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NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

seths.blog

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Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter that not everyone is a "economically rational agent". What matters is that there are some of them. People who will reinvest their profit into more mining, to profit more and reinvest it further. The people who are currently fabbing their own ASICs and setting up mining farms in places where electricity is cheap. These people left unchecked will, over time, suck up all spare electricity generation ca…

Once again I disagree.. these "some people" need to be the majority(of anyone participating in these currencies) for this mining to stay profitable.. Of course i may be mistaken about that part of the reasoning, but I'm fairly confident about it. Please let me know if you think it is an unfair assumption.

Majority is counted by hashing capability, not by head count. Is it not?

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#682

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.

> If you see them in person, you can see how the different brush strokes overlap and theoretically signify different things. You had me until this bit

Respecting nuance in other other people's perspectives, even if you don't see it, is a good skill to learn.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#683
post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NFTs are nonsense and just as much a pyramid scheme What scares me is that there are artists who I don't think understand how scammy this is. They've drunk the kool-aid and accepted the handwaving "you don't need to know how it works, just that it exists" explanations. Creators who wanted to make an honest dollar but ignorantly perpetuated the scam could find them themselves in hot water.

> Creators who wanted to make an honest dollar but ignorantly perpetuated the scam To be fair, if they're doing it honestly the value proposition is "Support the artist and get bragging rights for having done so!", which doesn't become a scam (or at least any more of scam, depending on your view of bragging rights) just because there's a scammy secondary market that the patron doesn't necessarily have to participate…

It seems like there should be a better way to "Support the artist and get bragging rights for having done so!" that doesn't involve the scammy other part. You see this with Patreon all the time where certain tiers get a shout-out.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#684
post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are overlooking the disadvantage of not verifying the prior hash, which you can't do until you can verify hashMerkleRoot, which you can't do until you have collected the entire block. If you skip verification, you open yourself up to bad actors feeding you a bogus header - and you only figure that out after being drip fed a bunch of transactions that don't match the merkle root. Erasure coding doesn't fix that. I…

> being drip fed a bunch of transactions Where are you getting ideas like this? How fast do you think internet connections are? Only in the context of bitcoin do people start thinking 250 byte transactions are somehow difficult to send over gigabit connections. The average bitcoin block is 900 -kilobytes- at most at 10 minutes on average. How is it that people have absorbed propaganda that makes them actually think t…

> Where are you getting ideas like this? How fast do you think internet connections are?

As fast as the packet source wants? The only way to defend against a slowloris DoS is by accounting for it at the application layer, which is both unusual and difficult - as DoS attacks are usually handled at the transport layer. In this case that could mean applying a deadline for the block announcement in its entirety - which means mandating a minimum connection speed, and classifying every connection that dips below that as an attack... so you better have a good SLA with your upstream network. Well, that is no problem for centralized operations... Guess what happens to cryptocurrencies that adopt massive 128MB+ blocks in order to increase their transaction throughput - they become incredibly fragile as the slightest amount of packet loss starts waves of peer bans.

> Who are these miners that are struggling to send out 900KB ?

Anyone who wants to handicap a competing pool by forcing them to either wait for the complete false block, or waste time hashing on a fake block header.

When are you going to admit that you haven't thought this through?

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#685
post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>If you skip verification, you open yourself up to bad actors feeding you a bogus header - and you only figure that out after being drip fed a bunch of transactions that don't match the merkle root. Malicious actors can't give a bogus header, because you can verify the bogus header doesn't have enough PoW. If the malicious actor does produce sufficient PoW for their bogus header, they are foregoing massive block rew…

> Malicious actors can't give a bogus header, because you can verify the bogus header doesn't have enough PoW. Ok, I guess you don't know how verification works. Here are the 19 steps: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_rules#.22block.22_messag... Step 4) "Block hash must satisfy claimed nBits proof of work" The bad actor has full control of that, he just has to make sure the fake header has enough leading 0s in pho…

What kind of a response is this? They said anyone can verify the proof of work and you are saying they can verify the proof of work. Where is the contradiction?

Verifying blocks is trivial. You aren't still saying that needing to receive 900KB is a big deal are you?

You seem to be acting like there is some sort of prediction that there will be a problem. Ethereum already produces blocks every 13 seconds at three times bitcoin's throughput.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#686
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rich people entrust their entire wealth to third parties to manage it for them. Why wouldn't they trust a third party to keep some ridiculous record of ownership?

