Even that is begging the question though, as there has to be some centralized process to decide who is allowed to issue driver's licenses.
> A.k.a. a blockchain. You don't even need to restrict write access; DMVs can readily ignore transactions by non-DMV entities.
Alright, you are really stretching the definition of blockchain. Like, lets say someone just mirrors the database. So there is a web interface, and someone else copied the whole thing down.
Does that now count as a "blockchain" lol? Having more that 1 copies, of a mysql database, is a blockchain now?
> The central authority has to issue the licenses in the first place.
The US federal government is not at all involved in issuing state drivers' licenses, last I checked. Nor is some international agency at all involved in issuing drivers' licenses within any given country. That's what I'm getting at with "central authority" - specifically, a central authority external to the issuer and/or validator.
> Like, lets say someone just mirrors the database. So there is a web interface, and someone else copied the whole thing down.
Is that person going to continually copy it down? What about data from other agencies? How many people are going to be using your web interface?
What I'm getting at there is that this all seems like an awful lot of work compared to just, you know, including some data in a transaction on any ol' existing blockchain (even Bitcoin or Dogecoin or what have you is good enough for this, let alone something that actually supports NFTs like Ethereum or Cardano) and using any ol' blockchain client/explorer to lookup whatever transaction got printed on the ID card.
> Is that person going to continually copy it down? What about data from other agencies? How many people are going to be using your web interface?
> What I'm getting at there is that this all seems like an awful lot of work compared
They are literally the same thing.
The definition of what a "Blockchain" is has stretched so much, that having 1 mirror of a database would now fit people's definition of what a Blockchain is.
Once we get rid of proof of work, and transactions, the only thing we are left with is "a database which has mirrors".
> Once we get rid of proof of work, and transactions
Neither of which I suggested getting rid of above (though to be clear, proof of stake and proof of burn both exist). Transactions are especially handy when you move beyond merely recording the drivers' licenses themselves and actually start recording things like, say, traffic tickets or new endorsements or what have you - and that handiness is significantly improved further when agencies are sharing a single public blockchain instead of trying to maintain umpteen different internal databases explicitly tracking each other.
Even taking your assumption that a blockchain and a database mirror are "literally the same thing", you're still missing the key difference: that the former gives you the benefits of the latter (or at least the ones relevant to this context) with significantly less effort. It's similar in comparison to, say, using IPFS v. mirroring an FTP server; yes, you can create a bunch of FTP mirrors, and reinvent a poorly-specified ad-hoc substitute for half of IPFS, but it'd be a heck of a lot easier and more robust to... just use IPFS.
The only implementation of NFTs I've come across that doesn't look like a fly-by-night operation is NBA's Top Shot, where you can buy video NFTs of special moments in NBA history.
At the very least, you can buy a piece of IP directly from the IP holder, and receive a package that's nicely presented.
It's still totally overpriced, but I can see at least some value. It still needs to go a step further technologically. Like a special app that allows you to view the NFT with AR features artificially implemented. Or displaying it in a holographic form, especially for moments captured with 360-degree cameras.
My main complaint with Top Shot is that the moments exist only on the proprietary site. They also can't be traded anywhere but that site. This removes any value the nft aspect brings to the table as it's now single-point-of-failure.
There was talk about expanding off the one site, but I haven't seen any progress there.
> At the very least, you can buy a piece of IP directly from the IP holder
You're not really buying the IP in any meaningful way, though, you just get a non-exclusive, non-transferable (!) right to display it. They can still air it or license it to others without paying you royalties.
I understand that, I am likening it to purchasing a DVD of a game, which is something that used to happen. Maybe not in the NBA, but in soccer, some clubs do put out DVDs of famous victories.
And even then, I'd say those mass-manufactured DVDs with 90 mins of content are intrinsically more valuable than a GIF-length video clip.
Ah, I think we agree then. I guess someone could make the argument that even though the license to reproduce is limited (e.g. it must be non-commercial), you technically have more IP rights with a TopShots NFT than with a DVD. But yeah, I'd take the DVD myself (if I still owned a player).
TopShot is nice and I made some money on it — but it only takes fiat currency and can’t be sent to my cold storage or transferred off the marketplace. Nothing about it is in the spirit of an NFT or anything decentralized.
I think it's something you can make for free, and sell for money. I don't think anyone "gets" the whole thing; I'd be shocked if anyone selling these things was also a collector. You either get the money or you give the money.
There isn't much to get. It is a collectible and now, for a variety of reasons, all sorts of collectibles are gaining value. I have a pet theory that after art market got heavily regulated with AML laws, a lot of it moved to NFT, where it is very much free game for anyone with money to stake.
I feel exactly the same way when thinking about the 90s. Telemetry and multimedia... two words that back then had exactly the same vibe to me. Both sounded as ambitious as ambiguous, raised millions and made zero business sense despite sounding glamorous and all-encompassing.
The writing was on the wall when the big newspapers gave stock tips for consumers on the hottest newest telemetry startups.
I'm still skeptical, but think of them as digital goods that you own, and that can follow you across applications. If you collect items in a game, you can have them in another place too.
The metaverse pitch is that you can create economies around these that aren't constrained to a single application. I can make and sell cool art, and you can buy that art and put it anywhere - and it's yours, in a way that a downloaded PNG just isn't.
It's not just ugly gifs. It's digital art, your online game items, concert tickets, supermarket vouchers and so on.
Quote from statista: "In 2020, global gaming audiences spent an approximate 54 billion U.S. dollars on additional in-game content". But the players don't own their purchases. You don't play the game anymore, servers go down or you get banned and all your stuff is gone. Think about that.
Edit: Of course my comment got nothing but down votes again on HN. Was worth a try anyway.
But it’s not. It’s a token on a blockchain with some metadata. You’d actually need a separate legally binding contract to link it to actual ownership, and at that point you could have just made up the legal contract without any blockchain or token…
With your example, if the game goes down, an NFT of the in-game purchase isn’t going to be very useful. What’s the difference between having a token or not of the content if there are still no servers for the game either way? Maybe the NFT still points to a screenshot? Great…
Doesn't your indie developer still have to acquire both licenses and assets for all those items, since NFTs (a) don't actually convey a recognizable legal ownership or right of any kind and (b) impose costs proportional to size in bytes, and so can't effectively store the actual data over which they claim ownership?
Good points.
(b) The actual data (jpeg, mp4, 3d mobdel, etc) is usually stored on a system like https://ipfs.io and not on the NFT chain itself.
(a) I think the optimal solution would be that it is in the interest of publishers to have their assets used in other projects. This would give them more value, and the NFT creator usually charges a transaction fee on their assets (every time something is sold on the secondary market, a percentage goes to the creator). Another option would be for the indie developer to assign these items to their own items. For example, AAA studio sword xy is assigned to indie game sword xy. Of course you can't manually assign zillions of NFTs, you would probably do this in tiers and I would imagine there would be services built around that. This would eliminate the IP problem as far as I know, and would just mean that owning NFT xy unlocks a feature/element in the game. This would of course be interesting for official collaborations between publishers.
You mean that your in game items get revoked after you got banned from a game? That's actually a good point. It wouldn't help you to sell these items on a secondary market except you try to scam someone.
At least the items could still bring you value in external games/prokects.
I didn't understand NFT storm as well then I made a 10K collection of NFT images with my friend (I wrote the smart contract) in three weeks and earned $3M from that. I made a lot of money and now I'm part of the creator community but I still sometimes ask "Why?"
The problem with NFTs and blockchain is that they purport that anyone can have access to it…the whole decentralized thing.
Except all these NFT stores require an invite from another artist. As someone who loves taking photos but isn’t socially connected because it’s a passion and not a job, it seems very elitist. Maybe it’s that way because I don’t have access to it and my brain is just playing tricks. But it seems like one of those “you aren’t good enough for this” kind of thing. Some of the online stores like Foundation app have become gatekeepers rather than outlets.
Someone sees cryptocurrency as exactly what it is, and at some point in the future we will know who.
But in the interim, lets not compare crypto to some utopian world that doesn't actually exist. In the current world which we inhabit, the many major currencies are either controlled or heavily influenced by people who:
1) Believe prices constantly rising is good for poor people.
2) Advocate that governments can spend potentially an infinite amount without consequences because they control a printing press. And looking at the actions of, e.g. the US government, it is easy to suspect that the people who understand the nuance there aren't the ones in control of the money supply.
In such an environment, the crypto folk are reasonable. Even if in a perfect world they would clearly all be scammers.
> 1) Believe prices constantly rising is good for poor people.
I mean, inflation actually does benefit poor people, when wages and prices rise at the same rate. Devaluing savings accounts isn't a big deal if you don't have any savings in the first place. Inflation also makes debt less valuable over time, making it gradually easier to pay off.
The real problem is that (in the US) wages have been stagnant for decades. That's not an issue that cryptocurrency is going to solve.
Well, there are a lot of ways of investing your money in ways that track or exceed inflation, so it's not like people without savings are doing well with inflation whereas all those people with savings are getting screwed.
Further though, I would imagine that people who have a little savings but not that much, would end up keeping that in a savings account rather than investing it. As such, the little savings poor people do have would be eaten away by inflation.
Also, like you suggest, wages are not rising with inflation so that just makes things even worse.
>1) Believe prices constantly rising is good for poor people.
