The Tinkerbell Griftopia
stephendiehl.comI work in the crypto industry right now - my job is to keep bad guys from stealing XXX millions of dollars. I've also worked on a team that has done the tech side of several record breaking NFT's sales. And I've sold my own NFTS for fun, and strangers have bought them (wat!).
I'm not a "believer". Crypto is indeed full of idiots - and scammers - and crazy people who will say anything to see the token they hold go up - and scammers - and crazy people chasing a 100x buck - and more scammers. And even ignoring the scams, it's like living in an alternate Alice-in-Wonderland world where the rules of normal physics, normal economics, and normal society no longer seem to apply. It is truly a frothing zoo of non-normality.
And yet I'm not a "skeptic" either. There are really, really hard technological problems out there, and there are really wonderful people working on them. In the middle of the economic silliness, there's a lot of new things around groups and economics being tried. And amidst the flurry of insanity in NFT world, there is some genuinely good art being created.
For example, take the stuff this person creates (https://tylerxhobbs.com/fidenza). The process of making it is exactly the kind of stuff hackernews loves, and it is genuinely good art. It's stuff I put on the wall. The whole game around who gets to pay a stupid amount of money to say they own it (https://opensea.io/assets/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aeba...) of them doesn't diminish the fact that art has been created, and the art can be enjoyed anyone.
It's easy, when you see lots of people making absurd claims, to go beyond just refuting those claims, and to slip into purely dismissing everything without ever checking to see if there's something of value there.
But there is good, interesting stuff going underneath the madness frothing on twitter around crypto. Deep behind the apparent wall of film-flam artists, there's work going on in super weird math, formal software proving with billions of dollars on the line, new programming languages, new ways of scaling consensus, and lots of art being created.
> It's easy, when you see lots of people making absurd claims, to go beyond just refuting those claims, and to slip into purely dismissing everything without ever checking to see if there's something of value there.
> But there is good, interesting stuff going underneath the madness frothing on twitter around crypto. Deep behind the apparent wall of film-flam artists, there's work going on in super weird math, formal software proving with billions of dollars on the line, new programming languages, new ways of scaling consensus, and lots of art being created.
I'm reminded of a tweet: "drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,"[1]
Remove "drunk" from that tweet and the opposite point is made: why must we demand that a thing is all bad or all good?
Edit: not sure why this is being downvoted. I am not defending NFTs, just saying that a comparison to something clearly wrong like drunk driving needs to be established with more evidence than hyperlinking dril.
All you're saying is that if you leave out a crucial word in the initial statement, the meaning changes. Fine, but so what?
That is a very uncharitable interpretation of my comment. Here is an explanation for you:
So are you defending drunk driving because it helps people get to work on time?
Not at all, they're suggesting that even clear benefits like driving have some negative outcomes. Whether NFTs/Crypto is more like driving (positives outweigh the negatives) or more like drunk driving (negatives outweigh the positives) is the question.
is the dril tweet even wrong though?
> And amidst the flurry of insanity in NFT world, there is some genuinely good art being created. ... The whole game around who gets to pay a stupid amount of money to say they own it of them doesn't diminish the fact that art has been created, and the art can be enjoyed anyone.
It is good art, and thanks for the link, I hadn't heard of them before.
But I don't see what the NFT aspect adds. They've been creating art for years. Are they creating more art because of NFTs? What's the practical difference in outcome for the artist between selling an NFT and selling a print?
Yes, some people are selling a lot more art because of NFTs.
For one thing, there's only so much space on your walls for prints, but a huge enormous amount of space in your wallet to hold NFTs. Whales / superfans can spend even more than they otherwise could - which isn't a bad thing for artists.
Another thing is the immediacy of selling. Tweet little corners of something while you make something, tweet about it when it is done, and one or two days later when the auction ends, you have money. A whole of of the friction and delay is gone.
On the other hand, super fast distribution, and direct artist to buyer "connection" on a mass scale means that to make the mega-bucks requires being something like a music star or an instagram / reality star celebrity. Or maybe it's like YouTube / twitch. There are a lot of creators, and some percentage of those creators have massive audiences and some have ten people. Or zero. That kind of change we've seen before in other types of art, and now it's coming here. There are a lot of people who have made NFT's that have never seen a sale. It's not a magic money tree.
> For one thing, there's only so much space on your walls for prints, but a huge enormous amount of space in your wallet to hold NFTs. Whales / superfans can spend even more than they otherwise could - which isn't a bad thing for artists.
This is quite silly. Digital art has been a thing for years. By raw numbers, the majority of independent artists these days make a living doing digital art commissions. And yes, to whales; I have multiple artist friends who make an absolute killing drawing one-of-a-kind commissioned pornography (furries are loaded!). NFTs did not invent digital art or the digital art market, it's just that techbros are finally realizing it exists now that it's possible to attach cryptocurrency scams to art.
You can make art according to your own creative impulses (and get paid for that) or...you can make commissioned porn for furries. Choose wisely.
Cool! So now there is one more way, especially for artists you'd rather not do commissions.
> But I don't see what the NFT aspect adds.
It's a very good question, and the answer was conveniently left out of the blog post at hand. The reason art NFTs were created to begin with was because in the traditional art world, the people who make nearly all of the money are not the people who actually make the art. It is the art dealers and the art collectors who take the lion's share of the money.
The purpose of putting art in an NFT is to better balance the economics of art so that when the dealers and collectors continue to sell the art for increasingly higher prices, the original artist also gets some of the financial reward. This is especially important for young artists who are talented but are not yet able to sell their originals for a liveable wage or get any interest in a distributor to make prints.
A lot of people think NFTs are a waste of time and money, and I completely understand that paradigm, but NFTs are very important to the Artists who are trying to make a living wage from their passion. Ideally, this will contribute to even more imaginative art in the future.
I'd argue that Art NFTs actually share the values of open source software that were listed in the article, at least when it comes to improving "abundance, post-scarcity, universal access, and equality" for artists.
There's no particular evidence that NFTs will change the economics of art. Indeed, given the rich history of scams, money laundering, grift, and fraud in the fungible token space, I'd say there's good reason to think artist will end up at least as screwed over. Indeed, given that the traditional art world will be eager to get in on it, it could be worse.
> Art NFTs actually share the values of open source [...] improving "abundance, post-scarcity, universal access, and equality"
This is flatly wrong. The whole point of an NFT is to create artificial scarcity in a post-scarcity medium. And it is the sort of "up is really down" crypto promotion that has turned me into a reflexive skeptic.
> The whole point of an NFT is to create artificial scarcity in a post-scarcity medium.
That's not true for art NFTs. If you don't own the rights to an image, whether it's a regular old bitmap or an art NFT, there's no difference in scarcity as an observer of that image. But, as the artist who created a digital image vs an art NFT, there's a massive difference, and THAT is the whole point of an art NFT.
Nah. A post-scarcity, open-source-like solution is letting people sponsor art creation. An NFT is creating artificial scarcity: one person thinks they "own" a digital asset. And there's plenty of agita when people don't play pretend with them: https://mashable.com/article/non-fungible-tokens-nfts-right-...
> An NFT is creating artificial scarcity: one person thinks they "own" a digital asset.
This is true for most digital images, NFT or not... one person usually does own it. In either case, there is no scarcity for observers -- anyone can look at the image as much as they want.
In both cases, people can even copy the image and it use it without the owner's permission, if that's what you're really concerned about losing. But at least the NFT makes it very clear who that owner is, for those who do seek permission or licensing (unlike your average jpeg). For anyone who believes in intellectual property, that seems like a step forward.
Yes, NFTs are like other images in that respect, which makes them even more pointless. And also worse, in that the ownership is less reliable and subject to far more terms and conditions than regular ownership.
But regardless, you make my point for me. It's just as illegal to copy somebody's NFT'd JPEG as it is any other privately owned JPEG. NFTs do not "share the values of open source software", which is about making it legal for people to freely use IP, more or less the opposite of the sort of free-market fundamentalist "who believes in intellectual property".
> What's the practical difference in outcome for the artist between selling an NFT and selling a print?
With NFTs, the artist gets the money before they're dead!
What stops me from getting paid for selling an NFT of your art?
It wouldn't have any value for lack of actual provenance (you can test this by trying to sell your own copy of Fidenza, please report back).
What part of the NFT protocol verifies provenance?
And why did this not work for Davidson Carvalho, who hasn't seen a cent of the money made by someone selling NFTs of his work? If there was no provenance, why did anyone pay $170,000 for them? [1]
Could it be the case that the NFT market doesn't give two figs about provenance?
[1] https://twitter.com/colorblindmess/status/145059819884259328...
Social interpretation of the contract that the token is attached to.
e.g. if your Art Blocks NFT is on the Art Blocks contract, it's authentic. If it's the same image on a different contract, it's inauthentic.
Just saw your edit: now that it's known that the art is stolen from a different artist, I would expect the original NFTs to lose most if not all of their value. The convention of authenticity is a social one. If an artist misrepresents art as their own then it seems authentically theirs until shown otherwise. Same as e.g. selling prints of someone else's work.
> Social interpretation of the contract that the token is attached to.
So if the value of NFTs only exists because of a "social contract," what good are they? I could just pay the artist $1M for a normal JPEG they will send me via email (and for my money, an actual JPEG seems like it would be way more useful than a cryptographic hash of a URL to the JPEG).
In neither case do you "own" anything in a real sense, you have an artist communicating that you have exclusive rights to a bucket of bits.
The only value I can comprehend in all this is that of the ledger's utility in facilitating trading on the secondary market (since the artist doesn't need to go and vouch for everybody who eventually buys/sells the ownership stake in the bag of bits in the future).
It all feels gross to me. I can certainly appreciate that artists have to make a living, but the idea that the best way to do this is to crank out digital certificates to confirm somebody "owns" their work (but only in the sense that the "owner" can trade and speculate on that ownership stake) strikes me as bizarre and dystopian.
>The only value I can comprehend in all this is that of the ledger's utility in facilitating trading on the secondary market (since the artist doesn't need to go and vouch for everybody who eventually buys/sells the ownership stake in the bag of bits in the future).
The contract also automates royalties.