Because the entire ethos of the cryptocurrency space is about dematerializing trust from large, complex networks of humans with various carrot/stick incentives keeping them honest to trust based on cryptography and game theory dynamics of open distributed systems that can't be successfully cheated without a massive accumulation of power.

What do you mean dematerializing trust, can you put an example? As far as I know, trust is not made of matter, I don't know how it could possibly be dematerialized.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read it, it’s an article from 2017 proclaiming bitcoin is worthless for a payment system while it is now 2021 and amount of value exchanged on bitcoin is more than ever. Author is clueless and the article is worth nothing.

> it’s an article from 2017 proclaiming bitcoin is worthless for a payment system It's clear you didn't even pretend to read it. Or understand all the problems listed. Payments is just a part of the first article. The sequel doesn't even talk about payments. > it is now 2021 and amount of value exchanged on bitcoin is more than ever. Amount of value exchanged on bitcoin !== it's useful for payments. Actual payments (…

> It's clear you didn't even pretend to read it. Or understand all the problems listed. Payments is just a part of the first article. The sequel doesn't even talk about payments.

it's clear you didn't even pretend reading my comments or understand the words i'm writing. we can be playing this game all day.

> Amount of value exchanged on bitcoin !== it's useful for payments. Actual payments (you know, for goods and services) are a very, very, very tiny fraction of exchanges.

since when you're the authority on what counts as useful and what counts as actual?

> The key feature of a new payment system is the confidence that if the goods aren’t as described you’ll get your money back

that might be the key feature in the payment system of your choice, but it's the anti-feature for people who find bitcoin valuable. finality of transactions is way more important and on top of a system with finality you can build all sorts of escrow services that offer money-back due to customer dissatisfaction and what not. without finality your payment system is worth shit.

> The government-backed banking system provides FDIC guarantees, reversibility of ACH, identity verification, audit standards, and an investigation system when things go wrong. Bitcoin, by design, has none of these things

again, all anti features. i don't want them in a system that handles my assets. thank you very much.

> In terms of micropayments, people enthuse that bitcoin transactions are free and instant. Actually, they take about eight minutes to clear and cost about four cents to process. this also shows how clueless you yourself are in anything bitcoin related. confirmation time is a function of hashrate fluctuations, not some inherent property of bitcoin that gets worse with time. and the article author is obviously clueless for even claiming nonsense like "people enthuse that bitcoin transactions are free and instant", his exposure to bitcoin is probably a single drunk talk in a bar.

and btw in payment channels payments are instant and essentially free and unlike visa and other payment processors, payment channels are completely independent and dont require centralized coordination, so i can already claim with all seriousness that bitcoin is able to process unlimited number of transactions per second.

read up on the topic before arguing.

PS I personally made an on chain payment today, the fee was less than $2, which is still great considering that micropayments were never supposed to be on chain to begin with. And yeah, fees today are higher than fees last year because Bitcoin is more expensive and fees are denominated in bitcoin, duh.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#688
post #518
post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let's say I buy a NTF $1000 and get a digital copy, what prevents me (barring legalities) to perfectly duplicate it and massively redistribute it (not the token, the distributed supposedly high quality file) for a fraction of $$$ and turn a profit The file is usually publicly accessible, why would anyone give you money for something they can just download?

Why do people pay extra for signed books? A signed copy is literally identical to a non-signed copy aside from the signature ink.

I'm not sure how that's relevant to the question of reselling stuff?

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#689
post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Creators who wanted to make an honest dollar but ignorantly perpetuated the scam To be fair, if they're doing it honestly the value proposition is "Support the artist and get bragging rights for having done so!", which doesn't become a scam (or at least any more of scam, depending on your view of bragging rights) just because there's a scammy secondary market that the patron doesn't necessarily have to participate…

It seems like there should be a better way to "Support the artist and get bragging rights for having done so!" that doesn't involve the scammy other part. You see this with Patreon all the time where certain tiers get a shout-out.

Oh certainly, and we should encourage such methods where practical. But if we're going to condemn people for using the same financial tools that can be (and are) also used for scams, I have some bad news about that global economy of yours...

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#690
post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The energy used to secure PoW networks is indeed wasteful. But just a heads-up, Ethereum is currently transitioning to Proof of Stake consensus mechanism which will reduce electricity costs by an order of magnitude.

How long and how often have the announce the transition yet?

Well Phase 0 is already live with a lot of people staking.. Don't pretend like it's never going to happen
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