Inflation isn't meant to cause rising prices. It's a shitty approximation for negative interest rates. What inflation is doing is letting money rust so that it is flexible enough to represent the real world. Logically speaking income earned in 2010 should be losing value because of the opportunity cost of not employing people. Imagine an economy with two people and you decide to spend your money ten years later. The other party has to spend 10 years unemployed. Even though you lost 10 years of potential employment you still insist that your money from 10 years ago is still worth the same amount. Inflation adds enough flexibility to represent this loss and makes the holder of money realize the loss in the real economy, which encourages him to minimize the loss in the real world. With deflation you deny its existence by making the money system rigid and incapable of representing this potential state of the economy.
Say's law postulates that aggregate demand and supply are always in balance in a barter economy. Money as an intermediary allows short term mismatch between the two and deflation allows an almost permanent mismatch. Since inflation erodes past income any surplus is eroded which encourages people to utilize their surplus and let aggregate supply and demand match again.
>2) Advocate that governments can spend potentially an infinite amount without consequences because they control a printing press. And looking at the actions of, e.g. the US government, it is easy to suspect that the people who understand the nuance there aren't the ones in control of the money supply.
Maybe you like to think that other people think like that but reality is quite boring. What people have recognized is that the real world matters, not the financial world. If you see an unemployed person you can hire that person and at the end of the day customers are happy because that person provided goods and services and the worker is happy because he got paid. If granting credit and promising debt lets that person work, then it's better than trusting on some financial bean counter that tells you that employing people and providing goods and services is bad for the economy.
I got about half way through the article, and all I’d read was a bunch of poorly attributed motives the author had invented for the people who participate in cryptocurrency.
Did they actually get around to talking about cryptocurrency at any point?
> Neither, strictly speaking, is anything that a normal person would really need to know or care about unless that normal person is the victim of a ransomware scam, or wants to buy drugs on the internet...
Ah right... because normal people never donate to journalists. Never pay for online subscriptions, never buy hardware off newegg. Just because the author has no exerience using cryptocurrency he assumes everyone is like him and repeats the FUD.
Normal people do all that with money and credit cards and debit cards and bank transfers, which works faster and better and are much easier to use and much more convenient. The existing framework is a much better way to do all the things you mentioned. What do you have for which the existing framework isn't better, and how often do "normal" people do that?
ICANN isn't perfect (not even close, lol) - but I wish a consortium of countries would just create their own crypto. Unfortunately this would probably devolve to what we currently have with individual fiat.
Would anyone even use a not-for-profit backed "crypto"? I don't mean in the blockchain-backed sense, more in the ICANN/gift-cards/points globally distributed sense.
If you look at ICANN's .org fiasco, it's pretty clear that they couldn't handle even the relatively small amount of money flowing through that. The corruption opportunities of an entire currency are way too much for them.
The rebranding of MySQL as blockchain was a brilliant move for sales. Bit torrent is decentralized and it doesn't use "blockchain". "Blockchain" only works for money and nothing else
I mean, if you look at transaction cost, settle time, user friendliness, and currency risk, it doesn't even work as a medium of exchange, which is the definition of money.
More than a decade on, approximately nobody uses Bitcoin for normal transactions. Compare with Venmo or MPesa, both of which launched around the same time, to se what actual digital money looks like. Both of those do way more transactions than Bitcoin and are much more widely adopted.
Got it. I mean, I know people who ride unicycles. But for this I'm not interesting so much in "is it possible" as "is it effective and widely adopted".
Agree, anecdotes aren't data. But seeing non-tech-savvy people doing it definitely makes me think it's somewhat common. I posted half with the expectation that someone would chime in with some personal experience on the topic; HN has a pretty diverse group here.
I found a number of guides on the pros and cons of various international money transfers options, and BTC is often included as an option. I also found some recent (and old!) articles about its use as a remittance system in poorer areas of the world[1].
> Other emerging market central banks in Latin America, India, and Southeast Asia, where remittances make up a significant share of the economy, are in a similar bind. Bitcoin transfers surged in emerging markets last year, as the pandemic accelerated the rise of cheaper, more efficient digital remittance services.
For sure. And I think that speculation (with attendant market manipulation) are the main observed purpose of it these days. The total drugs market is large, but I'd be surprised to learn that even 1% passes through all the cryptocurrencies put together. Especially Bitcoin given how traceable it is.
Why does the bitcoin blockchain need to be used for normal transactions? Do you not think a neutral payment rail/unit of account between nation state level actor’s could be valuable?
These nation state level actors would need to convert their Bitcoin into something that they can actually spend. Governments need to pay employees, contractors, and suppliers. These people want actual currency they can spend.
The main alternative would be to issue a Bitcoin backed currency. But then you're just re-creating the gold standard, and all of the problems that go along with that.
The goal was "a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash". That is, money.
If you are proposing a new goal, a settlement system for couple hundred named organizations with strong relationships, then a) that's not money, and b) the Bitcoin system is socially and technically wrong for that. But if we keep the goalposts in their original location, Bitcoin is clearly a failure when you look at how the competition has done.
_Anything_ that one could get central banks or nation states to agree to use would be valuable. The LOE the technical system (SWIFT, Bitcoin, whatever) is absolutely infinitesimal compared to negotiating a change of that magnitude.
In my opinion there is nothing wrong with third parties offering services on top but you know, the whole cryptocurrency idea is that you don't need them.
Q4 is set to be an amazing crypto run because all I see is lots of last minute FUD right now on all media channels, and of course from China. The OG FUD source has blown its final wad and banned all crypto “for real this time.” Let’s hope the USA isn’t as backwards thinking and sees that banning crypto is removing yourself from the new world economy.
Nah, I'm still in the bemused stage. They may actually succeed in making crypto a normal thing adopted by society. At which point I'll transition to my usual next stage. Being resigned to yet another bad technology solution to what is fundamentally a people problem.
If you take every long-refuted criticism of Bitcoin along with cherrypicked examples of cringe celebrities endorsing it, and you combine that with misinformed neo-Marxism and an unquestioning acceptance of government officials, you get this article.
> Since 1920, at least 55 hyperinflation events have taken place, destroying savings and creating economic hardship... Bitcoin offers the world an alternative – a sound monetary system outside the control of governments and central banks.
The paper you linked doesn't exactly get off to a good start, considering there are ~1600-2200 dead/worthless cryptocurrencies (see below) and Bitcoin itself is incredibly volatile. It's somewhat absurd to claim Bitcoin is the stable alternative to fiat currencies, or the solution to cases of currency collapse. The rest of the summary is just speculation on how the carbon footprint of Bitcoin might be reasonable in the future. Would you mind pointing out the parts that you feel refute the article's criticisms?
Good point, but you have to consider that if we're talking about a scenario in which it's being used in the place of a national currency, the bigger picture matters less. If your paycheck can lose 20% of it's value in a few days you may not have the option to wait for it to possibly regain that value. Even ignoring the short term issues, I'm not convinced Bitcoin is any more protected from becoming totally worthless than any given fiat currency. I just can't see the scenario in which it solves or even helps the issue of hyperinflation in a way that fiat currency couldn't.
BTC specifically has seen it's volatility drastically reduced. It's not hard to find several stocks with a much higher volatility in the last month, particularly the last week.
Many other cryptocurrencies still experience extreme volatility on par with BTC's early history.
One thing funny about cryptocurrency is that it's built for highly technical group of audience. But in my peers, a majority of people who get benefit from it are non-tech user.
Think of wallet concept. The wallet literally hold nothing. The fund isn't a file or something that the wallet keep. The wallet is simply server as an interface. The transaction can generate off chain. You can signed the transactionor any message to prove who you are. Read is essentially free but write contract cost gas. How can we explain these to a normal user? Why Solana is so fast and Ethereum is slow?
Now, the highly technical user understand those concept and feel something shady about a certain thing. Then they don't buy it. Meanwhile, othergroup get rich so quick and it makes the world feel like crypto is a ripoff.
Add in the controversal stuff such as Sushi fork Uni, then founder run off with $14m(and later return)...
all of that made crypto looks really bad.
But now let's see what blockchaing give us from a technical perspective. It's a distributed database where you can store data into it, like git, and can prove and trust it's what you write into it.
Example, DNS. DNS is very decentralize but what if your DNS server decided to return something different from the name server. What if we store DNS into blockchain? Write to it cost money but read is essentially free as long as you have a node.
But due to the highly cost of mining, and the craziness of its price, develop on blockchain is costly and it push people away because the people who want to build something on it doesn't have the fun. I, for one, want to do the above DNS idea with Ethereum but choose to go with Solana because Ethereum cost is just so damn high...
It’s pretty clear from the article that the author thinks markets are intrinsically bad, most entrepreneurs and founders are generally bad, and that economic activity is generally better coordinated and controlled by the state. And it’s pretty clear from the upvotes and comments that many here agree with this viewpoint.
And that’s fine. That’s a completely defensible world view, that many smarter than me have held throughout history. But for heavens sake why are you spending your time on a forum about celebrating startups hosted by a venture capitalist?
It's only "bad" if you believe in democracy and equality. Markets are great for those who benefit from them. I just don't see cryptos benefiting the majority of mankind. They pretty much reinforce or retain existing power structures.
Cryptocurrency gives people something they want. At best it might a new decentralized leaderless censorship-resistant free-as-in-freedom finance platform. At worst it might be a new decentralized leaderless pyramid scheme where we don't even need a Bernie Madoff because now we have The Algorithm.