>It all feels gross to me. I can certainly appreciate that artists have to make a living, but the idea that the best way to do this is to crank out digital certificates to confirm somebody "owns" their work (but only in the sense that the "owner" can trade and speculate on that ownership stake) strikes me as bizarre and dystopian.
It's definitely weird and it's definitely a novel form of ownership -- I think the debate over whether NFTs are good/bad is really one over whether this new social convention will stick around. I can see why some people don't want it to.
> I would expect the original NFTs to lose most if not all of their value.
Since crypto trading operates on the principle of offloading to a bigger fool, this does not seem like a sufficient disincentive. The original seller and the next N people to pass that hot potato around made money.
I really agree that it's good to go in with a level head. If you highlight the extremes of either "believers" or "non-believers", both sides seem like low effort takes.
I bucketed crypto projects into two categories: (1) things that are only possible on crypto networks, and (2) things that people aren't motivated to do on other networks. For example, the US is woefully missing a banking API, especially for consumers. DeFi takes a stab at this. DeFi is still mostly closed circuit and too expensive, but if it continues to grow and integrate with non-crypto financials, that's a strong basis for a banking API.
The blockchain ecosystem has also fueled a lot of work into zero knowledge proofs and its components like homomorphic encryption, which has uses outside of blockchain. So even if the grand experiment fails (strongly doubt the whole thing fails) there will be a lot of cool technical progress that has been made alongside it.
Any technological progress obtained from cryptocurrency research will be the most expensive progress ever purchased in human history.
The costs come from:
- Opportunity cost of having lots of smart people focusing on cryptocurrency who could have been researching medicine, clean energy, or space tech.
- Money spent on manufacturing and maintaining the cryptocurrency mining equipment. Those factories could be making other products that directly benefit peoples' lives. We currently have a shortage of electronics because of the pandemic. Cryptocurrency mining makes that shortage worse.
- Environmental pollution produced by the power plants used for cryptocurrency mining. For every $1 a miner spends on electricity, the rest of society will pay $N to remove the CO2 later. Also, emissions from coal power plants often poison people and soil nearby.
- Increased environmental destruction caused by digging up energy and building and running more power plants.
The ultimate benefit will not be worth the cost. How could it?
It's an interesting question, but in my personal view trying to weigh the total moral value proposition of new technology is so incredibly difficult. If one could do it well, you could predict the future.
As an interesting hyperbolic comparison, is our understanding of nuclear fission and fusion worth it because two cities in Japan were bombed and thousands died? IDK
Edit: and this isn't to say we shouldn't be critical of Blockchain technology. I think the criticism of proof of work is important, and I'm glad that most chains are proof of stake or transitioning. Would we have made proof of stake if we first didn't validate the idea with a simpler proof of work implementation? Maybe. Maybe not.
thats just not the case.
firstly you objection to opportuity cost is flat wrong. those many smart people as you refer to them aren't going to just jump inot what ever the best for mankind research is because you want them to. Researchers and scienetist aren't a fungible resource, someone with a master ins mathmatics and a focus on cryptography isn't going to join a clean energy start up join a biotech firm or work on space tech. If crypto currency didn't exist they would probably work on other cryptography related fields.
the chip shortage has little to do with this as large scale mines use dedicated bespoke 'application-specific integrated circuit' or ASIC chips not used for anything else. try to run a mineing rig on CPU, and GPUs just isn't cost effective anymore. Secondly they didn't cause the chip shortage, shortsighted manufactures ending their orders both the immediate term and for years in advance that did. The chip foundries did the only logical thing and resold the slots for those canceled orders to keep the fabs running.
as for the enviromental impact crypto, cryto thrives on low cost energy as it gives the miners a higher coin/dollar spent mining. and currently building new solar and wind is cheaper than building coal. so really what we need to do is stop burning coal.
Many people in the world don't have access to a functioning financial system- what's the benefit in building one?
Private companies already build functioning financial systems cheaply. Many companies in developing countries have deployed electronic payments that work on cheap feature phones via SMS and WAP. They have massive adoption by the unbanked. None of these systems use cryptocurrency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_banking#Mobile_banking_...
Reductio ad absurdum, many people don't have access to computers, so what's the benefit of computers?
> Opportunity cost of having lots of smart people focusing on cryptocurrency who could have been researching medicine, clean energy, or space tech
It's doubtful many of those smart and obsessed enough to contribute to medicine, clean or space tech would be moved. What we would have seen is the same smart decentralized consensus obsessed people still working on formal proof systems, distributed consensus algorithms robust to adversaries, precursors to the vile offspring and post-capitalist or post-communist economies.
It's interesting that a lot of people lodge similar claims as you have, against crewed space missions even though you count it as having value.
> Those factories could be making other products that directly benefit peoples' lives.
Things were like this before cryptocurrencies and what you say is already possible despite cryptocurrencies but still does not happen. You might be interested in [Dives, Lazarus, and Alice](http://bactra.org/weblog/841.html).
> We currently have a shortage of electronics because of the pandemic.
Robustness sacrificed at the alter of efficiency means extra vulnerable to shocks and surprises.
> Coal Powerplants
Countries with or without PoW mining presence are still building coal fired and other CO2 generating powerplants. The world has not been smart about moving to clean tech fast enough.
Not many of these things depend on crypto or blockchain, though. People on the internet made great art pre-NFTs. Even in terms of recent phenomena, "buy a copy of the constitution" would work just fine as a Kickstarter.
Last night, I was buying some dumb something on some random website, as one does. And they offered cryptocurrency as a checkout option.
"Well, I've got some money in coinbase; why not try it? Its only $10."
It was the best "stateless" checkout experience I have ever had. Sure, Amazon is easier, but I already have an account with them. I'm talking specifically on a totally new website. Select a currency; pops up a QR code with the amount in crypto; punch it in to the coinbase app; scan the QR code; five seconds later its done.
This could even be trivially improved, if that QR code also embedded the amount and the currency type. Just scan and go. Hope we get there.
Of course, its predicated on me already owning crypto. Can't dispute that point.
But not only was this a far better experience than "run to the other end of the house, find my wallet, rip it out, punch in twenty dumb numbers that have faded to near unreadability from being in my wallet, op security code". I'd argue Apple Pay is roughly as convenient as crypto; traditional solutions do exist.
But to think that it was both the easiest checkout experience I've ever had, and (in theory) it doesn't rely on some centralized megacorp gatekeeper taking 5% of the transaction (Visa, Apple, etc), or acting as the centralized merchant every consumer has to interact with (Amazon).
Nothing is perfect! This website was using one of them "centralized gatekeepers" to proxy the transaction. They probably never saw the crypto; they just see USD. I had to overpay a bit in the USD conversion to account for risk spread; speaking of which, the price was still set in USD. The gatekeeper probably took X%. And I use coinbase, which is another one of those centralized gatekeepers.
Yet, I saw a sliver of the promise! It was shining in my eyes with undeniable brightness. This is why crypto exists. Its the Best Path toward allowing independent businesses to digitally transact with their customers, no Visa, no Amazon. Its not finished walking the path it has laid. Maybe it never will. But in our current economic climate, there's no other hope that I can see. Maybe if our government could compete with Visa and lay down a public, digital cash network (crypto or no crypto); but they aren't.
So while it isn't perfect, even in its ideal state (intrinsic implications: environmental, sovereign economic policy, etc); nothing ever is.
The ability to dispute a charge has value, and the cost will be borne by someone. Removing Visa just means replacing it with some other entity that fills this need.
Truly peer-to-peer cash transactions without recourse is a bad idea that I think will actually increase friction in the market, since people will take longer to make purchasing decisions.
Its true. I think this is the strongest argument against cryptocurrency-as-a-currency which proponents too easily gloss over.
Security issues e.g. disputed transactions is arguably something which would naturally happen less with crypto, given the higher security bar to accessing funds. 16 digit static card number versus real cryptography, pull versus push, etc. Additionally, most people (including me) shouldn't be managing their own wallets, and I feel too many proponents go all cut-and-dry "don't use coinbase, they're centralized finance"; the advantage is the ability to fall off coinbase and still have your money and transact with it, not to get rid of all centralized entities.
Chargebacks are something that simply can't be done in crypto. Well, they could be, with a more complex new currency that looks more like escrow rather than currency. Optimistic take: Its still a fantastic option today for goods which really don't qualify for chargebacks (think: digital downloads). Pessimistic take: Merchants hate chargebacks, and are the ones who ultimately decide which currencies they want to accept, so the lack of chargebacks won't actually impact uptake/usage.
In fact, this last point is why tons of porn providers already accept crypto. Adult content is an industry ripe with chargeback, which is why most processors won't touch them. The ones who do charge a ton in fees. They love crypto; no chance of a chargeback, and lower fees. Customers probably love it too; better anonymity.
> people will take longer to make purchasing decisions.
I'd be interested to know how many people seriously consider "I have recourse through my credit card if things go awry" as a major factor in purchasing decisions. I've DEFINITELY spent more to buy something from Amazon or direct from Apple, because I know their customer support is fantastic, and that's an avenue that won't go away with crypto. Card specific protections, I can't say I've ever considered, but that's just me.
There's still plenty of room in crypto for centralized entities, like Coinbase, to take on the role of a bank and absorb some of this responsibility. I'm imagining a "pay with crypto" versus "pay with coinbase" option, where the customer can opt-in to an additional X% transaction fee, paid to coinbase, for "purchase insurance" or something. Its not pure-crypto, but again: balance in all things.
Crypto is important not so it becomes the One Thing All Consumers buy Everything With in a Wholly Distributed and Decentralized World. Its just another option; an important one because it provides recourse for humans who have traditionally be spurred by the established western and wealthy-oriented banking system.
Well, I saved a bunch of that art and can view it any time.
That's kinda the point. The "collector" can feel like they own it -- using an idiosyncratic new definition of ownership that you don't really have to agree with but other collectors/speculators/crypto peoplke also feel is real. The artist gets paid (kinda rare for art, much less digital art), everyone else can enjoy their artistic output. System working as designed.
I’m curious if anyone actually feels like it’s real, or if it’s 99% speculation. I tend to think it’s the latter.
