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NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

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Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#411

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

For a more technical definition following the citations:

> NFTs are distinguishable and you must track the ownership of each one separately.

> The pair (contract address, uint256 tokenId) will then be a globally unique and fully-qualified identifier for a specific asset on an Ethereum chain.

https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#412
Two misconceptions in this article:

1) proof of work is not the only way to do blockchains. You can do NFTs on e.g. Stellar or soon on Ethereum 2.0 and it would make sense to do that as it would be cheap to transact. That is in fact the main motivation to create ethereum 2.0: transacting needs to become cheaper. Some companies seem to have some success tokenizing e.g. supply chains, energy markets, art ownership changes, etc. The resulting tokens are typically not intended for speculative trading. Proof of stake solutions are optimal for this since making money of the transactions is not a goal here typically.

2) supply can actually be constrained quite easily. E.g. on Stellar you would issue a limited supply of whatever token from an issuing account (stellar tokens are identified by their issuing account) and then lock that account forever by increasing the account thresholds to be higher than the weight of the account signers (stellar supports multi sig accounts). That effectively is the last transaction that can ever happen on that account. No more tokens can be issued from then on. On ethereum, you'd be able to do something similar with smart contracts. I use stellar as an example, because I've used it to create a token. Creating tokens on Stellar is super easy and requires no programming. An NFT is basically a token with a supply of 1.

NFTs make sense in any kind of scenario where a group of stakeholders wants to agree on who owns what without relying on a trusted third party like a bank or government agency. If it's cheap and easy to use them; why not use them?

You can get your own stellar account by putting in enough xlm to cover the base fees. About 5 XLM should be enough to create a handful of accounts + trustlines that you would neeed to create your own token. Stellar laboratory provides you all the tools to do this if you want to practice this on their testnet: https://laboratory.stellar.org/#account-creator?network=test. You click your own token together in a few minutes. Simply switch to the mainnet to do it for real. If you are serious about this, the legal work is going to be most of the effort.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a way we are "device", so therefore, it is possible to make intelligence similar and/or more powerful than our is. I mean, yes, I can have a child and raise her to be smarter than me, but I don't really think that's what you have in mind. The strong AGI proponents always resort to hand-waving and dubious analogies. There's no reason to think that building ever-larger ML models will produce an intelligence capabl…

I am just simply stating, if it (bionic intelligence) already exist - another (artificial) can be built. I am not saying anything about existing models, ways or methods, just that if exist - it is possible to build one "again" so to say.

I still don't think we've proven that at all. Unless you believe in god, then no one has ever "built" an intelligence. The human brain is the result of millions of years of evolutionary pressures.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most contemporary art has a lot more effort put into it than you think. It’s perfectly okay to not value that effort, but things like those “black squares” or whatever actually aren’t just that. If you see them in person, you can see how the different brush strokes overlap and theoretically signify different things.

The example you're using isn't contemporary, it's over a century old, and it's a design for a stage curtain. It's not valuable for the effort put in * (it's literally just a solid black painted square), it's valuable because of the point in time it represents w/r/t art history * edit for clarity: what would be commonly considered technical artistic effort, although a large % of graphic designers would disagree with t…

Just to expand on that, I love Malevich as an artist. I've travelled specifically to see exhibitions of his and his contemporaries' works. If I had large amounts of spare cash and I were in a position to buy an original, I probably would. From an artistic pov, I feel the ideas he introduced are extremely important. From a technical pov, I think his colour and composition are superb. From a conceptual pov his art is a pretty laser-sharp distillation of the ideas he had regarding what art means or can mean. From a personal, professional point of view, I'm trained as a designer, and worked as a designer and illustrator. The tenets of constructivism and suprematism have been formational to much of my approach to design.

So, it's not that being technically spectacular in some arbitrary "really accurately painted or drawn picture of reality, like a photo" way makes art valuable (photography effectively destroyed that a long time ago, sorry!). It's that it has some special significance. If that significance is more than personal, as in it has some historical/cultural significance, then it becomes valuable. There's no point to it, it's art. So w/r/t original subject, above reasons make me think twice about any knee-jerk cynicism I have toward it (which I do have, I just have to have an open mind)

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#416
This repeats the same mistaken belief that "energy is precious". In reality, there's lots of energy that is either worthless or has negative value. There currently is no economical solution for storing this energy and it's the biggest impediment for renewable energy.

Many bubbles have left lasting improvements to infrastructure. The railroad bubble brought railroads. The telegraph bubble wired up the country. The internet bubble made internet connectivity mainstream.

I believe that proof-of-work can bring lasting improvements to both energy infrastructure and semiconductor processes that are unaccounted for in all the naive calculations that make for a good headline.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#417

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.

Bitcoin's transaction throughput is independent of its energy consumption. If its block size limit was raised to allow Visa-scale transaction throughput, its per transaction energy cost would be 1/1000ths what it is now. Bitcoin Cash forks Bitcoin to provide a block size limit that allows these kinds of throughput levels, while Ethereum enables both sophisticated transaction compression methods and layer 2 models, th…

When you blow up the transaction limit you physically centralize the verification process. This is why you'd see miners gamble with sitting on a solved block and secretly beginning the next search, with a few seconds of head start, before announcing to the network, or skipping the inclusion of any transactions: because fractions of a second make a big difference. Bigger blocks propagate more slowly, and magnify the advantage of employing those kinds of undesirable behaviors. This is why HFT boxes end up as physically close to Wall Street as possible. This is also why bcash got so much early support from Chinese miners.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#419
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But with something like CryptoPunks you're essentially paying for digital beanie babies, which are worse than real ones since anyone can display and enjoy the image you paid for. It seems like the obvious counterpoint is that perhaps all of these “collectible” scarce physical things which are bought and sold for huge amounts of money (art, coins, relics, etc.) are in fact being used simply as a way to identify a un…

Also if anything is a digital beanie baby then so is Bitcoin, what’s the difference?

It is permissionless. You can transfer BTC without a bank or eBay or the postal service being involved. It is the best way to buy LSD from a stranger. So it has some value because of that. Similar to rare wine, most of the price is due today to speculation and asset diversification, and rich hobbiests.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#420
The fact we’re so far into crypto and NFTs that this famous bloggers take is “it’s bad for the environment” should be the signal he’s past giving relevant takes.

This would have been the take to have in the first months of Bitcoin.

A boomer can’t comprehend the actions of the generation where house prices rocketed and their salaries stayed the same. They’re going to do whatever it takes to build wealth and gambles like crypto, gamestop, nft are now the norm, anyone over 30 today realizes building savings and living within your means is now a waste of time as they still struggle to afford houses.

When it comes down to it “but the environment...” isn’t going to put anyone off, the environmental impact of AirPods never put anyone off the convenience of no cable so why would this?

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