If I am simultaneously cynical and hopeful, maybe it will have an adolescence of B and mature into A.
Except its not very decentralized and leaderless. It is dominated by a few ultra rich players, to an even greater extent than the stock market. And that didn't democratise finance either.
This article argues that they are currently used transactionally to launder money. Not the only way to launder money. Not an easy way to promote prosperity among the poor, either. Not even a heuristic to tell the good sources of money from blood-stained ones.
To get to (B) from here, we must endure some path dependence that takes us through an era of unaccountable wealth transfer.
Actually it's pretty weird. This is a sports blog and content engine. And the author is someone who started this publication. I'm not sure what the motivation/context is at all here.
I was involved in a blockchain (DeFi) startup. All the blockchain companies are mostly a huge pyramid scheme. The company I worked for has a lot of big claims, raised millions, wanted to solve world hunger, prioritized partnership, marketing, while having no working implementation. Others in the eco system are the same.
The NFT scene is even more BS. It could destroyed uninformed people's life, just like gambling. However, this kind of gambling is public on the internet with little regulations.
I hope more tech people speak about this instead of just ignoring them.
"I worked at a sleezy startup and meet a bunch of partners doing similar things, and most of them are worse or just as sleezy"
- But cuz you work in a sleezy one so you can only meet the bad company
We were very technical oriented in the beginning. I was hired to do formal verification and system design. Until, money happened, and founders realize they over promised.
> I was involved in a blockchain (DeFi) startup. All the blockchain companies are mostly a huge pyramid scheme. The company I worked for has a lot of big claims, raised millions, wanted to solve world hunger, prioritized partnership, marketing, while having no working implementation. Others in the eco system are the same.
I agree that there are lots of scammy "blockchain" startups, but I don't think it's fair to paint them all with that brush. There are also plenty that are actually building cool projects, without pumping their coin, and announcing light interactions with a company as partnerships.
If you have 20% of companies being scummy, but churning out 80% of the news, your assumption will be that all of the companies are scummy.
I won't pretend I'm a computer genius or anything, but I feel like I understand tech at least more than the average Joe - at least, I'm the designated IT guy for computer problems faced by anyone I know.
The fact that, despite having it explained multiple times by multiple sources multiple ways, I still can't seem to wrap my head around how crypto functions... Makes me suspicious. It feels like the whole idea is to obfuscate it's functionality to the point it becomes this incomprehensible enigma - by design.
If it's not easy to comprehend, and instead a strange mystery number that moves between even stranger mystery-er numbers, someone is bound to think those numbers must be worth something - otherwise it wouldn't exist, right?
Basically what I'm saying is cryptocurrency sends me into an existential spiral of thoughts about how all value is just perceived and agreed upon and 90% of what we call "the economy" is just fake. Look up fractional reserve banking and join the existential crisis with me!
"I don't understand it, therefore there is something suspicious about it" is a very dangerous way of reasoning.
We burned innocent people because of this not long ago.
Anyways, I find the Bitcoin paper very approachable. You may need to read it a bunch of times until everything clicks into place. But it's all there, in just 8 pages.
Humans haven't changed. We just like to pretend we have and are superior now. Pick any random person and put them back in the middle ages, they'd be burning witches and screaming of joy at gladiator matches.
> I still can't seem to wrap my head around how crypto functions... Makes me suspicious. It feels like the whole idea is to obfuscate it's functionality to the point it becomes this incomprehensible enigma - by design.
It's certainly not just obfuscation and smoke+mirrors. It's only as complicated as it has to be and the mathematics behind it are solid. Unfortunately, it is complicated enough that most people won't be able to easily understand it.
It's really just a very slow, very inefficient and very public, database with an audit log of hashes keeping track of every change made. Everything else is just fluff/hype around that idea.
Honestly, one of the funniest things about our money system is that it keeps changing. Our understanding of money isn't really "finished". We ended up with a promise (also known as debt) based system by "accident" (through slow evolution) and that people have to catch up to this.
Not going to say that no one lies about it but I had to transfer a sizable amount of money between two banks at about the same time I did a transaction from my home with BTC that took all but 20 minutes without the need for fax machines.
There are advantages to cryptocurrencies and one can very much want a future where currencies they would use isn't hampered by government.
Transferring huge amounts of money between accounts, specially when you own both is not a problem unless you live in the US. For most of Europe, Asia and even latin america this problem has been solved almost two decades ago. Around the same time the banks on those countries retired their fax machines.
I live in Canada and had bank accounts in France as well where anything above 5 figures is hard to do across institutions. I was able to move 50k in 10 minutes in BTC when 25k CAD was tough to send and required days of wait time despite a certified cheque I paid extra for.
I think NFTs are really dumb, a scam, and/or vectors for money laundering. Then again, I think the same thing about multimillion dollar private artwork and politicians' "nonprofits".
I think most cryptocurrencies and tokens are really dumb or a pyramid scheme. Then again, I think the same about multilevel marketing and much of the modern real estate and stock markets.
But I also see the really exciting potential and promise of blockchain tech. People are working on expanding access to capital and systems to countries with unstable currencies. They're working on the future of the corporation beyond capitalism with DAOs. Enabling micropayments for creators. Much more. It's tiring seeing all these articles harping on the downsides without acknowledging or looking into the upsides.
Probably because the system works fine for these authors -- they're somewhere with a stable currency, their 401k is going up, etc. Blockchain is a space where people are actually dreaming of something different and better instead of accepting the status quo. Meanwhile in the U.S. we have a Fed printing trillions of dollars to prop up asset prices, we have wars to support USD hegemony. In other countries their wages inflate away before they can spend them, etc.
I don't know a lot about all this stuff but I really respect the part of the blockchain space which is about broadening access, decentralizing power, and envisioning new systems.
> The hucksterish utopian rhetoric and blustering ambient scuzz of the broader cryptocurrency thing as it exists in this moment—the clammy slew of posturing experts, the open mendacity and barely concealed rube-running bad faith, the actual criminality and simple goonery that define its day-to-day—do the idea at the center of it no favors, but that is, more or less, the thing that always happens to any idea once people get ahold of it. Again, this is something that most people understand without really understanding how they understand it. At some point, when you are being lied to all the time and everywhere, you just know when it’s happening.
There are way too many words in that article, yet the author manages to say almost nothing that hasn't been said before. I suggest removing all adverbs and adjectives, then re-writing.
> Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer
An amazingly succinct title. Absolutely true. Whenever someone hypes up cryptocurrency, it is almost always for their personal gain, directly or indirectly.
Who cares what Satoshi said back then. What Bitcoin has become now is a complete sham with early adopters stoking the flames of FOMO to get rich quick at the expense of everyone else.
I wish cryptocurrency fans would stop smelling their own farts for once and realize they aren't the absolute geniuses in finance that they claim to be. It's arrogant.
And I wish cryptocurrency detractors would stop lick state boot, calling for bans and throwing out stupid arguments like energy usage.
While many in the coin space are arrogant from ignorance, I would argue that the detractors are universally arrogant with their ignorance.
Bitcoin people are trying to decentralize the world. Make the powerful less powerful. Free humanity from debt economies, inflation, weak fiscal policy and the slow theft of fruits of your labor.
AntiBitcoin people are trying to centralize the world. Empower the already powerful. Stamp that boot onto the face of humanity forever. Ensure that the state can always rob its people of their savings and lifes work, and force compliance with weak fiscal policy, negative interest rates.
I think I know which is on the correct side of history.
>Bitcoin people are trying to decentralize the world. Make the powerful less powerful. Free humanity from debt economies, inflation, weak fiscal policy and the slow theft of fruits of your labor.
I have looked at lots of potential money systems and I'd say most cryptocurrencies fall into the usual deflation speculation death that lots of government currencies (especially during the gold standard) have fallen victim to.
In fact, most currencies are heading down that route. The euro and yen are prime examples. It's kind of funny how people shout about inflation the most when it's been super low for a long time. They complain about inflation when their real problem is that they have no bargaining power because inflation target policies are also supposed to inflate wages. Bitcoin also doesn't solve the rentier problem with land. If your purchasing power magically increases with Bitcoin then the land owner just gets more of your money.
I am really tired of the anti debt crap. The only reason people would be against debt is that there are crazy people who are out of touch with reality who insist on permanent positive interest rates. Just think about the absurdity of hating debt when interest rates are negative. It's simply illogical.
>AntiBitcoin people are trying to centralize the world. Empower the already powerful.
Deflation is empowering the rich. That's what positive real interest rates do. If you have a lot of Bitcoin and Bitcoin goes up in value then you get more gains than a poor person with very few Bitcoin. Inflation and negative interest rates hurt those who are rich the most and hurt those who have very little the least.
>Stamp that boot onto the face of humanity forever.
Is this supposed to be some kind of joke?
>Ensure that the state can always rob its people of their savings and lifes work, and force compliance with weak fiscal policy, negative interest rates.
Savings are literally just a reduction in demand for labor. Reducing your demand for labor doesn't make anyone wealthier by itself. It's only because there are other people who want that labor that saving even earns a return. You are basically paid to reduce your demand so that other, more productive people get to have the scarce labor. If you reduce your demand for labor and nobody ends up demanding the freed up labor then you basically worked for nothing. The entire point of inflation and negative interest rates are to get this fact into your damn head. You are piling up a bunch of potatoes that spoil before you eat them. Stop that.