Some people really feel it, I know a few long-term collectors. Some people are into the VR galleries they assemble, others buy non-standard sized displays fit for specific NFTs to display in their homes. It's definitely an odd little community of rich people collecting digital art. And more broadly people feel attachment to their Twitter PFPs and feel like they can't truly use it unless they own it. It's a new social convention that's very unevenly distributed.
But what is it really that they own? Bragging rights, that they paid for the artist to proclaim them the first (or subsequent) person to own a hash on one of multiple blockchains, that contains a link pointing to an image file of an artwork hosted on a CDN? And the artist can create infinitely more? And the image file might be taken down at any time? And while you can trace the provenance on the blockchain easily enough, linking the originating address with the actual artist needs some external evidence off blockchain that might not be around forever? And the blockchain it’s on might well lose popularity at some point and be forgotten? Etc?
I just can’t see why it’d be valuable to anyone, unless they’re just caught up in the hype and don’t think too hard about it. I can however see people taking advantage of the many, many people who feel like they missed out on, say, Bitcoin and want to get in on ”crypto”.
A provenance certificate which is socially interpreted as ownership. Not going to argue whether that's a good or durable interpretation of ownership, just attesting that some people really do feel it.
I hear you. I expect the bottom to fall out of this, abruptly and fairly soon. But we’ll see.
I thought so too but now met enough people who believe in that interpretation and seen the virality of it; feel like it might have cultural legs. We'll see if it survives the crypto bubble popping and the monetary value of all the expensive NFTs disappearing.
How can anyone possibly be considered a "long-term" collector of something so new yet?
It's essentially a state of intention: people buying art to appreciate having it rather than with an intention of selling. Most people in the NFT space are flippers riding bubbles, but a few actual collectors really do exist.
Speculation and money laundering. NFTs are perfect for the latter.
Does anyone have evidence for nfts-as-money-laundering? I keep seeing this thrown around without any actual reasoning...
Really that's just an inherited property from physical art
Digital art has been free of this "inheritance" for years. We don't need to impose the arbitrary constraints of physical art on digital art. It's as backwards as Blockbuster trying to ban digital video so that they can sell more DVDs. It's philosophical DRM for jpegs.
It's kinda the opposite of DRM though, there's a strong culture of CC0 / public domain licensing in the NFT space. The idea is that you should be able to use and remix media freely but you can preserve a kind of monetary value through which artists get paid via a novel concept of ownership.
Open source funding hits art. Anyone can view it and get the benefit of doing so, the artist got paid to create, somebody gets bragging rights. Everybody wins.
Everybody wins except for the part where a bunch of people wasted a bunch of energy competing to be the one whose computer confirmed the financial transaction in an absurdly inefficient distributed database.
Patreon's been solving the problem of "open source funding" for about a decade without that part.
> in an absurdly inefficient distributed database
Suppose you wanted a distributed system where arbitrary nodes can enter without vetting. You'd need to be robust to adversarial nodes that lie and collude. Distributed consensus under asynchrony and adversaries seriously ramps up the difficulty of already challenging problems typically solved by Paxos derived algorithms. The first moderately scalable solution to consensus within such a hostile environment and with relatively few moving parts was built on a proof of work scheme inspired by hashcash. It's not inefficient, it's just a complex domain.
It should be noted that NFTs run on Ethereum which has been in the process of moving to the vastly more efficient proof of stake scheme.
> Patreon's been solving the problem of "open source funding" for about a decade without that part.
There are a number of developing nations whose citizens cannot participate on Patreon. For others, there are workarounds that involve hurdles like navigating providers with worse customer service rep than paypal, giving out sensitive identification, high fees, high withdrawal friction and chaining various third parties who themselves might disappear or be indirectly connected to fraudulent banks.
> wasted a bunch of energy competing
A problem of PoW based consensus, and will not be relevant to PoS/X based consensus.
> absurdly inefficient distributed database.
A decentralized distributed database with read/append commands available to any participant.
> Patreon
A centralized company.
You're not wrong, but you aren't making any points that people who are interested in crypto don't already know, or care about.
> will not be relevant to PoS/X based consensus
It's relevant now.
"Maybe someday crypto will move off of PoW so you should completely ignore the fact that there the networks exist entirely because PoW is how people get paid" is a bunch of bullshit that does nothing to change the fact that Proof Of Wasting A Lot Of Power On Nothing is how it works right now. Right now I consider crypto finding a way to work that doesn't burn shit-tons of energy to be about as likely as The Year Of Linux On The Desktop finally coming to pass.
We already had pateron, github sponsors, etc. for that with significantly less complication and barely any scams.
Do any of those allow you to resell purely digital art?
Yes, they just don't have any mechanism to assist you in doing so. Not that resale is of any use as regards funding the artist anyway.
Yes, it is a completely contrived marketplace based on bragging rights. It seems to work, but it is incredibly stupid and eventually people will move on.
Welcome to the art world.
this is another instance of the phenomenon in tech and startup culture where someone claims to solve an already solved problem with a needlessly overly complicated technical "solution"
Original copies of (popular) physical art is expensive. Unknown imitations of (popular) physical art is also expensive. Known imitations of (popular) physical art is generally never expensive.
Art isn't some magic phenomenon. Many many people know that it has value! They pay a lot of money to exclusively own something that can almost always be trivially copied, not because they care it can be trivially copied, but because they _don't_ care.
Most physical art can't be perfectly imitated though. A print is not a perfectly accurate rendition of a painting, or even of a physical drawing.
NFTs are like a combat mech the size of the Solar System.
Someone can use it to have a really ironclad DRM implementation, guarding the art you saved and to make sure only its approved owner can view it (mimicking the tyranny of physical scarcity of meatspace for cyberspace goods).
The reason you saved it and can view it is that nobody's doing that yet. And because there are way easier and cheaper ways to implement DRM than Solar System-sized mechs, nobody probably ever will use NFTs for that. : p
Please explain how someone can have an ironclad DRM implementation that guards access to download a link to a jpeg on a public blockchain that you want everyone to be able to view.
DRM is a fundamentally broken concept. I feel like there has to be a mathematical proof out there somewhere that it is impossible to both make information consumable and, at the same time, prevent its duplication.
Why couldn't you just have a SQL DB where you store the ownership of these assets though? There's no reason to use an NFT - it's overkill.
What, and trust the central planners at Sotheby's to not steal my apes and slimers? They'll sell off half the pixels to the government because of my back taxes.
Is that different from how crypto operates though? Cryptocurrency exchanges already have to report to the IRS/government and they'll still come after you if you have unpaid taxes.
If NFTs get big enough, there's no reason to believe that the NFT exchanges wouldn't have to register with the government/IRS.
A simple example:
You wouldn't trust your NBA Topshot ownership to .. the NBA? Of course you would - SQL DB strictly better.
Sounds like a business opportunity.
Typical right clicker mentality /s
The article agrees with you that there is interesting math and good art in crypto. But disagrees about why it's being done.
“There are a lot of smart people working on this stuff” is something I’ve heard several times recently. It gives me reason to hope, but it’s not sufficient. At some point, concrete results are needed. Fingers crossed…
Well, you had me until you brought up Fidenza.
It’s something somebody with less than a CompSci or SWE bachelors could do. It looks like something a nerd who can program that just took an entry level mechanical engineering fluid dynamics course & thought it was cool made.
In other words, practically worthless, and hardly art. You would put them on your wall? Poor wall.
Recent Damien Hurst piece was a coke machine in the corner of a gallery that dispensed cans of coke with his signature on. Obviously a lot of easy criticisms there but still considered a collectible by some.
Modern art = I could do that + yeah but you didnt
>But unlike say the eternal emacs/vim war, the divisions on this topic are entirely philosophical and about culture instead of technology.
What? My problem with "crypto assets" is that "blockchains" are outperformed by a System/360 while costing billions of dollars to run and drawing about the same power as all datacenters in the world put together. The fact that I like Star Trek is irrelevant.
Indeed. Blockchain tech, at least in its PoW incarnation, seems like a negation of Moore's law. The same operations get slower and less efficient over time.
Every incarnation I've heard of is comparably slow. People claim to have ways to improve efficiency but I haven't heard of anything within three orders of magnitude of performance of the Windows 95 machine rusting in my garage.
The canonical way to get around the inevitable inefficiency of decentralization at scale is to quietly re-add centralization (ReFi?) and bury it under technical neologisms and benchmarks.
"Look how fast and innovative $cryptocurrency is! I totally didn't just reinvent a centralized payment settlement system."
This is specifically about NFTs, and not the general environmental problems with cryptocurrency, which exist, but are solvable with known technology.
Stellar article. It matches a ton of my views. I really appreciate the author for taking the time to follow the industry and keep writing about it. I've been tempted to do the same, but it would be so much work. involved but not only is the space metastasizing at an incredible rate, but even proponents agree that there's a ton of BS. And honestly, it would be terrible for my stress levels to deal with the army of financially motivated proponents.
Anyway here you go
https://thenftbay.org/description.html https://thenftbay.org/
You can have all the NFTs in existence without having to wear out your right click button.
We can all be "rich"
Turns out that torrent is mostly full of zeroes: https://github.com/ghuntley/thenftbay.org/issues/9
Probably still figuratively the case even after that issue is resolved...
Issue was deleted.
Yet, are you rich after torrenting that? Of course not.
There's the disconnect. The phantom in the system that some people aren't groking; the leap of faith. Why do (a vast minority of) the NFTs in that torrent still have value, despite the torrent existing?
Why is Disney worth $275B despite all of their movies hitting The Pirate Bay immediately upon their release?
I can Google Image search pictures of the Mona Lisa with zero effort. Thus, the original is worthless?
I'd ask detractors of the crypto/NFT movement really think critically about those questions. Not just for minutes and hours; not just for the time it takes to bash Reply and say "lol right click save as". Read up about the history of money; integrate ideas about megacorporation control over our government and economic systems, human behavior and nature, and what the concept of ownership really means.
I can't refute all the arguments against in one comment, and some are legitimate. But I'll leave you with one thought which fundamentally changed my viewpoint on NFTs: isn't it beautiful that you can right click save as on an NFT? That this system exists which, theoretically, enables creators to see compensation for their work, one consumer of that work to feel ownership/responsibility, and the population at large to enjoy it for free?
