Live data from Hacker News

NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

seths.blog

491–500 of 786 posts

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#491
If non-fungibility is just a constraint of current technology protocols, and these protocols could be extended in time to allow exchange of larger swathes of tokens of different degrees of dissimilarity then the only things stopping this at the moment would seem to be demand - is that right? I.e. if Joe owned a uniquely verifiable, exchangeable and trackable piece of code, and so did Mary, then both of these codes could be pooled on the same market no matter how they differed within the constraints allowed by the protocols for verification, exchange and tracking?

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#492
post #265
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was hilarious and well-written. I've become extremely alarmed at the number of completely non-technical people who don't know anything about how cryptocurrency works getting extremely into it via YouTube click holes. It's obvious that these NFTs are capitalizing on it. A guy I ran into at the hardware store today was talking to me and he didn't understand the concept of a cryptocurrency that has a stable value s…

Isn't it interesting though that the people who don't have the technical understanding of why most cryptocurrencies at the core are unsustainable, just as the housing market was in 2006 are still the ones making money on it? When betting in any market understanding people and psychology seems to be more important than understanding the product.

[deleted]

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#493

I don't quite get this post, it somehow seems to make a case FOR nfts and then try to make the point that these are not look likr stocks (which is rather obvious). The whole point of nfts is to create uniqueness among endlessly duplicatable media, and provide the possibility for digital art to be handled like physical art. Just like the Mona Lisa, you can look at endless photos of it without restriction, but only one…

The Mona Lisa is a physical "rivalrous" good, meaning if I own it, you cannot. Digital goods are "non-rivalrous", so although NFTs can give a psychological feeling of ownership, I wouldn't say they make digital goods rivalrous. I think digital NFTs only make sense in two ways: (1) psychological feelings of ownership, (2) perhaps a claim on something digital that _can_ be made rivalrous, for instance royalty streams.…

Digital ownership expressed through blockchain could certainly make it more difficult for others to own the good. This would be dependent on the configuration of the NFT, but if done this way it certainly would meet the definition of a rivalrous good.

Music that requires you to present a private key in order to play it would meet that configuration, for example.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#494

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 int…

Demand for energy efficiency improvements already exists. All PoW adds is a new form of demand designed to scale up to consume all energy efficiency improvements; every time energy prices fall miners are incentivised to increase the rate of mining (unless the block rewards or coin market price also falls) The Internet bubble was people making infrastructure available in the hope people would use it, not people conver…

> ...unless the block rewards or coin market price also falls

At least one of these is guaranteed to happen, so that kind of makes your argument moot.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#495

If Alice buys art from Bob, and that art goes up in value due to the open-market activity of anonymous [Carol?, ...], then Alice can donate that now expensive art to a digital museum for a tax write off. Where could Alice get the NFTs appraised? Is the open market activity sufficient? It's almost like the NFT system allows proles to do fancy tax write-offs like their bourgeoisie cousins.

NFT appraisal is a grey area if it is anything like the art market, and yes it can be used to defraud.

https://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-irs2mar02-story.html

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#496
post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we had it (AI), talking about dangers of having it, would be too late (as human intelligence cannot argue with god intelligence) It is simple, as ant cannot contain human, in the same way humans won't be able to contain AGI. Can it exist, yes it can - simply, can me and you think, yes. In a way we are "device", so therefore, it is possible to make intelligence similar and/or more powerful than our is.

Bro this made like no sense.

At first I thought it was generated by GPT-3, but then I realized GPT-3 generally generates coherent content.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#497
post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

>>When you blow up the transaction limit you physically centralize the verification process.

You could 500X the transaction throughput and running a full node would only require a 25 Mbps internet connection.

>>Bigger blocks propagate more slowly, and magnify the advantage of employing those kinds of undesirable behaviors.

Miners do not propagate blocks all at once. They use propagation protocols like compact blocks to only propagate the transactions not already in other nodes' mempools: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8922597

The transactions fill the mempool over the course of the entire on average 10 minute duration between blocks, meaning that by the time a block is discovered, other nodes already have almost all of the transactions in that block.

The 'validation free mining until the new block is fully propagated and validated' strategy further mitigates the competitive disadvantage miners face when receiving large blocks from other miners.

All-in-all, centralization concerns do not justify preventing Bitcoin blocks from growing to meet market demand up until they reach at least 500 MB (ie. 3.3 MB/s of transaction throughput). The current 1 MB - or 1.6 MB assuming full SegWit adoption - limit, which only allows for 2 KB/s of transaction throughput, is absurdly inadequate, and makes Bitcoin's current energy consumption absurdly wasteful.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#498

NFTs make perfect sense for representing a claim on things that can be used, like event tickets or in-game virtual goods. But as certificates layered on top of collectibles... I'm not so sure. With something like CryptoKitties, you can do something with the tokens (play a virtual pet game). But with something like CryptoPunks you're essentially paying for digital beanie babies, which are worse than real ones since an…

> You can brag about owning such-and-such an image, but only as long as enough other people desire images from that particular set. When a set's popularity wanes, so does your token's value, and your ability to show it off. And only as long as people recognize your NFT claim to ownership as even being valid. Other people may view that brag as being as sad as someone bragging about their land holdings on the moon: htt…

There's a difference if the author of the art is the one that minted the NFT.

It's like jack dorsey selling an NFT of the first tweet compared with any random person trying to do the same.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#500
post #244

NFTs make perfect sense for representing a claim on things that can be used, like event tickets or in-game virtual goods. But as certificates layered on top of collectibles... I'm not so sure. With something like CryptoKitties, you can do something with the tokens (play a virtual pet game). But with something like CryptoPunks you're essentially paying for digital beanie babies, which are worse than real ones since an…

> You can brag about owning such-and-such an image [...] How? You don’t own a (digital) image. You own a token that references an image. Everyone else can view the image and send it to their friends. But you have some token allegedly signed by the author of the image — who cares?

It's like owning a celebrity's autograph. Some people do care, a lot.
Post reply on HN