I fundamentally disagree with everything you have written, from definitions, to target of harms, to outcomes. I think your philosophy is dangerous and harmful.
So, No, I will not stop that. Thank Satoshi that I don't need to.
I choose to opt of your authoritarian and paternalistic
philosophies. I will always convert fruits of my labor into hard money, where you cannot hurt me.
This statement is actually quite similar to what I used to hear people say at a stock technical analysis class. In speculative financial markets, one person's loss is another person's gain. So almost no one is going to give you any advice that will help you.. more likely they're helping themselves by misdirecting you.
I want poor people to stop losing their money to scammers. This is primarily who loses money in pump and dumps. Rich people pump the currency, recruit, then dump.
FOMO hits the poor way harder than it does the rich. Rich people have lots of places to invest their money that give good returns and they don't need to "get rich quick".
I want cryptocurrencies shut down so they stop using insane amounts of power so that people can gamble.
We all indirectly gain if cryptocurrencies cease to exist, because less carbon will be released into the atmosphere.
> I want poor people to stop losing their money to scammers
Then your ire should be directed at scammers, not a specific implementation detail of their scams. Should we abolish wire transfers and gift cards because scammers use those in scams, too? How about stocks, while we're at it? Those get pumped and dumped all the time, too.
> I want cryptocurrencies shut down so they stop using insane amounts of power so that people can gamble.
> We all indirectly gain if cryptocurrencies cease to exist, because less carbon will be released into the atmosphere.
Not all cryptocurrencies are proof of work; proof of stake, for example, is increasingly common (Cardano is the biggest current example, and Ethereum is moving toward it) and uses negligible energy (and therefore releases negligible carbon into the atmosphere).
Bitcoin has nothing to do with all these scams like NFTs and "internet computers" like Ethereum, which are pushed by tech gurus, influencers and marketers. It's time to stop conflating these under the same umbrella. Bitcoiners are not the same people who push these useless things.
What do you mean? Of course it is. How else has ransomware been able to thrive as of late?
The sooner governments abolish fiat to cryptocurrency exchanges and make such transactions illegal, the sooner this clown car of sadness will come to an end.
As much as I'm not a fan of China and the CCP, they are making some good moves in this department recently to eliminate unneeded capital flight. The US should follow in their steps here.
It happens, but it isn't "the domain" like he meant. There are hundreds of millions Bitcoin users already, and the vast majority of them are not criminals. According to Chainalysis, only 0.34% of total transaction value was criminal in 2020.[0]
410 comments
[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 452 ms ] threadFor example, authentication/identity using blockchain technology seems interesting to me.
[1] https://blog.ipfs.io/decentralizing-the-internet-s-root/
Identity on blockchain beyond resolving zooko’s triangle (I.e. stably mapping pseudonyms to pubkeys) typically does not offer an advantage over (partially) centralized identity providers. E.g. putting anything related to government ID on a blockchain is pointless because you might as well have the ID issuer run a central or federated service.
Bitcoin (and it's successors) are a decentralized solution to the double spend problem. If "decentralized" is a requirement, then a cryptocurrency can be an excellent solution. Other known solutions (like "just trust everyone") don't scale well (an understatement!).
If "decentralized" is not a requirement then there are other solutions to the double-spend problem.
1. How much security do we need for this transaction?
2. For this block of transactions?
3. Can we have varying levels of security?
What we are ultimately trying to know is, is it profitable to double spend? If the answer is yes, then no one should be transacting, and anything they do transact is a gamble. If the answer is no, there's much less risk, and the farther the answer is no, the safer the transaction.
But we likely don't need as much security as we do now. In fact, it's very easy to handle at a user level.
A. Put the transaction on the blockchain.
B. Wait for additional blocks.
C. If your transaction is huge, wait for more additional blocks. Wait a week, a month. This is an important transaction. When the blockchain has not reverted for such a long time, finally do the transaction in the real world.
If you are transacting with yourself, you don't need any security at all. If you are transacting with a bar and the bar knows you, much like a tab, you don't need much security. If you are transacting with an anonymous person, you want high security.
So security is currently handled on a blockchain by blockchain basis, where it should be a transaction by transaction basis. What if you can't wait a month? Then you should put heavy fees on that transaction and it should be put in with other higher fee transactions.
4. How does security change with transaction size? Does it make sense to have limits?
5. How does security change with total transaction block size? Does it make sense to have limits?
6. When the coin price goes up, how does that change these factors?
7. When the mining reward in coins drops, how does that affect security?
8. When Bitcoin, in 100 years, moves to 100% transaction fee system, what happens to security? What would the transactions fees look like?
9. In 50 years when the block reward has been halved 5 times, either the price of Bitcoin moves to $1 million, or the security drops. Is that okay?
If someone hacks into my account, my bank will likely reimburse me for any losses. There are controls in place to stop them from stealing it al. If someone just transferred it to their own account, I could use the courts to get it back. If I use a credit card to pay a scam, I can do a charge-back.
With cryptocurrencies, it's just "bye money". They're not going to fork for you. There's no logic to stop people in Russia transferring my entire account. It's too hard to find criminals to get any relief. It's just your fault for using cryptocurrencies and not having 100% perfect security.
Not to mention, the chance of my bank stealing all my money is nil. They'd be sued and arrested, and the FDIC would reimburse me anyway.
What if it's taken thorough wrongful civil forfeiture? Will you be able to afford to navigate the courts to get your assets back after they've been seized?
Cryptocurrencies don't have to replace all existing financial instruments to be a useful hedge. They can just be one tool of many to diversify your risk profile.
Especially consider that for people living outside the developed world, the risk of having your assets stolen through legal channels is going to be much higher.
You had to cover the "too big to fail" system.
On btc no.
Funny - I have never seen someone in the traditional financing system do that and not get caught. Closest things were ponzi schemes like Madoff (and he did get caught)
I have, however, heard of dozens of exactly this incident happening with cryptocoin exchanges (wallets, services, the most general term for all combined slipped my mind)
If you want to trust a conglomerate of folks who have a vested interest in keeping you small and poor to solve your problems, then there is no advantage. If you do not, then the advantage is exactly that it is not centralised.
Imagine a world tmr where bitcoin is everywhere. You ll have mining conglomerates in the cheapest electricity providers working as cartels to help each other and protect their interests (so can envision centralizing a blacklist of addresses they dislike, coordination on software version etc), de facto cartels of whales (like todays "billionaires" people describe as a collaborative force), and large lenders who concentrate capital and therefore still can buy out whatever they want (today called banks).
How do you think the blockchain solve any of that?
It's not rocket science. When you keep your wealth in monetary terms, you don't get to have it in physical terms. Money represents how much real wealth you could have if you spent it. It's deferred consumption. There is no real wealth in something that didn't happen.
Essentially yes :)
There are some stateful blockchains which allow changing the passphrase but of course there is no 'forgot my password' feature; a malicious actor who manages to steal your passphrase could potentially use it to change your passphrase and lock you out of your account but at least you don't have to live in doubt if you suspect that your passphrase was compromised.
The idea behind the blockchain auth approach is that you would only need one passphrase for all services but you would have to secure it carefully since losing it would cause you to be locked out of all services associated with that account.
So you're gambling bigger: less likely to have your identity stolen, but complete loss of everything to do with that identity, with no recourse, if it is stolen.
I'm not sure I like those odds.
This is only marginally better than SSO with Google/Apple/Facebook/whatever. It dodges the "Google closed my account" problem, which is a meaningful improvement. But I'm not fully certain why you need the public key to be part of a blockchain for this to work. Couldn't you just publish your public key identity on any number of considerably less wasteful systems? As far as I can tell, the only advantage here is the mapping between the name "UncleMeat" and my public key would be able to be reused across services... but in so many cases I don't want my identity to be consistent across services.
- It allows you to use the same passphrase for all services without compromising security since your passphrase never needs to leave your own machine; it is never sent over the wire. You just send signatures to different services.
- The cost associated with purchasing tokens needed to initialize an account on the blockchain would serve as a spam prevention mechanism; an alternative to SIM cards which most centralized services rely on today as a cost barrier to limit the creation of spam accounts.
- Superior integration potential between different services/systems provided by different companies/groups since they can all refer to the exact same account on the same blockchain and provide new ways to unify data between the different services.
I'd wager that most people don't care about this much, though it is real. Still, this can be achieved with signature-based authentication that doesn't require the tremendous waste of BTC. Just... tell the service your public key and sign a message when you sign up. Your key pair doesn't need to be associated with some distributed system for that to work. This has been around for decades and not exactly caught on.
> It allows you to use the same passphrase for all services without compromising security since your passphrase never needs to leave your own machine; it is never sent over the wire. You just send signatures to different services.
This is true for all signature-based authentication, which does not necessitate a blockchain.
> The cost associated with purchasing tokens needed to initialize an account on the blockchain would serve as a spam prevention mechanism; an alternative to SIM cards which most centralized services rely on today to limit the creation of spam accounts.
This sounds like an anti-feature to me. Especially since it'd be foolish for a service to only support authentication via a blockchain. Imagine telling my grandmother that she needed to buy some btc in order to sign up for the service that hosted my wedding photos.
This is different because your grandma would have to buy the tokens once and signup once and she will have access not only to the 'wedding photo service' but a large number of other services. It's more like paying a small amount of money to get access to an ecosystem of services. Like how people pay money to buy an iPhone and this gives them access to the Apple App Store and all the apps therein.