> Why is Disney worth $275B despite all of their movies hitting The Pirate Bay immediately upon their release?
Merchandise, theme parks, movie tickets, cruises, live shows (eg "Disney on Ice"), and so on. You're typically not going to find an HD quality pirated movie the second it hits theaters, only once it's released to the home or sent out as a screener. That's only a tiny slice of their diversified pie. For the record, I'm not usually one to defend Disney as a corporation.
> I can Google Image search pictures of the Mona Lisa with zero effort. Thus, the original is worthless?
It's not worthless. :) The original is the original physical painting that you can touch and feel, and your Google Image results are a bunch of pixels of photos/scans of the painting. On the other hand, if you create an original .jpg and sell it as an NFT, every other .jpg of that NFT is literally identical to the original, something you cannot achieve with your Mona Lisa comparison.
"NFT is literally identical to the original" Youre so close here! Literally identical except for the fact that people are willing to pay millions of dollars for one, and not the other! Perhaps there is something else that makes them different too.....
So, would you agree with the following statement: The value of the real Mona Lisa is dominated by its physicality; the ability for its owner to touch and feel it.
A few further thoughts to ponder over:
1) No one touches and feels the Mona Lisa. Now, that's something wholly unique to High Art, but it is worth bearing: the Mona Lisa sits in a vault, or behind panes of glass, only touched by caretakers, who don't even own it. Yet, it has value.
2) Actually, I pulled the Mona Lisa as an example, but consider: is the Mona Lisa actually valuable? By what measure? USD in a Private Sale? Is there a market (really want to stress that word, because its critical: Market) for the Mona Lisa? Is there demand for the Mona Lisa, or is the risk of owning a stolen original of the most well-recognized art in history too great? Consider how this flips the conversation: I just presented a compelling argument for why the Mona Lisa, this Thing we've been using as a stand-in to represent a "highly valuable original good", may actually be worthless! Supply, Demand, and Market Liquidity vastly dominate the Pricing of most goods/services; not Value. Art Caretakers oftentimes describe pieces of art as "priceless"; its easy to interpret that as "REALLY EXPENSIVE", but they actually mean it at face value: No one knows what the price would be, because it has no price, because it has no market.
3) Are nonphysical goods destined to be valueless? For digital goods: Isn't this already sustainably demonstrated to be false, independent of any conversation on crypto? Fortnite turns billions a year in revenue, selling digital costumes and experiences to wear them in. Those costumes hold value to people; not marketable value, but value none-the-less.
4) Does Slack have value? Woah. Think about that for a second. What is the value of Slack? Forget the stock market; think intrinsic. Its a Digital Service. So, per the argument; its nonphysical, cannot be touched and felt, and isn't even a discrete good! This should be the apex of Worthlessness in many peoples' naive model of value, which is endlessly applied in-kind to NFTs; yet Slack demonstrably and undeniably has Value. Where does it come from? What components comprise the value of Slack Inc?
I'll pay $1000 for the Mona Lisa. Just like that, theres a market for it now.
A market requires both a buyer and a seller. There are no sellers; and thus, no market.
Disney creates works billions of people want to see, and they have governments around the world enforce the ownership rights.
Nobody wants the piece of art associated with your NFT’s. And is there even any legally framework for the ownership of NFT’s or is it just something a weird club of people says is so?
> Disney creates works billions of people want to see.
Yup!
> and they have governments around the world enforce the ownership rights.
This is one of the strongest selling points of crypto for its supporters; that, when it makes sense, floaty, legal ownership rights can be replaced with hard cryptography. It doesn't make sense for every good, or even every digital good.
> Nobody wants the piece of art associated with your NFT’s
Speaking wholesale for seven billion human beings, I see.
> And is there even any legally framework for the ownership of NFT’s or is it just something a weird club of people says is so?
Ideally, theoretically; its not a legal framework, its a cryptographic framework. The minting address of the original artist would be publicly known, and is encoded into the chain of custody for every NFT.
This is the jump that many detractors don't make. Its not the blockchain that prescribes authenticity to the NFT; the chain VALIDATES authenticity, it doesn't prescribe it. Its not OpenSea (though they can definitely make it all more user friendly). Its the chain of custody and the address of the original minter.
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79802
MOMA is going to be so mad when they find out Starry Night is worthless now.
You're talking about a piece of art that exists on a canvas, with its own bumps/grooves, versus a photo/scan of that art. There is still only one Starry Night in it's exact, original form despite us being able to pull it up on Google Images. It will age, and change with age.
A .jpg NFT can literally be saved/copied in it's exact original form an infinite number of times.
So, you're saying that those exact bumps and grooves are the repository of value for Starry Night? That if only we could perfectly replicate those grooves, then it'd have no value?
He links that very site in his third paragraph
Soon we get to the point when the Tinkerbell believers become violent against the unfaithful because their heresy is what spoiling the magic.
In practise this will mean legal regulation and support, probably by some further perversion of IP laws. Really dont see any end game that aint ugly.
Keep an eye out for cryptocurrency lobbyists passing laws to force browsers to disable right click > Save Image.
I've never seen that, ever. There are, however, daily calls to unperson people in the crypto space -- just like what S. Diehl is doing here by claiming it is essentially a 'collective delusion worthy of punishment'.
There are several major issues with NFTs but I don't think this article identifies any of them:
- NFTs are not durable. All of the implementations I've seen are trading "ownership" of URLs that rely on DNS and WHOIS. URL is nice for convenience feature, but they should at least include file hashes, ideally multiple perceptual hashes as well. If there is a central point of failure in a web service, the benefits of decentralization are null. If OpenSea goes down, your NFT is effectively gone: so what is the effective distinction from OpenSea hosting a centralized database?
- Scarcity is entirely illusory across ecosystems. A given NFT within one ecosystem may be scarce, but there is nothing preventing duplicate NFTs of the exact same content (or minor pixel changes). That's why perceptual and file hashes would be useful: currently there is little to stop someone from taking popular NFTs on one ecosystem and selling the same images on another ecosystem. Ecosystems have a financial incentive to ignore enforcing duplicated content from other ecosystems: it makes them more money and hurts their competitors at the cost of possible minor reputation risk. Each NFT ecosystem is effectively a separate competing namespace system. Imagine if opensea://google.com and rarible://google.com were entirely independent and routed to servers controlled by competing organizations: chaos.
- There is no validation of copyright upon NFT creation. I can find someone else's art, make an NFT and sell it. NFT ecosystems need to evolve into becoming more like auction houses: their brand's value should be based on the trust that the art sold is not counterfeit, and are being sold by the true owner.
- NFTs have not succeeded in a test within the courts (afaik, lmk if you have an example of this). NFTs grant no legal rights to the holder. If NFTs granted the exclusive right to license that content AND courts enforced that right, they could be immensely valuable. There is no unified "IP Registry" that I can find a picture/audio/video on the internet and look up who the current owner is to contact for licensing. This is the killer app for NFTs IMO, but whether courts will play along with code-as-law has not been legally validated yet.
Fortunately for NFTs, non of these are technically insurmountable. Maybe there are some smaller ecosystems that have better designs, but it seems the big players are all taking the easy path and building a fragile foundation for ownership.
>NFTs are not durable
Some of the more prized NFTs are entirely on-chain; I agree that ones which just encode a URL of an image feel very superficial and brittle.
>Scarcity is entirely illusory across ecosystems
Every successful ETH NFT has been copied (probably multiple times) on other chains; this isn't really any different from just even copying on the same chain. In all cases it's treated as a copy.
>There is no validation of copyright upon NFT creation
I agree and I think this is a huge problem for 1/1s!
> NFTs have not succeeded in a test within the courts
Best NFTs are CC0 licensed and don't confer any legal rights (but instead encourage liberal reuse and remixing)
> Some of the more prized NFTs are entirely on-chain
Oh neat - that's definitely better, I'm sure it increases costs significantly though.
> "treated as a copy."
Are consumers able to easily make informed decisions about which versions of NFT are primal and which are derivative? Seems like a hard problem that would require a lot of expensive moderation by the ecosystems.
> Best NFTs are CC0 licensed and don't confer any legal rights
I love me some CC0, but I'd also love a system where I can self service:
- Identify the owner of a song I'd like to use as background music in a video
- Buy an NFT that represents a license to use that song in a single streaming video
- "Point" that NFT at a file hash of the completed video
- Upload video to youtube and other streaming platforms including a reference to the NFT, making it immune to arbitrary takedown requests.
There are stories of creators who own the rights to a song getting takedown requests on a video that includes it and getting stuck in kafkaesque bureaucracy despite having a valid license. There is no public registry of who is licensed to use a piece of content, so Youtube would have to manually inspect contracts to resolve this - it seems they are grossly understaffed in support to be able to do this. Sure, this is partially due to Youtube's extreme subservience to the IP lobby, but a public system to validate licensing would be extremely valuable IMO.
If you have a "unified 'IP Registry'", as you (I think correctly) posit would be useful, why does it have to be done with a blockchain?
Blockchains are useful for decentralized decisions, but decentralization is antithetical to the kind of thing you would need in order to take an IP claim to court. If you and another person with alleged IP claims to the same work but different registries show up to court, the court has no way to determine which registrar is authoritative for that work, and will ignore both of you. IP without government enforcement is literally useless, so your IP rights are nothing.
This is why property records, patents, etc. aren't decentralized. You and another person can't both have a legitimate claim to the same patent based on two different patent decentralized blockchain records, as cool as that concept might sound technically.
And once a system is unified, it doesn't need to be a blockchain. You can just have a simple database.
In terms of "unified IP registry' I'm not talking about a single centralized organisation, but a super-ecosystem of multiple sub- NFT ecosystems:
- Each do due diligence of creator ownership before an NFT can be sold on their platform.
- In addition, they test the candidate-NFT against the file and perceptual hashes on other trusted peer ecosystems
- Due diligence signatures are portable and transferrable, so ex. Sotheby's validation could be used as evidence when token is resold within OpenSea ecosystem - even if Sotheby's was to hypothetically disappear (assuming old signatures are still trustworthy).
