Live data from Hacker News

NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

seths.blog

161–170 of 786 posts

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#161

NFTs, the new way to spin a copyright or incorporate into DRMs, but since it pumps and is bullish for crypto, all cool kids are lovin it.

This is a complete misunderstanding of what an NFT does. The content isn't protected by the NFT, ownership is.

It’s like owning a shitcoin with tokenomics of 1 coin premined, no future coins and zero decimal places.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#162
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol, you seem to be forgetting every other system related to and directly supporting payment networks, clearinghouses, etc... oh, and all the regulatory frameworks. And the FED :)

I’m not. I’m saying by scaling just one small corner to bitcoins inefficiency it cannot be true as it would use 3x the worlds power supply. It cannot be true by induction. If we scaled those aspects up too we’d be taking hundreds or thousands of times more power than the world generates. By doing that id actually be making my argument stronger.

I wasn't kidding when I said "parroting". You are regurgitating a number derived from lazy thinking.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21289486

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One random idea I had was to use cryptomining to “soak up” excess power: so, for example, you could build nuclear out to meet peak load and then set up mining rigs to use the difference between peak and the current load, subsidizing the cost of power production. It’s probably a bad idea for other reasons, but it’s one way to reduce the environmental impact of PoW

You can reduce the energy output of a nuclear reactor both through the moderation of the fission reaction (via control rods, coolant temperature variation, neutron poisoning, etc), and through moderation of the electrical generator turbine (slowing down the turbine speed, venting steam, etc). There is no such thing as "excess power" for crytomining. Even if there was then that energy could just be stored using batter…

> There is no such thing as "excess power" for crytomining.

I was thinking the idea seemed to have some validity.. For ex: storage of solar/wind-powered is critical and the current inefficiencies and batteries rely on lithium and alternatives are still in research.(http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/#moving-storage) ..

so in theory there's a system that can be built around the excess energy(of renewable systems) + crypto mining as a incentive for taking up renewable energy setups.(Of course this cannot convert the mined stuff back to energy so it's a one-way stuff at best and has it's own cons and pros).

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#164

NFT: non-fungible token. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fungible_token Expand your acronyms, peeps.

NFTs have been the wildest mania to sweep the internet in the last three weeks. If you're not watching, well, check it out.

People are paying millions of dollars for artwork that doesn't exist.

The bid for Jack Dorsey's "first tweet" is over two million dollars. (What does that even mean?!)

Sure, I suppose you could link ownership of intellectual property or actual goods to NFTs, but what's the benefit? Who enforces it? And what happens when crypto is broken and people can't prove they owned the private keys?

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One random idea I had was to use cryptomining to “soak up” excess power: so, for example, you could build nuclear out to meet peak load and then set up mining rigs to use the difference between peak and the current load, subsidizing the cost of power production. It’s probably a bad idea for other reasons, but it’s one way to reduce the environmental impact of PoW

You can reduce the energy output of a nuclear reactor both through the moderation of the fission reaction (via control rods, coolant temperature variation, neutron poisoning, etc), and through moderation of the electrical generator turbine (slowing down the turbine speed, venting steam, etc). There is no such thing as "excess power" for crytomining. Even if there was then that energy could just be stored using batter…

What I’ve generally heard about nuclear and the grid in general is that it’s cost-ineffective to build out generation capacity to meet peak demand and that nuclear power is relatively bad at meeting fluctuations in demand. Sure, you could use batteries or whatever to store/use the power that the grid currently doesn’t need. You could also build aluminum processing plants or arc furnaces or whatever. Cryptocurrencies would be interesting because the mined cryptocurrency could used to reduce rates to consumers.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#166
The articles is to simplistic and the author doesn’t understand the technology.

The author claims it’s easier to mint an NFT than a currency...for all intents and purposes it’s no different to mint a erc20 token vs erc721, so the we shouldn’t pretend NFTs are somehow the lowest common denominator while “alternative currencies” are inherently complex. A shit coin is a shit going whether it represents a digital image or nothing at all other than a store of value people collectively agree on.

What everyone ignores is that not all NFTs can be described as representing a jpeg (the digital baseball card). sure many are that, but others actually include a transfer of the intellectual property they represent. Others have a “public” representation but have embedded files accessible only to the owner. Others represent ownership of digital items that can be used in various DApps across the ethereum blockchain.

And even assuming all NFTs were just digital baseball cards, if baseball cards were your thing, then I think you could acknowledge how valuable it is to be able to trace every baseball card that exists and otherwise be connected to a marketplace that include the ability to buy/trade/sell directly with other persons without a centralized authority regulating those transactions.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t necessarily true: if the subsidies spread clean power generation then the percentage of miners that have bad environmental impacts will decrease over time. Also, since this would make relatively clean power sources cheaper, it would help phase out fossil generation capacity.

They're not "subsidies", they're just profits earned from selling what was mined, nothing useful happened, it simply makes the blockchain needlessly more expensive for everyone because a nuclear power plant is dumping hashing power into the network. Green energy doesn't change the fundamental nature of PoW, it inevitably expands to consume all available energy because the more energy you can burn the more money you c…

I disagree with the last part about direct proportionality between energy and money. But my real wonder is if we can use this hashed/mined out coins for something that is actually useful socially.(even if it is a transaction of services anonymously.) I keep wondering if we can create a crypto currency + IOT devices + energy tracking system that can value the coins you have based on the energy sources that fed into mining it. But it feels so complex that I am not optimistic about creating such a thing..

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#168
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol, you seem to be forgetting every other system related to and directly supporting payment networks, clearinghouses, etc... oh, and all the regulatory frameworks. And the FED :)

I’m not. I’m saying by scaling just one small corner to bitcoins inefficiency it cannot be true as it would use 3x the worlds power supply. It cannot be true by induction. If we scaled those aspects up too we’d be taking hundreds or thousands of times more power than the world generates. By doing that id actually be making my argument stronger.

The only misconception is you can’t scale Bitcoin to visa without a hard or soft fork.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#169
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bikes have unique serial numbers. https://bikeindex.org runs a free website to let you lookup serial numbers and mark them as stolen, and there's also various other regional websites that do a similar sort of thing. If you want to buy a bike, make sure it has a serial number (and if the number was filed off, then yes it was probably stolen), and look it up on the index. How would an NFT be better than the above datab…

> How would an NFT be better than the above database in any way? It wouldn't depend on the benevolence of a third-party absorbing the cost of running the index. It would be geographically and culturally agnostic. Zoom out here and notice how little of the World's population is involved: https://map.bikewise.org/#0/84/-77 It would be globally unique and would not require the cooperation of manufacturers. Neither of my…

No instead it would foist that externality on the entire world in the form of carbon emissions and depend on the highly uncertain future value of a cryptocurrency.

And it would still require a third party to benevolently run an app to search and make sense of the data from the ledger, and also to verify that the data inserted was actually real and not poisoning the db.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, there’s an idea, just generate a random string, bundle it with the artwork and sign the whole damn thing using good old RSA. Achieves the exact same goal, uses a fraction of energy and no fancy tech.

Uh...no? These can trivially be copied (double spent), which means they're just as scarce as any digital data. Valueless without some significant proof of violence and hyper censorship ability enforcing copyright protection. The primary revolution of bitcoin was the invention of self enforcing digital scarcity.

The ownership of the NFT itself is verified through public-key cryptography, the blockchain adds nothing of value.
Post reply on HN