There will also be network effects associated with the blockchain price going up with adoption. People who signed up early to the right blockchains will have priority access to certain software ecosystems and exclusive services which are only accessible to the richest among them (for example).
This seems even more like an anti-feature TBH. Imagine not being allowed to use the future equivalent of basic services because you were not "early enough". Sorry grandma, no wedding photos for you because you didn't buy these specific three coins out of the thousands started every month.
I cannot possibly imagine a world where services will choose to only permit authentication via some expensive blockchain such that they deny themselves access to markets outside of the global rich.
And telling my grandma "don't worry, the coins you don't understand will go up in price" is not going to help.
This is the core question: why is signature-based authentication using public keys associated with BTC wallets superior to signature-based authentication using public keys not associated with BTC wallets? As far as I can tell, the only benefit here is that now my identity on my photo sharing service can be linked to my identity on my wine rating service. Why do I want that?
I'm convinced that decentralized communities will eventually corrupt and destroy all centralized services and agencies by manipulating their employees and members... Because they can. People will always find a way to create new problems to make themselves necessary. In these political games, decentralized anonymous communities have the upper hand. Unlike centralized projects, you can't corrupt decentralized projects. What can be corrupted, will be corrupted.
To understand why it's the future, you need to look at the big picture. You're assuming that centralized auth providers are secure and trustworthy. This is not going to be true in the future. Trust in institutions and organizations has been eroding and will continue to erode.
“Services will make more money because blockchains are trendy” isn’t a meaningful difference.
Doesn't seem like that to me. If I get banned I can just move my cash to another account and start again, and assuming multiple services does this I can amortize the cost over all of them.
The rest seems to me like something mTLS could solve better.
You don’t need blockchains for this. Ordinary websites can implement this. They usually don’t, but, they could?
Bad taste of the bored rich is not a new thing, but I hope NFTs won't become a noble tradition.
But when some random guy without a story renders a thousand animated dogs from a script and the actual art is how to push it via Reddit bots, my support for artistic value creation has reached its limit.
Or things are only cool until they are not mainstream?
But once it was picked up by the grift/hype/fincrime machine that has eaten cryptocurrencies, it lost all semblance of plausibility to me. It has gone from something like "I bought a small piece of a creator whose work I treasure" to "ZOMG MAKE MONEY FAST".
As an example, take the guy who was big on what he calls investing and I call gambling, who proposed to his girlfriend with an NFT:
https://twitter.com/redditships/status/1432396694608662536?l...
For me it's the same deal with cryptocurrencies in general. Interesting idea, and I want to visit the alternate reality where it was developed gradually and sanely by the sort of curious, well-meaning person that got into it early on. But the sort of value-based innovation I care about got stomped long ago.
I would extend that by suggesting that NFTs should be a valid means of supporting new artists. The problem arises when people dump garbage into the market to make a quick buck. This will ultimately diminish the long term value of NFTs, meaning there is less value for those who are trying to make a living from their art (and even for those who are trying to make a living investing in art).
I know there's a hypothetical resale mechanism, but it's fundamentally operating on a lottery system - artists are buying a ticket hoping to hit it big, and that favors a self-destructive mentality.
A Patreon-like system still has an element of luck, but the steady monthly income makes it much easier for an artist to say "this is working, I should keep going" or "I guess I should start looking for a/keep my day job".
Especially since NFTs confer no actual assets or rights in anyway that matters EXCEPT for in an adjacent speculative market.
The recent Met gala.. socialites and wealth parading the halls hanging Caravaggio and Van Gogh, who died destetute.
If you are trying to find something to filter out art that will not skyrocket in prices that's different. You need to find out what people are buying and only buy those. Each subgroup will be buying different types of art so research is required.
Anything is real art. A rock you brought in or a painting made by a computer. As long as you see it as art, special and perhaps get an emotion from it.
However once NFTs became a thing and the crypto whales started pimping it I saw the truth. These people have no vision beyond finding some story to get someone else to pay more for their crypto tokens down the line, full stop.
* Real charities, not those billionaire tax avoidance schemes.
There are a surprising number of bored rich people, especially when you consider all the new-found crypto wealth. Most of them probably haven't contributed any of their excess wealth to help the hundreds of millions of people who are still starving, so if NFT is one way to extract some of that, so be it.
Hate to burst your bubble, but that is 99.99% of the NFT market. There is maybe 5 people total who bought a NFT for art appreciation reasons, but aside from that rounding error the only reason anyone owns one is as a speculative investment.
No such thing.
In the US, a billionaire has more money at the end of the day if they just pay taxes on it than if they give it to charity and take the deduction.
The only other way a charity helps a billionaire save on taxes is if they use the charity's assets (e.g. boats, helicopers, real estate) as personal assets. But that's felony tax fraud. A billionaire wouldn't be likely to risk prison for that kind of chump change.
The crooked thing about charities is the people who run them, focus on fundraising, and pay themselves a huge salary. But those people aren't billionaires.
Now, you could rent your real estate to a charity you control at an inflated price, or sell them other services, but I think that's probably an edge case.
Most of the influencers are shilling something, obviously
If not, who would buy an NFT of your jam sessions? The pioneering garage rock band The Stooges released a remastered edition of 1970's Fun House some years back, and included 2 CDs of rehearsal/studio sessions and outtakes.
They were widely panned for it, with some reviews saying that even the most ardent Iggy Pop fan wouldn't need 5 versions of "TV Eye".
All an NFT is is a token that represents ownership, like if the title to your car or house deed was on a blockchain.
NFTs have some sane use causes like designating the owner of a valuable asset or creating electronic tickets that can be resold or transferred without some centralized entity like ticketmaster.
Prior to NFTs existing, would you purchase the ownership rights to a gif or tweet? Probably not. And that is what is dumb about the excitement around NFTs, some people with more money than sense seem to think that now that you can represent ownership on a blockchain some things, like crappy jpegs, have suddenly become valuable assets.
The fact there is a new way of proving ownership doesn't make the thing owned valuable.
It makes me doubly furious that NFT is advertised as caring for artists. In fact, NFT makes it easier than ever to sell stolen artwork. NFT itself doesn't contain any copyrighted material, and selling metadata/URLs is not illegal, so it's likely that fraud through NFT is de-facto legal if you just carefully word it as selling the NFT of the artwork, and not the artwork itself.
It sold for 74 ETH.
Hrm...I wonder if I should mint some nft's?
And so it begins.
Don't mistake extreme technical skill as being the sole reason humans value things. Sometimes, it's just about being the first to effectively convey a new idea, and the crudeness of the execution doesn't matter. And there are plenty of extremely skilled artists that spend decades mastering their craft whose work is effectively worthless, because they're not actually breaking new ground.
I was not actually implying that I would literally start making NFT's right now.
I did however forget that jokes and humor were against Hackernews rules, and for that I thank you kind sir for the reminder.
Learning to mix paint like Rothko would take years.
NFTs are equivalent to a orange checkmark on the website twotter.com that I just set up.
For example, we know the original creator of Nyan Cat came out of the woodwork to retroactively mint an NFT for it, https://foundation.app/@NyanCat/nyan-cat-219, which sold for 300 ETH. Obviously, anyone can create an NFT with the same gif, but we are reasonably certain that the actual created this ONE and declared it be the original.
Obviously, this is a very odd thing to try to wrap your head around, but is it really that different from valuing original physical artwork?
I can sell NFTs of bridges all day long; doesn't mean anyone is buying a bridge.
When people first started talking about them I thought that was the idea - a kind of people's copyright registry on the blockchain. Which seems like a fairly reasonable idea, as far as it goes.
Edit: To be clear, I mean a copyright registry that is used for the sort of thing copyright registries are used for, ie. adjudicating copyright disputes. I am not saying an NFT of the Mona Lisa is good evidence you painted the Mona Lisa (unless you minted it in 1502), and I'm definitely not saying the current market in NFTs is sensible.
It's really not at all reliable. I could create an NFT for the "Joeboy" HN account right now, and ostensibly become the owner of your HN account since such an NFT does not already exist. Obviously, this makes no sense, the NFT is meaningless.
If instead Ycombinator would release each user as an NFT, and allow people to buy/sell then, then yes you could become the owner of an HN account via NFTs. But until then, the one who knows the password is the owner.
People seems to have some sort of problem with trying to understand NFTs were all thoughts and logic go out the window as soon as NFTs are mentioned.
All that can be definitively proved outside of other methods is who created the token.
NFTs also don’t put the image on chain usually instead just linking from the metadata so a fraudster could register a bunch of placeholder NFTs and then later put stolen art where the link points to. Hey Presto you can steal art and “prove” the actual creator is the fraud.
Anyway. I wasn't talking about NFTs as they exist today. I'm just saying the original concept (as I understood it) seemed basically reasonable, before everybody went insane.
The second clause shows why the first is not true: the other evidence is what gives you the information you need. In every context where it really matters it comes down to what a court would accept and … uh … I would not want to be the one having to tell a judge that something is proof of ownership when anyone on the internet could submit the same record.
NFTs are the ownership-tying documents - specifically, asserting ownership over some property, just like any other deed/title to some property (be it tangible or abstract/intellectual). NFTs, like any other sort of deed/title, require recognition, validation, and enforcement by society at large to have any real value.
