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NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

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Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#201

Post by Animats »

tal8d wrote: post #104

It is odd, I've been involved in the cryptocurrency scene from the beginning, and I've seen the whole "Bitcoin kills Mother Gaia" talking point pop up every couple of years - but I've never seen such prolonged parroting as this last cycle. It is a silly complaint, because it never considers the wastefulness of the status quo. But it is an interesting method of attack, trying to conceal the fact that it is a call for…

I've never seen such prolonged parroting as this last cycle.

The scale of the thing is getting out of hand. Cryptocurrency mining is eating up power on the scale of a small country, a sizable fraction of GPU manufacturing capacity, and a noticeable fraction of wafer fab capacity.

This has some parallels in how Spain went broke mining gold in the Americas in the 1500s. Expeditions went to the New World and gold came back. They were rich! Well, no. They had only created inflation by creating a gold glut. At a much higher operating cost than printing money, too, because it took ships and armies to make this happen.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#202

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

timoth3y wrote: post #199
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #107

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

This is called "Demand Response" and it's an important part of grid management. For example a factory will agree to decrease consumption when asked in exchange for lower rates. Too much power is usually handled in the generation side by incentivize producers to scale back generation or even paying to have them take a plant offline. For a bitcoin mining operation, I suspect it would not be profitable to have all that…

I was thinking that if you built for peak load, you could reduce the idle time to four hours or so a day.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#203

Post by dmitriid »

TheColorYellow wrote: post #94

Pretty bad take on NFTs. There are numerous configurations, networks, and commercial structures that can be created for NFT offerings that can mitigate "problems" described in the OP and accommodate for different tradeoffs. A simple retort would point to the many alternative NFT networks that don't use POW-based consensus algorithms or the NFT offerings that enable value add offerings very differently than purchasing…

> There are numerous configurations, networks, and commercial structures that can be created for NFT offerings that can mitigate "problems" described in the OP and accommodate for different tradeoffs.

Ah, yes. The goid old "might", the adage as old as the whole blockchain itself.

Translation: "will painstakingly re-invent all the attributes of what real world needs, and already has, and doesn't need blockchain in the least".

More eloquently put in these articles: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-c...

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#204

Post by paulmd »

tal8d wrote: post #135
arcticbull wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a dead easy argument to debunk. If each visa payment used 600kWh like a Bitcoin transaction visa alone would consume 3x as much power as the entire world generates and produce 100% of the worlds ewaste. So no, the status quo is orders of magnitude more efficient on a unit basis by definition.

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 :)

virtually all of those services will still have to exist under crypto. Regulatory frameworks will still exist, centralized entities will provide lightning channels to small-fry actors, firms will still host servers to execute trades based on the network, etc.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#205

Post by supermatt »

elefanten wrote: post #190
arnarbi wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any owner can sign as many receipts of sale as they want.

What stops an original owner (of the to-be-digitized asset) from selling an NFT on the same thing multiple times? Perhaps on multiple different platforms?

Nothing, but they can only sign the "first" once

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#206

Post by root_axis »

nandhinianand wrote: post #167
root_axis wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mi…

Why do you disagree? If I profit X per kWh why wouldn't I burn as many kWhs as I can?

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#207

Post by prox »

timoth3y wrote: post #199
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #107

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

This is called "Demand Response" and it's an important part of grid management. For example a factory will agree to decrease consumption when asked in exchange for lower rates. Too much power is usually handled in the generation side by incentivize producers to scale back generation or even paying to have them take a plant offline. For a bitcoin mining operation, I suspect it would not be profitable to have all that…

Another way to change this : Could crypto not make useful calculations instead of useless calculations? Like protein folding for example?

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#208

Post by j4yav »

dingaling wrote: post #124
TheDong wrote: 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…

How would you prove to a blockchain that a particular serial number really is owned by you, or was lost, or all the other things that can happen that don’t occur on the blockchain? Aren’t you sort of back to needing the cooperation of lots of different entities globally, and some kind of authority equivalent to the third party database maintainer to ensure the data makes sense?

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#209

Post by exporectomy »

purple_ferret wrote: post #36
ajiang wrote: post #23

Regardless of what you think of NFTs, you have to recognize that the author's only counterargument against NFTs is that they're bad for the "rest of us" due to externalities that everyone else has to pay. The "rest of us" don't pay for the electricity use. The ETH miners are paying for it directly. And creators and buyers are paying for it indirectly through ETH usage. It isn't an externality. That's like saying the…

> you have to recognize that the author's only counterargument against NFTs is that they're bad for the "rest of us No, I think he makes a valid point that they're intentionally misleading and a scheme to sucker someone out of money. Let's look at Jack Dorsey's 'minted' first tweet.[0] This is in no way gives to exclusivity to 'owning' this tweet. It literally is just 'owning' the rights to 'Valuable's' NFT of this t…

Same for art though. You don't own a copyright. You own only the bragging right as well as the useless physical canvas and paint. All artful beauty it has can be copied much more cheaply than the original painting's price.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#210

Post by dnpp123 »

klipt wrote: post #148
anonporridge wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 artist can sign a message including your public key. The message is verifiable using the artist's public key. If other people copy it, they're just copying the proof that it belongs to you. If you want to sell it to someone else, you sign a message saying you give it to them and so on, forming a "chain" of signed transactions.

Congratulations, you just invented an inefficient PoS for a single use case!
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