(caveat: Perceptual hashes are starting to push past my technical expertise, not sure to what extent perceptual hashes would be economically feasible: can they be specific enough to not cause excessive false positives while still identifying true positive subtle image manipulations without drastically increasing on-chain storage costs?)
I think the benefits of decentralization would be nice, but it's certainly arguable that an ICANN-like international centralized consortium could be a better solution - it certainly can be more energy and cost efficient but at the expense of that entity being a single point of failure.
I think what Stephen misses in his campaign against crypto is that the old ideals have already been coopted and smothered with the corporatization of the web and splintering of what was a decentralized ecosystem into a megacorp walled gardens. I know there's a tiny community of non-crypto decentralized web advocates and I hope they win. But, the main force for a return to decentralization is in crypto and the only realistic alternative to a web3 future is one where everything is a property of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, &c
> But, the main force for a return to decentralization is in crypto
The more I watch this space, the more I realize that many of these projects are just an excuse to flip novel tokens for a quick profit.
We reached the point where there are enough blockchains and crypto tokens for almost every conceivable purpose. At this point, many of the new entrants feel like they’re just arbitrarily bolting new coins and new tokens on to ideas that could have been executed on top of many existing chains or coins. Or even executed entirely without a blockchain at all. The reason, of course, is that it’s far easier to get rich quickly by minting new arbitrary coins and tokens than it is to build on top of someone else’s coins.
> But, the main force for a return to decentralization is in crypto and the only realistic alternative to a web3 future is one where everything is a property of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, &c
What’s stopping any of these companies from simply buying 51% of the tokens to a decentralized DAO, for example? There’s nothing magical about crypto that makes platforms immune to big company involvement. If anything, many of them make it easier to execute and harder to detect.
There’s nothing stopping anyone from launching a project that isn’t owned by these companies but also doesn’t involve blockchain. In fact, it’s never been easier to get something off the ground and going.
This argument always feels like an appeal to binary thinking: We’re supposed to imagine that there are only two possibilities (web3 or big tech) with the implicit assumption that big tech is the “bad” one and therefore web3 is the obvious choice. Yet there’s a huge middle ground between the two that is more accessible than ever before.
> What’s stopping any of these companies from simply buying 51% of the tokens to a decentralized DAO, for example?
Smaller coins, sure. Its a legitimate concern.
But it becomes far harder as coins get bigger. Up to a local maxima of general global use and investment. Even harder as companies compete against one-another to do the same thing. What's stopping Chase Bank from buying up tons of coins and mining power to control Bitcoin? Well, every other human who owns Bitcoin, not to mention Bank of America and Wells Fargo.
Company interest in doing this will naturally correlate with usage. Which means, companies & governments simply wont do it until its too late and they can't. And if they did; if they jumped the shark; the coin's value would drop as users recognize this, and their investment would be ruined. Suicide-bombing is not in the self-interest of most corporations. The GDP of the US, the single richest cohesive entity on the planet, is still only ~25% the GDP of Planet Earth.
This sort of co-option of a currency won't happen, because a currency would either be so big that no entity could afford to do it, or a currency is so small that taking control would destroy its market and their investment.
Whats the distribution of mining power in the bitcoin network right now? Like, what % of the total are the top ten groups?
The top singular contributors to mining power are, for most coins, mining pools comprised of thousands of individuals and corporations. So, its very difficult the say; we can point to pools, but that's where the investigation stops.
The pools themselves are collectives, and as such really don't hold much logical power in swaying the network. If one pool goes rogue, miners are generally pretty savvy, and would react (this has happened in the past).
Ok. With what little I understand about the way wealth pools and congregates, and the inability to peer behind the curtain in this situation, I don't see any reason to believe that the majority of power has not centralized into a small group of people.
I think you have to participate a bit in the non-speculative side to get a feel for the culture and social movement that's brewing there. New entrants aren't the ones to watch since they're probably jumping in to make money, look to the increasing interest in DAOs as social coordination mechanisms, they will keep evolving to empower groups of individuals to have outsized impacts.
> feel for the culture and social movement that's brewing there.
It might be slightly cool if they weren’t 99% either grifters or people who can’t actually do anything. Like, even basic programming that would actually make something real.
The current “culture” is literally just saying a lot of words and making absolutely zero point.
Sort of like Kanye said
“No one knows what it means, but it's provocative
Gets the people going”
> “No one knows what it means, but it's provocative. Gets the people going”
This is actually a high quality quote from Blades of Glory, a high quality film. Apt reference either way, though.
What are some non-speculative places where one can get into this?
It depends on your interests, I just joined a decentralized biotech discord where people are exploring alternative funding mechanisms for both non-profit science and biotech startups. There are quite a few art discords/communities that are focused on the actual art (and not on resale prices).
Any of them could easily deploy enough compute to own any blockchain.
> But, the main force for a return to decentralization is in crypto and the only realistic alternative to a web3 future is one where everything is a property of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, &c
It'd be awfully nice if said decentralization was offering more valuable things than just naked ponzi schemes.
I'm on team "we're in an ad bubble and it's disgusting that these major companies created a surveillance state" but the alternative presented is an extremely toxic culture of money-obsessed scammers who burn energy with reckless abandon.
I'd advise that proponents of cryptocurrency-based systems like "web3" clean their houses out a bit.
I think it's easy to miss the content at the core of the movement given how thoroughly it's wrapped in gold rush and scamming. But the more time I spend around the space the more it seems that there is a legitimately transformative force which attracts the gold rush in the first place. And the ethos of people working on e.g. research DAOs, decentralized publishing, crypto art, &c feels right compared to the web2 world.
It's the classic MBA meets genius nerd situation.
"Hey everyone, look at this weird tech thing my brother has been obsessively building for the past year! You can have one for $5!"
> But the more time I spend around the space ...
The more you get sucked in to the reality distortion field. I've been there, get out.
Nah, I kinda like it. It's a very idealistic and optimistic space with a vision for creating a commons that's not owned by any one commercial entity. The scams will drop away when the current bubble bursts but the web3 culture + tech are probably here to stay.
> the only realistic alternative to a web3 future is one where everything is a property of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, &c
Take heart! Living in a mud hut and drying jellyfish on racks over a tire fire is also a realistic alternative to a "web3" future, and a more likely one for most of us!
Maybe the most likely future of all...
I'm also bummed by the centralization and corporatization of the web. What web3 projects should I be looking at? What stands out as promising?
Because when I look, I just see things that look like grifts, platforms that eschew centralized moderation and become spammy cesspools, or projects that actually aren't decentralized but co-opt the web3 name. But I'm open-minded, if there are things I'm missing.
It's legit very hard to sift through the scamminess of the space, I've been thinking of it as the cost of revolutionary potential: exponentially more people rush in to profit off "being early".
I would say start with web3 science folks like https://twitter.com/joshuaforman and https://twitter.com/eperlste who have a vision for the utility of DAOs for positive social impact that's unlinked from personal profit.
If I read something from the folks with vision for the utility of DAOs, will they explain why a DAO is meaningfully different from a traditional corporation for whatever purpose they are imagining?
To really act meaningfully in the world outside crypto, DAOs needed to be wedded to LLCs so they can participate in the legal system.
But...the DAO governance structure allows very low friction, high transparency coordination between pseudononymous strangers on the internet.
The DAO is the "real" manifestation of the collective will of a bunch of people, the corporate shell is just going to perform whatever actions the DAO votes on.
forget web3. basically we are in a situation where lots of people, smart, tech savvy people, stupid band wagon people, well meaning people, me-too people, go-with-the-next-big-thing people, all made a wrong bet that the particular set of algorithmic technologies and protocols that bitcoin spawned are a generic blueprint for a new decentralized digital infrastructure.
it aint.
the choice is not between web3 and meta-dystopia. The choice is between people owning and running their own hardware and software versus being granted that "privilege" by some digital overlords.
As one of those non-crypto decentralized advocates, I am not super optimistic. I think the best case would be that we manage to build a bunch of generic decentralized infrastructure while all the easy money is being thrown around at the bottom of the Ponzi pyramid, and then that infrastructure manages to survive and continue to provide value even after the cryptocurrency house of cards collapses.
> then that infrastructure manages to survive and continue to provide value even after the cryptocurrency house of cards collapses.
That's my optimistic forecast for what happens after the current speculative bubble pops. We'll be left with e.g. universal sign-on via crypto wallet that's not owned by any corporation and can be used for cryptographic signature / voting / &c. We'll also have increasingly robust decentralized infrastructure like zero-knowledge rollup L2s on top of Ethereum to make increasing complex decentralized applications. The money making stuff is about as vacuous as everyone seems to think but the substance it's attached to is a movement away from walled gardens and towards increasingly empowered individuals.
> That's my optimistic forecast for what happens after the current speculative bubble pops. We'll be left with e.g. universal sign-on via crypto wallet that's not owned by any corporation and can be used for cryptographic signature / voting / &c.
This seems entirely self-contradictory. How do you certify that a nominally anonymous cryptographic ID represents a particular individual for the purposes of signature/voting without some real-world (likely centralized!) entity establishing a connection between the two?
This seems like fundamentally the same problem that SSL certificates are trying to solve for website identity and I don't see how blockchain removes the need for a central authority somewhere if you want guarantees like "one person, one vote".
Why assume you need a pseudonymous persona to map onto a real world ID? Check out how DAO proposals work at e.g. https://gitcoin.co/grants/
There's a bunch of cool stuff if you Google "proof of {humanity,personhood}". Here's the wiki page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_personhood
It's all pretty new and not proven long term, but it is an area of active research.
Surely somewhere beyond the wall street grifters, the silicon valley data slurpers and the cryptomaniacs there is a fintech community that is actually worth being part of?
Casinos?
> "Information doesn't want to be free anymore"
“Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive....That tension will not go away” - Stuart Brand
Think about the whole quote and NFTs will make more sense to you.
NFT != DRM
go wild, right click and torrent. i'll send you my nft images myself if you want them. the signatures and the economic security of that signature taking place is valuable. there is no scarcity of information in NFTs.
these takes are getting so bad, misunderstanding the point so much im not sure how we get people aligned in the discussion at this point. but in the words of satoshi “If you don’t believe it or don’t get it, I don’t have the time to try to convince you, sorry.”