That is:
> I can sell NFTs of bridges all day long; doesn't mean anyone is buying a bridge.
I can sell deeds/titles to bridges all day long (complete with thick paper and fancy seals); doesn't mean anyone is buying a bridge.
No. An NFT is just a few bytes of text pinned to a blockchain. They are essentially useless, and every useful property of an NFT can be achieved using asymmetric encryption or digital signatures, the blockchain component is just wasteful hype.
The ability to hold and trade the NFT on the public blockchain makes that asset accessible to a large number of autonomous on-chain markets, like dApps which allow a person to take out self-executing loans that use the NFT as collateral.
In other words, you don't need the blockchain because the actual value comes from a different system. The only thing it's adding is overhead and unreliability.
"makes that asset accessible to a large number of autonomous on-chain markets, like dApps which allow a person to take out self-executing loans that use the NFT as collateral"
What market undergridded by banks provides these features.
The blockchain provides extremely high assurances of up-time and immutability in its protocol rules - which assures accessibility and protection from third party interference. This is ideal as a digital asset registry.
Not to mention you are not the only one to hold it either as someone else can Taylor Swift NFT and sell it to.
It is exactly same as buying and owning cards of your favourite celebrity. They are worthless even compared to cowdung and have absolutely not practical value.
One has to be high on drugs to buy ugly gifs for thousands of dollars.
I feel like there are two vastly different audiences with NFTs. The casual, celebrity/athlete NFTs that are selling multiple of some persons face for fiat currency, and parole who are actively participating in minting NFTs with web3 dApps made by developers with roadmaps and a strong community.
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2015/03/02/beanie-baby-bubbl...
I don't get the art focus.
They can be a degree, a concert ticket, a driving license, a permission to a API service, equity to a company.
Just think about all cases of fake liceses? This could be verified rather easily with an NFT while faking it would be quite hard.
Since drivers licenses are linked to individuals, and cannot be traded, the traffic cop that's checking your license will need to compare it to your government issued ID. Then they look it up to see that its valid and linked to you as a person.
How is doing this as an NFT (or other blockchain thing) any better than having a government database they look up?
This is a big problem I have with most blockchain tech: yes, it can be built on a blockchain, but it doesn't need it and alternatives tend to be simpler and cheaper.
I'm overall pro cryptocurrency and blockchain, but if we want people to still take it seriously in twenty years time, we need the use cases to actually make sense. I don't see how NFT's make sense here, unless I'm missing something.
But having a globally available, decentralized, and transparent database for some of these "certificats" could be a good thing.
If it's an out-of-state (or worse: international) ID, then the traffic cop (or, speaking from experience, some clerical worker back at the station) would need to deal with some bespoke interface for some external government database - and thus be at the mercy of that external agency. Such interfaces do exist, but they're clunky and antiquated, and it's pretty difficult to get authorization to connect to it. Even for intrastate lookups, a centralized database entails a bunch of infrastructure that's rarely publicly-accessible.
With a (public) blockchain, this becomes a heck of a lot easier and more accessible, since anyone from anywhere can query it with a common and publicly-known interface. Likewise, any agency can post to it without necessarily needing prior authorization and without needing to be at the mercy of other agencies; while there's obviously still a need for agencies to communicate with one another to exchange public keys (and therefore recognize/trust each others' blockchain transactions), that's much less complicated than coordinating a bunch of ad-hoc API connections.
It would more likely be something rolled out by the agency itself. That somebody could accordingly be the agency (preferably just a rebadged and customized version of some FOSS application) and "some reason" would be "not having to duplicate a bunch of effort just to maintain an ID database".
> using a more complex system that they have less control over
I think you're underestimating the complexity of building 50 separate databases and the connections between them, as well as overestimating the control an agency would have over 49 of those databases. And that's just for interstate lookups, never mind international.
Point being: in the grand scheme of things, a blockchain-based approach would be far simpler and offer more control.
I don't know police agencies well at all, but I suspect that if a local police force was deciding between "use the state system" and "use some frontend we built ourselves or needed to license ourselves and has no reason to have any tech support", they are going to choose "use the state system".
Or heck, just use a federal system.
Only if you assume that every country will actually collaborate and use the same blockchain. Much more likely, in my opinion, is that each country will have its own incompatible blockchain and the end result won't be any different than what you described.
I mean, I get what you're saying and its more likely that an international standard would come into use if no individual country has control over it, but I still think its unlikely.
You can code a non-tradable NFT no problem.
Tradable NFTs are just the hype right now.
WTF does that even mean?
Do people remember what a blockchain even is, at this point?
A blockchain is a chain of transactions. You take away the transactions, and its not a blockchain anymore. Unless we really stretch the definition of a "transaction" or blockchain......
Cryptocurrency has lost the plot. People are talking about blockchains, that don't have mining, or transactions now apparently.
I was just pointing out how it can be done or how it might make sense, if you needed it for something where blockchain did actually make sense, but in the case of drivers licenses, I don't think it does.
Also, it doesn't necessarily have to be a single central authority adding transactions; a whole bunch of DMVs could very well post to the same blockchain and only trust the validity of ID tokens issued by one another (i.e. with some out-of-band method to associate keys with actual DMVs, much like PGP's "web of trust" concept). This could even pave the way to things like drivers' licenses being partially or fully decentralized, with independent issuing authorities trusting one another based on some external certification process (e.g. "the California DMV has audited Foo Bar Licensing, Inc. and verified that it issues licenses in compliance with the California Vehicle Code, and therefore recognizes FBL-issued licenses as valid").
Allow me to use your example if I want to explain the main advantage of Blockchain derivative technology. Most of people seem to mix up Blockchain and Bitcoin, and think that Blockchain is equivalent to Bitcoin.
> some external certification process
Or just skip the extra complexity and have it all handled by a central authority?
Yes, you can use a blockchain to implement it how you describe, but I still don't buy that it has any real advantages. Also, who would run the blockchain?
> a whole bunch of DMVs could very well post to the same blockchain and only trust the validity of ID tokens issued by one another
> with independent issuing authorities trusting one another
If they are the only ones who can issue tokens and they have to trust each other anyway, why does it need to be a blockchain anyway instead of some shared database? Or if you want to keep it distributed, a peer-to-peer distributed hash table or other peer-to-peer database of ID tokens that only the DMV's have write access to. No need for a blockchain.
> if you have a California driver's license and I (as a Nevadan) want to verify its validity
If all the states share a blockchain, then they could just as easily share a database and web interface that you can look up. If they don't share a blockchain, then I don't see how its any different from each having their own system. I mean, even if its a blockchain, how well it works is then up to each state and if there's a centrally mandated blockchain they should be using, then there could also be a centrally mandated database they could be using. It just moves the goal posts around, it doen't in itself solve it. The person checking (bar staff in your example) still need a website or app that they can input the data to derive the hash (as not to leak personal data) and check the hash against the blockchain, this could just as easily work against a central or state database and how well it works, in either case, is still very much dependent on each state.
It seems overly complicated to build this on or as a blockchain.
Then every agency would have to trust some central authority. Maybe doable for interstate queries (with the associated federal bloat, but that's hardly anything new), but once you go international that becomes a lot harder.
> Also, who would run the blockchain?
Who runs Bitcoin? Ethereum? Cardano? Dogecoin?
> If they are the only ones who can issue tokens and they have to trust each other anyway, why does it need to be a blockchain anyway instead of some shared database?
The amount of trust required for "I'm reasonably sure this agency issued this driver's license" is far lower than the trust required for "I'm okay with this agency having control over my agency's records".
> Or if you want to keep it distributed, a peer-to-peer distributed hash table or other peer-to-peer database of ID tokens that only the DMV's have write access to.
A.k.a. a blockchain. You don't even need to restrict write access; DMVs can readily ignore transactions by non-DMV entities.
> If all the states share a blockchain, then they could just as easily share a database and web interface that you can look up.
That ain't anywhere near as easy, both politically and technically. This is already something they struggle do to, and distributed ledgers make that struggle entirely unnecessary.
> if there's a centrally mandated blockchain they should be using
There wouldn't need to be a mandate. States are perfectly capable of making agreements with one another, and could opt into a public blockchain at their leisure. CCW reciprocity is a good example of this; states have on their own come to recognize concealed carry permits issued by other states, and a blockchain would be a natural fit for recording and authenticating said permits under that dynamic.
Even assuming the need for a mandate, it's a hell of a lot easier for the federal government to say "hey, all states need to use this public blockchain per this standard" than for the federal government to roll out a whole central database that's scalable enough to handle queries nationwide and say "hey, all states need to use this central database".
> The person checking (bar staff in your example) still need a website or app that they can input the data to derive the hash (as not to leak personal data) and check the hash against the blockchain, this could just as easily work against a central or state database
Yes, and that would - again - require either:
1. a central authority that each state's agency trusts to be the record of truth, or:
2. 50 separate databases with 50 separate APIs.
A public blockchain absolves the need for either; agencies can maintain their licensing data autonomously (and, for that matter, data pertaining to those licenses; e.g. recording traffic citations, additional endorsements, etc., even for licenses issued by other agencies) without needing to deal with all that infrastructure.
They already have to do that! The central authority has to issue the licenses in the first place. Unless you are suggesting some absurd, decentralized driver's license issuing? Even that is begging the question though, as there has to be some centralized process to decide who is allowed to issue driver's licenses.