> the signatures and the economic security of that signature taking place is valuable
Except, it isn't. What is the point in having a certificate of ownership of a resource so un-scare that it is practically free?
We have achieved post-scarcity of information, and people are desperately trying to cram scarcity-based economics back into it because that's all our society knows how to deal with. We should instead be working to remake society around the new reality, in my opinion.
> but in the words of satoshi “If you don’t believe it or don’t get it, I don’t have the time to try to convince you, sorry.”
Yeah, that's what scam artists say. Tell everybody you have a miracle, instill some FOMO, and when people poke at the holes tell them you don't have time to explain it to them or it is too complicated, but trust me it's great.
People need to be paid to do the work, so they can eat and pay rent. We dont actually live in a post scarcity star trek world. So we find a way that people can be paid yet the information and content can remain free to everyone. It seems like lots of people like this. For some reason some people really really hate that other people are willing to pay to make content freely available to them. The people buying NFTs are footing the bill for you to have that free information. Sure thats a social/cultural status game with a side of speculation, but in turn we have art that is permeating culture rapidly.
As he is quoting a distortion of Stuart Brand, maybe we should see what he would think? well here he is at the ethereum devcon in 2018 talking about this stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLGZdLpHl1w
Open minded, interested, exploring, doing what he has done for decades and has been admired by people for, being a hacker!
> People need to be paid to do the work, so they can eat and pay rent.
Yes, this is the part about reshaping society I was talking about. Artists do contribute value to the world and need a way to be supported, but the way we support them should not be to burn the gift of post-scarcity.
> We dont actually live in a post scarcity star trek world.
When it comes to information we really, really do. I have every single game ever made for every console generation from 1978 through 2002. This cost me next to nothing, because we live in the information age.
> So we find a way that people can be paid yet the information and content can remain free to everyone
We already have several mechanisms for that. I don't see how NFTs bring anything new to the table other than providing speculation-based scams to flourish, which doesn't really benefit the artists in any way.
> Sure thats a social/cultural status game with a side of speculation, but in turn we have art that is permeating culture rapidly.
I wasn't aware that there was a problem with this. Indeed, the non-scarcity of information has allowed art and culture to proliferate at ludicrous speed. We've seen someone's fanfiction become a big budget film series (with some IP changes), someone's basement-developed game became so big a company bought him out for billions of dollars, and a korean TV series become a smash hit in the west.
I'm open to having my opinion changed, but I don't see any problems things like NFTs actually solve better than any existing system other than being great for scams.
> I have every single game ever made for every console generation from 1978 through 2002. This cost me next to nothing
I think you are confusing the cost of production of these things, and the cost to you personally. There is a cost (material) and scarcity(human time) involved in making things. I think we have got away as a society with not paying artists and musicians and demanding their content be free and "post-scarcity". That really isnt helpful to people trying to live in this world. See Gillian Welch sadly singing "Everything is free now... They figured it out, I'm gonna do it anyway even if it doesn't pay".
> which doesn't really benefit the artists in any way.
the default on most marketplaces is a 10% resale royalty paid to the artist. compare this to existing aucition houses where we get 0. or second hand record shops where we get 0%. or spotify or youtube where the ceos are billionaires and we get fractions of pennies for streams AND have our work surrounded by adverts.
when i look at https://foundation.app/collection/clsfd I see an artist i really admire finally getting paid some money for her years of work and experimentation. and retaining control in that system. The work isnt tied and locked in to this particular website like posting on instagram, the provenance is clear and royalties fair (decided by the artist).
I think people need a reminder of Sturgeon's Law. 90% of everything is shit. Don't get blinded by the noise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
> I think you are confusing the cost of production of these things, and the cost to you personally.
No, I'm not. The fact that artists need to be paid for their work so they can continue to exist within world of scarcity economics is orthogonal to the fact that information can be copied and disseminated for an effective zero-cost.
Let me put it this way: if, instead of minting and purchasing an NFT, the potential buyer just gave the artist money, what has changed? Everyone can still copy the art for free, the owner can still say they paid for it and prove it in any number of existing methods. Absolutely nothing about adding a cryptographically secure certificate of ownership to that is valuable as far as I can see.
So why didn't people do that? There has been the option to give artists money forever, and yet as a society, we generally haven't. NFTs are demonstrably transferring massive amounts of wealth from crypto bros with too much money to artists who need it. It's revolutionary because _it's actually happening_. Even though it was theoretically possible in the past, _people didn't actually do it_. The traditional art market doesn't care about an artist until they're dead. The value of NFTs is that a massive new market for art, from living artists, has been created ex nihilo.
> So why didn't people [just give money to artists]?
Because there’s no way to make a speculative profit off a donation?
So your argument isn't that this is a useful and revolutionary tool that will change the world for the better, your argument is that it is a useful way for artists to exploit idiots? A.K.A, a scam?
I'm not convinced this dialog is in good faith, but no, my argument is that it is a way for artists to get paid, at a much larger scale than they have in the past. Personally, I think artists getting paid does change the world for the better, but I suppose that's open to disagreement. I'm not sure which part of that you think is a scam - are the people buying the NFTs being misled? Is the product sold not what was claimed?
> Personally, I think artists getting paid does change the world for the better
I don't disagree, but if it weren't for NFTs there are still other ways for them to get paid. Hell, there are still other ways to scam rich idiots for that matter. Point is, it isn't the technology of NFTs getting them paid, it's the sociology around it. My contention is that the technology itself brings us nothing of value.
> I'm not sure which part of that you think is a scam - are the people buying the NFTs being misled? Is the product sold not what was claimed?
Yes. NFTs talk about "ownership" of some work, but that's the lie. No one has any ownership in any meaningful sense conferred by the technology of NFTs. I can have the exact same thing your NFT points to; hell, I can even mint my own NFT that points to it. If I bribe the artist I can probably get them to vouch for mine being the "legitimate" one. The NFT is meaningless. It's the digital equivalent of the star name registry scam. Even if we take the NFT to be backed by some legal contract entitling the "owner" to actual factual copyright, that isn't enabled by NFT tech, it's enabled by governments and treaties and has been functioning for hundreds of years without cryptographically secure anything and, in fact, depends on so many systems that are not cryptographically secure and decentralized that adding those things into the mix only makes it more difficult to work within that system.
"There are still other ways for them to get paid" is not the same thing as "they would in actuality be paid the same amount". I agreed in my message that it was always possible, and yet it wasn't happening. I don't care whether it's theoretically possible that artists could be paid, I care whether they are actually paid. NFTs are actually getting them paid. You seem to be missing, or avoiding, this point.
I am not making an argument about technology, or sociology, or any of the things you seem to be worked up over. I am strictly saying, NFTs get artists paid, in far greater amounts than they had previously, and I consider that valuable. I've yet to hear a refutation (or an acknowledgement) of this, and I consider it a strong refutation of your own quote "Absolutely nothing about adding a cryptographically secure certificate of ownership to that is valuable" - adding the certificate of ownership radically increased the size of the market, and got artists paid. QED.
I am primarily concerned with the technology's value as regards solving problems that actually exist. You know, the way nuclear fission or NVMe storage have value, not the way that Q-Ray Bracelets have the value of being effective at separating fools from their money.
If you're going to argue that Q-Ray Bracelets are valuable, then I do not believe that further discussion on this topic is possible as we live in fundamentally different realities.
Whether or not they are actually making money for artists in a profound way, as you keep asserting, is not an argument I'm willing to engage in since I haven't bothered to look in to the subject. My assertion is that even if they are[0], NFTs are still a broken-window-fallacy solution to the problem, not a real one. As the author of the original article states, this mechanism relies on a shared delusion that NFTs actually mean something and as soon as that delusion evaporates so will the "solution".
[0] I have seen no data one way or the other, so let's steelman and assume you are correct.
I think you're not wrong that some artists are actually getting paid whereas they wouldn't have were NFTs not a thing. But I think you might be wrong about the "why."
The Apple App Store got a lot of indie developers paid in the early days because Apple made payment easy and made side loading hard. There was a gold rush that is largely over now.
The question to ask is whether the NFT art market is sustainable.
My hunch is that there is a relatively small number of people with paper gains in ETH looking for something to do with it, but that the underlying demand for digital art hasn't changed much simply because there's now a new way to "prove ownership."
'people buying NFTs are footing the bill for you to have that free information'
Where? All I see is people paying for works after the fact, that no one would pay for -except- buying into the idea of an NFT.
Where are the NFTs being sold for desirable creative works -prior- to their creation and distribution? Show me a movie being shot, by names good enough that they could otherwise sell tickets, that will release freely to everyone that was funded by selling an NFT to it, say.
Retroactive sales have long been the way most art (and most stuff in general) is funded. Art is made and then sold, then the artist can keep making things. Someone makes them then sells them then they can keep making more. There is also the smaller market of commissioned work, which is popular in illustration and graphic design, but not so much in fine arts as it strips agency from the artist (you are asking them to make a particular thing). Alongside that there is funding applications via arts councils and crowdfunding, the closest for that would be projects on https://mirror.xyz/
Here is a crowdfund for a musician who is releasing records on catalog: https://haleek.mirror.xyz/crowdfunds/0x8B38a9cbabC067ddEA968...
Also as he was mentioned before, here is the crowdfund for the documentary about Stuart Brand too that played with these ideas of free/expensive/public/private https://weareasgods.mirror.xyz/crowdfunds/0x69DdE2e4d81720AE...
Not really answering the question there, which was specifically in reference to "People need to be paid to do the work". Clearly, they don't. They do the work first. Maybe if they were not paid they'd not do -further- work (though "starving artist" being a thing tends to imply people create because of a desire to create, not because of how lucrative it is), but with NFTs...no one is actually paying them to do the work. There could be an NFT with no artwork attached (in fact, there is no artwork attached; there's just a link, pointing somewhere on the internet, that can be changed out at any time by the creator).
> "People need to be paid to do the work". Clearly, they don't.
im really not sure what you are arguing for here? It seems you just really dont want a person to give someone else money and that have exchange/relationship be tokenized?
because regardless of how you feel about it, clearly lots of other people do want this. many artists and musicians do want this, particularly with royalties on resales.
I make something, I put up a signed version for auction, it gets sold. That person has the version i signed, they like having that, maybe in the future they sell it again and i also get royalties from the future sales. This is a positive improvement for me selling my artwork/music, and i much prefer it to begging on patreon. Even just making/advertising a patreon account is seen negatively from my experience, people would much rather pay me for something than send me $5 a month. I guess the follow up is why crypto not paypal, and beyond the obvious dependancy/fees/region locks, well its just more fun :)
We know that people feel different when they buy things. We know that ownership brings with it a sense of care. We know the exchange of one token for another (be it crypto of pieces of paper or stones) builds relationships, builds community. And a record of those exchanges builds legitimacy. That legitimacy extends to the system, as more people use it the more accepted it becomes.
>that can be changed out at any time by the creator
that would be one quick way to destroy your legitimacy, future sales, and upset your audience, sure. not sure why you'd do that?
NFTs aren't funding art in any substantial. They are funding some people playing the NFT/status game. People making art are supported by Patreon, commissions, etc.
To be fair, some artists have started selling NFTs of their work, and seen their income explode.
That said, -they were already creating art-. They're now getting better funded, which is great, but they also have geared their art toward that funding (see Bitcoin Angel as an example), which is, I would contend, a form of selling out (but is probably not much worse than patronage), and the source of that funding is horrific for the environment and requires a collective speculative delusion, but I've yet to see any art come about because of NFTs. To be fair there, though, I don't think art for the purpose of making money is a thing; artists create because of a desire to create, and hopefully it gets suitably appreciated to make money.
As I mentioned to others, remember the saying "90% of everything is shit" and make some time for the 10% maybe being legitimate, maybe having something worthwhile that is attracting all the attention.
Most people I know making art are funded by Arts Councils and government programs. Then there is the private markets, which look similar to the NFT speculation games (go watch a sotherbys auction some time, its eye opening) but with no royalties going to the artists. NFTs at a minimum have that 1 up on auction houses.
Then there is larger grants from foundations and charities, which would fund a project without expectation of ownership on any items. Philanthropists.
Then there is the smaller graphic/illustration commission artists who use paypal and patreon, interestingly they also seem to be the ones kicking up the most fuss about nfts, im not sure why though.
And it is just plainly wrong that artists arent using NFTs, and that it is just people playing status games. Its been quite widely accepted and adopted, particularly amongst those who already deal with selling their works so dont have that hesitation and fear of asking to be paid. Sure there is abuse and scams, those are the 90% of shit. most pop music is produced by organisations making bland acceptable rhythms with a pretty teen face dancing around to make a company a bunch of money, kinda sounds scammy too. But that doesnt mean theres also good stuff going on. Its up to you if you want to engage with it, but flat out denying it is happening wont make you an expert either.
> We dont actually live in a post scarcity star trek world.
We don't have matter replicators, or fusion reactors, but we've had sufficient technology to reliably give every living human a comfortable and safe existence since the early 1960s at the latest (see Murray Bookchin's "Post-Scarcity Anarchism" (1968)). Tellingly, we (collectively) choose not to. Instead, we're getting Gibson's Jackpot.
Are you saying this is the monetization of virtue signaling?
> but in the words of satoshi “If you don’t believe it or don’t get it, I don’t have the time to try to convince you, sorry.”
This quote is funny, because the technology and cryptography is pretty understandable and doesn't require faith. What I have a qualm with is the economics. And the problem with the economics is that it's not value neutral. Sure, we could have a system where signed hyperlinks to jpegs have value, but do we want that? Who does such a system benefit? Are the incentives of such a system aligned with continued human prosperity?
Edit: > there is no scarcity of information in NFTs.
This is contradicted by the hype around NFT gaming and "pay to earn". Every NFT gaming proposal I've seen seems geared around using NFTs to enforce artificial scarcity of digital items.
If NFTs get the economics right, then there is literally no need for any sort of IP law when it comes to digital assets. After all, the profitable thing is proof of ownership, not the good.
And yet, no one is paying (to grab a software company out of a hat) Oracle for the Oracle "name". They're paying for the software. The closest we have is paying for "proof of authenticity", because that belied a level of quality, but if we can trivially make a perfect copy, even that loses all merit.
What can you do with the proof of ownership of a digital asset if everyone else can copy it and ignore that proof of ownership? It's like starting with DRM and saying, "Oh yeah, we don't encrypt it, we just trust you not to violate our terms. Now pay up."
What would Taylor Swift do right now? I can rip all of her audio off of Spotify and use it in my movie without her permission even though she owns the music.
She would try to stop me - maybe send a cease and desist, sue, or otherwise seek remuneration for unauthorized use of her work.
Her proof of ownership is a signed contract with her recording company and any US copyright filings.
Your proof of ownership is an unambiguous cryptographic scheme (NFT), which you could use to secure a US copyright.
> I don’t have the time to try to convince you, sorry.
I'm willing to bet you do :)
lol maybe today on a friday afternoon i do haha :)
but in general the conversations are getting exhausting and distracting. I feel like it is at a point where we will just keep building the things we find useful for ourselves and our communities, maybe others will join in.
hopefully he people with such extreme anti-crypto views recognise that we are human; we'll try and we'll fail and maybe we'll make some cool stuff too. maybe they dont share the same values and maybe theyre scared of what might happen, but the continual insults and accusations of everyone being scammers/scammed because we linked some metadata with some signatures is absurd and weird.
if theyre so worried about culture and society maybe they should take a moment to think of what energy they are putting out into the world and if its at all healthy.
"A lot of us older grizzled engineers came from an open source culture that, at least aspirationally, built software around ideas of abundance, post-scarcity, universal access, and equality"
I can't square this type of thinking with actual analysis. Some tech bro is making $225k arbing AVAX every day? I can literally go and check out his contract on chain. I can deploy it myself! How is that anything but abundance, universal access, and equality?
TBH if you check out this guys tweets its like 70% crypto stuff, but anti crypto. I think he found his social echo chamber and is exulting in the attention.
It is worth ruminating on how this 21st century Tinkerbell Griftopia started.
Most of the proponents would have grown up roughly within the period 1991-2008. After the Cold War, before the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). The zenith of neoliberalism. The globalized USD seemed invincible, a worldwide Tinkerbell.
Then the GFC happened. The USD-based system was not infallible after all.
But it is hard to overcome our conditioning. Rather than evolve beyond the financial Tinkerbell mindset, increasing numbers of disillusioned have looked for a new Tinkerbell to believe in. Just listen to one of their slogans: "Fix the money, fix the world". Bitcoin happened to pop up also in 2008. The stage was set for a Tinkerbell revolution.
My prediction is that the money will never be "fixed", and the global economy will continue to migrate away from the free-market financial Tinkerbell model of the last 75 years and towards computer-driven allocation and trading systems between sovereign governments and global corporations. For example, Ford Motor just inked a (non-binding) partnership with Global Foundries for car chips. Expect to see a lot more of these bilateral economic partnerships and less free-market chaos over the coming decades.
Seems to me there's a conversation about the technology and conversation about how people react to that technology. Would be nice to talk about only the technology, but I guess in this case the social dimension is impossible to separate.
I think he missed the part where the crypto infrastructure is aggressively based on open-source, abundance, post-scarcity, universal access, and equality.
The current "assets" that are traded are indeed meaningless, as is most of what people buy with money beyond food and basic shelter. This is what initial post-scarcity looks like: people being ridiculous with assets because they realize that assets themselves are ridiculous, because post-scarcity.
We're in a transition period, a lot of old structures don't work anymore. We're just starting to rebuild critical functions using new ways of thinking. One of my favorite examples: https://cryptoforthehomeless.org/
> https://cryptoforthehomeless.org/
This seems like a well-intentioned project, but I have to ask: Why is crypto helpful, or even necessary here? Why not just use normal money?
Because there exist people who will donate crypto but not "normal money".
Same reason why there are charities that accept cars, canned food, christmas trees, etc.
That kinda just reinforces the point though that all of this cryptononsense is a scam. Sure, here's a group exploiting Bitcoin Iditiots LLC for a good cause, but they're still exploiting.
It's completely orthogonal to whatever you believe about crypto.
The preface to your link was:
> We're just starting to rebuild critical functions using new ways of thinking. One of my favorite examples:
Which I think any rational person would take to mean that you believe the linked project was enabled to do something revolutionary[0] by the technology of cryptocurrencies. But that isn't what the project does. The technology of cryptocurrencies is irrelevant to what they do, it's the hype they're taking advantage of.
[0] "new ways of thinking".
Broadly speaking, people are not buying crypto assets "for the lulz" because they have too much darn money lying around, they are buying them on the speculation that they will appreciate--like Bitcoin--and can be dumped at a profit.
This is exactly the key insight in a post-scarcity environment, though: Beyond food and basic shelter, everything is lulz.
A lot of people didn't grow up in that environment of abundance, so they still think that "profit" is serious business and not lulz, but then they use that profit for big houses or yachts or children or other lulz anyway.
Is it lulz, or is it a desperate attempt to find a financial/economic foothold when traditional footholds (bearable careers, houses, etc.) are increasingly out of reach for Millennials and onward?
The traditional footholds are no longer relevant.
Millennials and onward live on their phones, not in a house or at a workplace.
From the traditional perspective, this seems like a loss.
From another perspective, it's not.
Not only is the article completely on point, the writing is marvelous
How exactly is cryptocurrency disconnected from classical economics?
Try pricing any cryptocurrency in a discounted cash flow model.
That's not classical economics, that's asset specific. Try pricing USD or a commodity or literally any other asset that doesn't represent financial investment in a business venture in a discounted cash flow model.
Nobody is using cryptocurrency as a currency, securities pricing is the only one that makes sense.
Net trade balance (as in fx) gives them no investment value either-it's called a discount curve for a reason.
Aside from that, there's stock to flow (lol) and technical analysis of volume/sentiment which are fine for day trading but ignore fundamentals.
How would you price them on fundamentals?