> A.k.a. a blockchain. You don't even need to restrict write access; DMVs can readily ignore transactions by non-DMV entities.
Alright, you are really stretching the definition of blockchain. Like, lets say someone just mirrors the database. So there is a web interface, and someone else copied the whole thing down.
Does that now count as a "blockchain" lol? Having more that 1 copies, of a mysql database, is a blockchain now?
The US federal government is not at all involved in issuing state drivers' licenses, last I checked. Nor is some international agency at all involved in issuing drivers' licenses within any given country. That's what I'm getting at with "central authority" - specifically, a central authority external to the issuer and/or validator.
> Like, lets say someone just mirrors the database. So there is a web interface, and someone else copied the whole thing down.
Is that person going to continually copy it down? What about data from other agencies? How many people are going to be using your web interface?
What I'm getting at there is that this all seems like an awful lot of work compared to just, you know, including some data in a transaction on any ol' existing blockchain (even Bitcoin or Dogecoin or what have you is good enough for this, let alone something that actually supports NFTs like Ethereum or Cardano) and using any ol' blockchain client/explorer to lookup whatever transaction got printed on the ID card.
> What I'm getting at there is that this all seems like an awful lot of work compared
They are literally the same thing.
The definition of what a "Blockchain" is has stretched so much, that having 1 mirror of a database would now fit people's definition of what a Blockchain is.
Once we get rid of proof of work, and transactions, the only thing we are left with is "a database which has mirrors".
Neither of which I suggested getting rid of above (though to be clear, proof of stake and proof of burn both exist). Transactions are especially handy when you move beyond merely recording the drivers' licenses themselves and actually start recording things like, say, traffic tickets or new endorsements or what have you - and that handiness is significantly improved further when agencies are sharing a single public blockchain instead of trying to maintain umpteen different internal databases explicitly tracking each other.
Even taking your assumption that a blockchain and a database mirror are "literally the same thing", you're still missing the key difference: that the former gives you the benefits of the latter (or at least the ones relevant to this context) with significantly less effort. It's similar in comparison to, say, using IPFS v. mirroring an FTP server; yes, you can create a bunch of FTP mirrors, and reinvent a poorly-specified ad-hoc substitute for half of IPFS, but it'd be a heck of a lot easier and more robust to... just use IPFS.
The blockchain space is just starting out and people try new things. But many can only see the crypto currency use-case.
transactions change the state of the database. they aren't limited to trading-related transactions.
At the very least, you can buy a piece of IP directly from the IP holder, and receive a package that's nicely presented.
It's still totally overpriced, but I can see at least some value. It still needs to go a step further technologically. Like a special app that allows you to view the NFT with AR features artificially implemented. Or displaying it in a holographic form, especially for moments captured with 360-degree cameras.
There was talk about expanding off the one site, but I haven't seen any progress there.
You're not really buying the IP in any meaningful way, though, you just get a non-exclusive, non-transferable (!) right to display it. They can still air it or license it to others without paying you royalties.
And even then, I'd say those mass-manufactured DVDs with 90 mins of content are intrinsically more valuable than a GIF-length video clip.
The writing was on the wall when the big newspapers gave stock tips for consumers on the hottest newest telemetry startups.
We all know how it went.
The metaverse pitch is that you can create economies around these that aren't constrained to a single application. I can make and sell cool art, and you can buy that art and put it anywhere - and it's yours, in a way that a downloaded PNG just isn't.
Quote from statista: "In 2020, global gaming audiences spent an approximate 54 billion U.S. dollars on additional in-game content". But the players don't own their purchases. You don't play the game anymore, servers go down or you get banned and all your stuff is gone. Think about that.
Edit: Of course my comment got nothing but down votes again on HN. Was worth a try anyway.
With your example, if the game goes down, an NFT of the in-game purchase isn’t going to be very useful. What’s the difference between having a token or not of the content if there are still no servers for the game either way? Maybe the NFT still points to a screenshot? Great…
I don't quite understand your first point. Edit: the NFT is verifiable in your wallet and comes from a verified source
Why? The blockchain already does this. All you need to do is hold the private key to the wallet.
Except all these NFT stores require an invite from another artist. As someone who loves taking photos but isn’t socially connected because it’s a passion and not a job, it seems very elitist. Maybe it’s that way because I don’t have access to it and my brain is just playing tricks. But it seems like one of those “you aren’t good enough for this” kind of thing. Some of the online stores like Foundation app have become gatekeepers rather than outlets.
But in the interim, lets not compare crypto to some utopian world that doesn't actually exist. In the current world which we inhabit, the many major currencies are either controlled or heavily influenced by people who:
1) Believe prices constantly rising is good for poor people.
2) Advocate that governments can spend potentially an infinite amount without consequences because they control a printing press. And looking at the actions of, e.g. the US government, it is easy to suspect that the people who understand the nuance there aren't the ones in control of the money supply.
In such an environment, the crypto folk are reasonable. Even if in a perfect world they would clearly all be scammers.
I mean, inflation actually does benefit poor people, when wages and prices rise at the same rate. Devaluing savings accounts isn't a big deal if you don't have any savings in the first place. Inflation also makes debt less valuable over time, making it gradually easier to pay off.
The real problem is that (in the US) wages have been stagnant for decades. That's not an issue that cryptocurrency is going to solve.
Further though, I would imagine that people who have a little savings but not that much, would end up keeping that in a savings account rather than investing it. As such, the little savings poor people do have would be eaten away by inflation.
Also, like you suggest, wages are not rising with inflation so that just makes things even worse.
Inflation isn't meant to cause rising prices. It's a shitty approximation for negative interest rates. What inflation is doing is letting money rust so that it is flexible enough to represent the real world. Logically speaking income earned in 2010 should be losing value because of the opportunity cost of not employing people. Imagine an economy with two people and you decide to spend your money ten years later. The other party has to spend 10 years unemployed. Even though you lost 10 years of potential employment you still insist that your money from 10 years ago is still worth the same amount. Inflation adds enough flexibility to represent this loss and makes the holder of money realize the loss in the real economy, which encourages him to minimize the loss in the real world. With deflation you deny its existence by making the money system rigid and incapable of representing this potential state of the economy.
Say's law postulates that aggregate demand and supply are always in balance in a barter economy. Money as an intermediary allows short term mismatch between the two and deflation allows an almost permanent mismatch. Since inflation erodes past income any surplus is eroded which encourages people to utilize their surplus and let aggregate supply and demand match again.
>2) Advocate that governments can spend potentially an infinite amount without consequences because they control a printing press. And looking at the actions of, e.g. the US government, it is easy to suspect that the people who understand the nuance there aren't the ones in control of the money supply.
Maybe you like to think that other people think like that but reality is quite boring. What people have recognized is that the real world matters, not the financial world. If you see an unemployed person you can hire that person and at the end of the day customers are happy because that person provided goods and services and the worker is happy because he got paid. If granting credit and promising debt lets that person work, then it's better than trusting on some financial bean counter that tells you that employing people and providing goods and services is bad for the economy.
This author obviously has an axe to grind, so I didn’t get much out of his words.
Did they actually get around to talking about cryptocurrency at any point?
Ah right... because normal people never donate to journalists. Never pay for online subscriptions, never buy hardware off newegg. Just because the author has no exerience using cryptocurrency he assumes everyone is like him and repeats the FUD.
Not really, unless you count patreon.
> Never pay for online subscriptions, never buy hardware off newegg
Credit cards or paypal. Both of which have a better refund system.
Would anyone even use a not-for-profit backed "crypto"? I don't mean in the blockchain-backed sense, more in the ICANN/gift-cards/points globally distributed sense.
More than a decade on, approximately nobody uses Bitcoin for normal transactions. Compare with Venmo or MPesa, both of which launched around the same time, to se what actual digital money looks like. Both of those do way more transactions than Bitcoin and are much more widely adopted.
Which is really why bitcoin exists as thing today, in my opinion. It was a way to pay for drugs over the internet.
The rest of the pricing is purely speculation, and it hurts any real utility it might provide.
I found a number of guides on the pros and cons of various international money transfers options, and BTC is often included as an option. I also found some recent (and old!) articles about its use as a remittance system in poorer areas of the world[1].
> Other emerging market central banks in Latin America, India, and Southeast Asia, where remittances make up a significant share of the economy, are in a similar bind. Bitcoin transfers surged in emerging markets last year, as the pandemic accelerated the rise of cheaper, more efficient digital remittance services.
[1]https://qz.com/africa/1983610/bitcoin-draws-millions-of-work...
The main alternative would be to issue a Bitcoin backed currency. But then you're just re-creating the gold standard, and all of the problems that go along with that.
The goal was "a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash". That is, money.
If you are proposing a new goal, a settlement system for couple hundred named organizations with strong relationships, then a) that's not money, and b) the Bitcoin system is socially and technically wrong for that. But if we keep the goalposts in their original location, Bitcoin is clearly a failure when you look at how the competition has done.
Sadly this really is the most nuanced definition of "blockchain" that many people can understand
If your average sports writer actually wanted to understand the space, they could read something with real data: https://nydig.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/NYDIG-Bitcoin-N...
The paper you linked doesn't exactly get off to a good start, considering there are ~1600-2200 dead/worthless cryptocurrencies (see below) and Bitcoin itself is incredibly volatile. It's somewhat absurd to claim Bitcoin is the stable alternative to fiat currencies, or the solution to cases of currency collapse. The rest of the summary is just speculation on how the carbon footprint of Bitcoin might be reasonable in the future. Would you mind pointing out the parts that you feel refute the article's criticisms?
https://www.coinopsy.com/dead-coins/ https://deadcoins.com/
Largely in the right direction.