It's going to sound hand wavy, but it is a new asset class with a novel value proposition, so analyzing fundamentals will require assessing novel characteristics.
How do you price a currency on fundamentals? Some of those indicators apply, like supply, yearly monetary inflation, reserves ("hoarding"), and some don't, like stability of the issuing state, but an analog to that would be network security.
How do you price tulips? I'm not going to pretend that there isn't a massive section of demand that is entirely speculative.
As far as a novel approach, you have to gauge potential utility, something there aren't very many analogs to in other asset classes. Can you send it over borders without being molested by various bureaucracies? Is there some guy that is going to change how things work under pressure? IMO the unique fundamentals of a cryptocurrency have to do with censorship resistance, permissionlessness, fungibility, some of the hot buzzwords that people use as selling points are more than buzzwords. And there's no century long history of refining the methodology of doing this, we are figuring out exactly what works and what doesn't, which is a part of the process of price discovery with any new asset class.
This writing is truly poetic :')
Yes, the bankster grandpa Dahl is right. Crypto is not for you, it is not for the very wealthy old americans that have build the 'open' web of platforms and sucked the value out of all the corners of the Earth. It's for the rest of us.
You realize that there's literally nothing stopping Old Money from buying their way into cryptocurrency ecosystems and concentrating their wealth there too, yes? In fact it's even easier for wealthy people to speculate like this, because unlike poor people, wealthy people have disposable income. Cryptocurrency is a playground for the wealthy and the model for our futuristic serfdom dominated by a digital aristocracy (a class that will have almost perfect overlap with our modern aristocracy).
There is, its risk. They are rich and risk averse, we are poor and have nothing to lose except our tiny paychecks. Wealthy people have assets, poor people have time. There is very little freedom and social mobility left in our decaying system and crypto is all there is left.
There is of course the possibility that the current aristocracy will apropriate our tools for themselves (they sure are trying), but I see the potential for a much better world, one where democracy is restored and enhanced by technology.
Very weird to frame crypto as contrasting with "an open source culture that, at least aspirationally, built software around ideas of abundance, post-scarcity, universal access, and equality". Were the "older grizzled engineers" all literal communists or what?
Nothing weird about it. Crypto / web3 is about financializing everything. I.e, making everything about money.
The goal is to create a gamified world in which all human interactions are controlled via financial incentives.
The contrast is not communism, but rather the current gift economy model of open source, where people offer what they want out of intrinsic motivation rather than the desire to accumulate coins in a ledger.
This is the really icky part of crypto. It would be deeply ironic if crypto, which was supposedly created in opposition to traditional banking institutions, was able to open the door for those institutions to financialize every nook and cranny of our lives.
There's no shortage of icky parts of crypto. The whole idea from the outset was to enable an end-run around societal regulation of undesireables like money laundering, hiring hits, funding terrorism, human trafficking, tax evasion, and trading drugs & child pornography.
I don’t see what’s ironic about it. Those existing banking institutions may not prevail, but that’s irrelevant. The financial engineers behind crypto are not some different breed of human than those who work at Goldman Sachs. Their goal is nothing but financializing all interactions on the web. That is literally what web3 means.
Ah, Americans thinking that anything other than a rentier hellscape is literally communism. The early web and a lot of the US hacker culture was "anarcho-libertarian"; ownership matters a lot less when the answer to "who owns the means of production" is "everyone with a computer".
> A lot of us older grizzled engineers came from an open source culture that, at least aspirationally, built software around ideas of abundance, post-scarcity, universal access, and equality. We may not have always succeeded in achieving such goals, but these ideas informed much of what we now take for granted as the open source substrate that powers well … everything.
Lol. And how is that working out for you with the modern internet? I came from this period as well, and I believe in these ideals. But scarcity is a fact of the world, and it is going to exist on the internet whether we like it or not. The only choice we have is whether that scarcity exists in centralized servers and closed protocols, or whether it exists on top of open, decentralized ones. The "post scarcity internet" is a ship that sailed two decades ago, or more.
> Much ink has been spilled describing the technical internals of NFTs, and about as equal as much ink has been spent on obscurantism and decentralized woo woo to explain why the internals don’t matter. There is very little common ground on such debates because to the faithful the value of NFTs is a presuppositional truth instilled in them in the revelation of them making money off them. And simultaneously the non-believers can “right-click” or Torrent any NFT as a statement of the rejection of the ontological status of playing word games with the term “own”.
I agree with all the author's criticisms of NFTs. However, they all apply equally well to every piece of art ever created. A context in which I also agree with them. NFTs are no more or less stupid than the art market generally. I'm not particularly into art myself, but the art market has a very long history of existing and operating relatively smoothly. Any decent modern day painter could make you a passable copy of Starry Night, but that doesn't make the original any less valuable.
> There’s nothing new under the sun and the phenomenon of self-perpetuating faith-based economic schemes are well known to exist, there’s even a term: the Tinkerbell Effect. The phenomenon where things that are thought to exist only because people believe in them. The crypto acolytes really believe they can will into existence a whole new epistemé of value detached from the classical economics of the previous order. And that’s an idea that’s not without some historical precedence. The first book about virality of mania was written by the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay back in 1841 (See Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds), and to this day it remains the definitive reference on crypto mania because human nature remains largely invariant across the ages.
This was a totally valid criticism in 2013. Just as this criticism was valid of the internet in 2001. It is not valid today. Even if you believe crypto will never offer any transactional utility to anyone, assets like gold derive 99% of their value from their utility as hedges. Ultimately, that is not an economic truth, it is a social truth. People don't like that - they desperately want their assets to have some mathematical, provable value to them. But they don't. Some assets really are equal to their discounted future cash flows. Other assets, like gold and bitcoin, derive their value from inter-subjective social consensus. That does not make them illegitimate, any more than the meaning of words or handshake greetings are illegitimate.
> But at the same time, it must be understood that many of us in other intellectual traditions don’t look at the Tinkerbell Griftopia and see a promised land where we sit on a golden throne of monkey JPEGs. We see crypto as a mob of misguided fools repeating the ecological disaster of Easter Island on a global scale for the sole purpose of selling man-child themed Neopets. And some of us in the old guard think that’s not a future we want to see realized
It's amusing to me that people lean so hard into the environmental argument. This argument will likely continue to be valid for Bitcoin, but it won't be for Ethereum, and most of the stuff this guy is criticizing lives on top of Ethereum. Hitching your wagon to a contingent, ephemeral feature of the technology who's obsolescence is already planned seems like a major tactical error to me. But go ahead.
This dude really pumps out the rambly anti-crypto takes. Too bad HN upvotes are not a cryptocurrency or he'd be rich
Too bad being rich is such a temptation to people, or he'd probably not have to spend time writing these anti-crypto takes decrying the rampant greed that's undermining the technical foundations of internet culture.
A huge number of people are now paid to work full time on the cryptography, networking, and distributed systems challenges of creating decentralized tech, and open sourcing most of their work. This is paid for by cryptocurrency siphoning off a tiny sliver of transaction volume from the opaque, cronyist, closed source traditional financial system.
You want to go back to the old days where decentralized technologies were mostly created as a cute hobby by engineers getting rich off surveillance technology, or by phd students studying to get a job getting rich off surveillance technology?
It's unfortunate. Before he fell into this rut of anti-crypto screeds in the past year or so, there was some pretty interesting programming language material
His twitter feed instantly reveals how personal and petty his crusade has become: https://twitter.com/smdiehl
What it shows us is that the veneer of intellectual honesty displayed in the article is just a facade. The real goal is to gaslight and unperson people he dislikes. Sad!
Devil's Advocate: Do cryptocurrencies have _any_ legitimate use case?
I can see that some newer and non-mineable coins, Solana, Avalanche, Hedera, XRP, XLM, etc don't have mining issues that the big coins (BTC, ETH, Chia, etc) have.
Is what I am seeing from critics that there has been absolutely no progress whatsoever in this space?
Of course they do. The biggest one to me is micro transactions to me. Of course being required to pay capital gains on every transaction kills that.
It opens up ways to run ad free online services without thinking of dumb schemes like charging exhorbitant amounts of money for digital “stickers” and other crap. Like tipping with a small percentage going to the platform, charging tiny amount per min/hour of usage, tiny subscriptions. In game currencies/economies that use regular crypto.
But you can't do micro transactions on the blockchain - or rather, everyone can't do microtransactions on the blockchain because it's fundamentally anti-scalable and has to transmit every transaction to every full node.
(LN does not solve this unless you re-centralise on a common broker with whom you have a channel!)
This doesn't solve any of the other problems such as microfraud or friction either.
Are there _any_ true Scotsmen left?
It goes like this, I ask a question and an answer is given, not another question.
Reading this, nodded along mostly in agreement until the author attempted to compare the crypto community to "Scientology and their beliefs about alien thetans and e-meters"... come on, that's a dubious stretch in logic and with that one mean comment makes his points, as a whole, much less credible.
Have you read some of the stuff written by Bitcoin believers like MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor?
It is genuinely Scientology-level in its open defiance of physics wrapped into scientific-sounding jargon. Bitcoin is a form of energy storage, it's a new form of energy, etc.
From the article: "But truly that is the message of the Andersen folktale, that power begets the capacity to inspire delusion in the masses."
Does the "Andersen folktale" refer to Tinkerbell? Has nothing to do with the merit of the article or his argument, but Tinkerbell was a character invented by J.M. Barrie for Peter Pan and not a folktale at all.
I believe the author was referring to The Emperor's New Clothes, which he also mentioned in the article
Thanks. My reading comprehension has not powered up yet this morning.
It's hard to take takes like this seriously when they get the basic premise wrong. It's flowery and cute but its a lot of writing with very little substance.
It’s very hard to take seriously critiques that say a premise is wrong but are unable to say what that wrong premise actually is.
How did they get the premise wrong? What premise? If you're going to try undercutting a 1,000 word essay, you'll need to work to get there.
He thinks that being able to download every NFT's as a torrent is an own. But nobody cares about this.
Also, to me this is not a '1,000 word essay' but a 'carefully crafted attempt to gaslight people without any substantive claims'. Since I qualified it that way, there is no need to refute it. :)