Many other cryptocurrencies still experience extreme volatility on par with BTC's early history.
Think of wallet concept. The wallet literally hold nothing. The fund isn't a file or something that the wallet keep. The wallet is simply server as an interface. The transaction can generate off chain. You can signed the transactionor any message to prove who you are. Read is essentially free but write contract cost gas. How can we explain these to a normal user? Why Solana is so fast and Ethereum is slow?
Now, the highly technical user understand those concept and feel something shady about a certain thing. Then they don't buy it. Meanwhile, othergroup get rich so quick and it makes the world feel like crypto is a ripoff.
Add in the controversal stuff such as Sushi fork Uni, then founder run off with $14m(and later return)...
all of that made crypto looks really bad.
But now let's see what blockchaing give us from a technical perspective. It's a distributed database where you can store data into it, like git, and can prove and trust it's what you write into it.
Example, DNS. DNS is very decentralize but what if your DNS server decided to return something different from the name server. What if we store DNS into blockchain? Write to it cost money but read is essentially free as long as you have a node.
But due to the highly cost of mining, and the craziness of its price, develop on blockchain is costly and it push people away because the people who want to build something on it doesn't have the fun. I, for one, want to do the above DNS idea with Ethereum but choose to go with Solana because Ethereum cost is just so damn high...
And that’s fine. That’s a completely defensible world view, that many smarter than me have held throughout history. But for heavens sake why are you spending your time on a forum about celebrating startups hosted by a venture capitalist?
To get to (B) from here, we must endure some path dependence that takes us through an era of unaccountable wealth transfer.
I wonder how many media outlets use GPT-3 to help generate content.
The NFT scene is even more BS. It could destroyed uninformed people's life, just like gambling. However, this kind of gambling is public on the internet with little regulations.
I hope more tech people speak about this instead of just ignoring them.
- But cuz you work in a sleezy one so you can only meet the bad company
We were very technical oriented in the beginning. I was hired to do formal verification and system design. Until, money happened, and founders realize they over promised.
I agree that there are lots of scammy "blockchain" startups, but I don't think it's fair to paint them all with that brush. There are also plenty that are actually building cool projects, without pumping their coin, and announcing light interactions with a company as partnerships.
If you have 20% of companies being scummy, but churning out 80% of the news, your assumption will be that all of the companies are scummy.
The fact that, despite having it explained multiple times by multiple sources multiple ways, I still can't seem to wrap my head around how crypto functions... Makes me suspicious. It feels like the whole idea is to obfuscate it's functionality to the point it becomes this incomprehensible enigma - by design.
If it's not easy to comprehend, and instead a strange mystery number that moves between even stranger mystery-er numbers, someone is bound to think those numbers must be worth something - otherwise it wouldn't exist, right?
Basically what I'm saying is cryptocurrency sends me into an existential spiral of thoughts about how all value is just perceived and agreed upon and 90% of what we call "the economy" is just fake. Look up fractional reserve banking and join the existential crisis with me!
Yes, you are awakening. Cultures seem to like jewelry and art.
We burned innocent people because of this not long ago.
Anyways, I find the Bitcoin paper very approachable. You may need to read it a bunch of times until everything clicks into place. But it's all there, in just 8 pages.
Right...
Anyways, the golden rules of investing is to not invest your money into something you don't understand.
It's certainly not just obfuscation and smoke+mirrors. It's only as complicated as it has to be and the mathematics behind it are solid. Unfortunately, it is complicated enough that most people won't be able to easily understand it.
https://youtu.be/ZFRVfXeIaek
There are advantages to cryptocurrencies and one can very much want a future where currencies they would use isn't hampered by government.
I wrote about how misleading the crypto ecosystem is a while ago here: https://henvic.dev/posts/bitcoin/
I think most cryptocurrencies and tokens are really dumb or a pyramid scheme. Then again, I think the same about multilevel marketing and much of the modern real estate and stock markets.
But I also see the really exciting potential and promise of blockchain tech. People are working on expanding access to capital and systems to countries with unstable currencies. They're working on the future of the corporation beyond capitalism with DAOs. Enabling micropayments for creators. Much more. It's tiring seeing all these articles harping on the downsides without acknowledging or looking into the upsides.
Probably because the system works fine for these authors -- they're somewhere with a stable currency, their 401k is going up, etc. Blockchain is a space where people are actually dreaming of something different and better instead of accepting the status quo. Meanwhile in the U.S. we have a Fed printing trillions of dollars to prop up asset prices, we have wars to support USD hegemony. In other countries their wages inflate away before they can spend them, etc.
I don't know a lot about all this stuff but I really respect the part of the blockchain space which is about broadening access, decentralizing power, and envisioning new systems.
There are way too many words in that article, yet the author manages to say almost nothing that hasn't been said before. I suggest removing all adverbs and adjectives, then re-writing.
An amazingly succinct title. Absolutely true. Whenever someone hypes up cryptocurrency, it is almost always for their personal gain, directly or indirectly.
What was Satoshi lying about? What has he done with his riches?
> The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
This is not the motivation of someone trying to get richer. It's someone who cares deeply about humanity.
Is it so hard to believe that there are others in the space with similar motivations?
I wish cryptocurrency fans would stop smelling their own farts for once and realize they aren't the absolute geniuses in finance that they claim to be. It's arrogant.
While many in the coin space are arrogant from ignorance, I would argue that the detractors are universally arrogant with their ignorance.
Bitcoin people are trying to decentralize the world. Make the powerful less powerful. Free humanity from debt economies, inflation, weak fiscal policy and the slow theft of fruits of your labor.
AntiBitcoin people are trying to centralize the world. Empower the already powerful. Stamp that boot onto the face of humanity forever. Ensure that the state can always rob its people of their savings and lifes work, and force compliance with weak fiscal policy, negative interest rates.
I think I know which is on the correct side of history.
I have looked at lots of potential money systems and I'd say most cryptocurrencies fall into the usual deflation speculation death that lots of government currencies (especially during the gold standard) have fallen victim to.
In fact, most currencies are heading down that route. The euro and yen are prime examples. It's kind of funny how people shout about inflation the most when it's been super low for a long time. They complain about inflation when their real problem is that they have no bargaining power because inflation target policies are also supposed to inflate wages. Bitcoin also doesn't solve the rentier problem with land. If your purchasing power magically increases with Bitcoin then the land owner just gets more of your money.
I am really tired of the anti debt crap. The only reason people would be against debt is that there are crazy people who are out of touch with reality who insist on permanent positive interest rates. Just think about the absurdity of hating debt when interest rates are negative. It's simply illogical.
>AntiBitcoin people are trying to centralize the world. Empower the already powerful.
Deflation is empowering the rich. That's what positive real interest rates do. If you have a lot of Bitcoin and Bitcoin goes up in value then you get more gains than a poor person with very few Bitcoin. Inflation and negative interest rates hurt those who are rich the most and hurt those who have very little the least.
>Stamp that boot onto the face of humanity forever.
Is this supposed to be some kind of joke?
>Ensure that the state can always rob its people of their savings and lifes work, and force compliance with weak fiscal policy, negative interest rates.
Savings are literally just a reduction in demand for labor. Reducing your demand for labor doesn't make anyone wealthier by itself. It's only because there are other people who want that labor that saving even earns a return. You are basically paid to reduce your demand so that other, more productive people get to have the scarce labor. If you reduce your demand for labor and nobody ends up demanding the freed up labor then you basically worked for nothing. The entire point of inflation and negative interest rates are to get this fact into your damn head. You are piling up a bunch of potatoes that spoil before you eat them. Stop that.
So, No, I will not stop that. Thank Satoshi that I don't need to.
I choose to opt of your authoritarian and paternalistic philosophies. I will always convert fruits of my labor into hard money, where you cannot hurt me.
You can't stop us (all).
FOMO hits the poor way harder than it does the rich. Rich people have lots of places to invest their money that give good returns and they don't need to "get rich quick".
I want cryptocurrencies shut down so they stop using insane amounts of power so that people can gamble.
We all indirectly gain if cryptocurrencies cease to exist, because less carbon will be released into the atmosphere.
Then your ire should be directed at scammers, not a specific implementation detail of their scams. Should we abolish wire transfers and gift cards because scammers use those in scams, too? How about stocks, while we're at it? Those get pumped and dumped all the time, too.
> I want cryptocurrencies shut down so they stop using insane amounts of power so that people can gamble.
> We all indirectly gain if cryptocurrencies cease to exist, because less carbon will be released into the atmosphere.
Not all cryptocurrencies are proof of work; proof of stake, for example, is increasingly common (Cardano is the biggest current example, and Ethereum is moving toward it) and uses negligible energy (and therefore releases negligible carbon into the atmosphere).
Telemarketing scams inflict a lot more damage than naive crypto speculation.
We need to be accurate when discussing the various scams proposed.
The sooner governments abolish fiat to cryptocurrency exchanges and make such transactions illegal, the sooner this clown car of sadness will come to an end.
As much as I'm not a fan of China and the CCP, they are making some good moves in this department recently to eliminate unneeded capital flight. The US should follow in their steps here.
[0] https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-crypto-crime-repor...