Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WallStreetBets members adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 321 posts

Re: WallStreetBets members adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days

#151

Post by doomslice »

IgorPartola wrote: post #136
groby_b wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh... Selling a single token? 8.7MWh[1] That's slightly less than the average US household consumes in a year. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/nfts-hot-effect-earth-climate/

Has there been any movement in the crypto world (that isn’t just creating new coins) towards switching algorithms such that BTC et al don’t use proof of work anymore?

Stellar (https://stellar.org/) uses a novel Byzantine agreement protocol (https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol?lo...) which practically eliminates it in comparison.

It is also insanely cheap (like $1... and even that is just "held" in the account and can be released later) to "mint" a new coin and thus is practically perfect for NFTs.

It's seen as sort of a joke in the crypto world by those who are only trying to make a buck (price of XLM, used for paying transaction fees, is relatively stable compared to others) but I think it's one of the few cryptos out there that has a chance of making a real difference in the world long term.

Re: WallStreetBets members adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days

#152

Post by nerdponx »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #116
tudorw wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but I cannot buy, sell and speculate with that.

Well you can put the tweet up for sale or auction on eBay. Just like with NFTs, you wouldn’t actually be transferring the underlying asset, nor would the tweet actually be hosted within eBay (or an NFT chain) for some kind of archival purpose, nothing stops you from selling it again on Amazon or Craigslist or any other marketplace (or another NFT). If Amazon, EBay, or the company behind the NFT decides to close up sh…

I don't believe this at all.

If Jack Dorsey sold the "rights" to the first ever tweet, I'm confident someone would pay at least $1 million for it, even without an NFT involved.

The fact that there's an NFT involved makes it more valuable, because now the buyer can show off in more ways than one. But that's it.

There have always been, and always will be, rich people with more money than sense, who want to demonstrate their great wealth and worldliness by buying silly stuff to show off with.

Re: WallStreetBets members adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days

#153

Post by nonameiguess »

BelleOfTheBall wrote: post #99
dmos62 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the global population of mountain gorillas is 1,063 Who will be producing the rest of the gorillas?

When a momma gorilla and a papa gorilla love each other very much... (and significant resources are dedicated to keeping them safe, content and ready to procreate, which is what I'm assuming Reddit has achieved.)

Okay, I laughed at this, but unfortunately gorilla mating is quite a bit more brutal than this, more like an aspiring young alpha discovers the last alpha has grown old and weak, murders him, then murders all of the children as well, enslaves the gorilla women, and periodically rapes them. All he really offers in return is he'll keep other up and comers from murdering their new babies until he also grows too old and weak.

But yeah, basically it's love.

Re: WallStreetBets members adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days

#154

Post by nonameiguess »

beervirus wrote: post #140
TeMPOraL wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if the evil side can exploit this phenomenon to great success (e.g. drone strikes allowing to kill people halfway across the world, and making it feel like playing a video game from 1990s), why can't the good side? We can despair about the nature of man all we want, but if in the meantime, we can get rich people here to spend a lot of money on helping people far away, that's still a huge net benefit for the wor…

Is it really evil to use drones to kill evil people?

I'm not personally against usage of drones in some totally general way, but we should keep in mind why the Bush to Obama shift was made. Aside from the technology simply maturing and growing more viable, we went away from having teams of special operators apprehend terrorism suspects in surgical snatch and grab operations and toward just murdering them with drones for two basic reasons.

One, surgical snatch and grab operations sometimes result in high profile failures where US operators are themselves captured or die in the process, which becomes a huge local media sensation. Two, when you arrest people, you run into the issue of what to do with them. Hence, all of the continuing problems with Guantanamo. Do you give them rights? Transfer them to regular prisons? Release them? Hold an actual trial at some point? We still haven't figured it out, and the easiest answer is just stop arresting people and kill them instead.

I leave it to you to decide which of the two options is more ethical, but the reasons we did it have nothing to do with ethics. And drones are inherently less precise and also kill whoever happens to be nearby a lot more often than Seal Team Six.

Re: WallStreetBets members adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days

#155

Post by dieortin »

doomslice wrote: post #151
IgorPartola wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has there been any movement in the crypto world (that isn’t just creating new coins) towards switching algorithms such that BTC et al don’t use proof of work anymore?

Stellar ( https://stellar.org/ ) uses a novel Byzantine agreement protocol ( https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol?lo... ) which practically eliminates it in comparison. It is also insanely cheap (like $1... and even that is just "held" in the account and can be released later) to "mint" a new coin and thus is practically perfect for NFTs. It's seen as sort of a joke in the crypto world by those w…

Stellar is centralized though, so it completely misses the point.

Re: WallStreetBets members adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days

#156

Post by casefields »

bionoid wrote: post #47
habosa wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit has always been a place where you can find spontaneous generosity with a fun twist. Just one example: there was a popular sub many years ago called "randomactsofpizza" where Redditors would send pizza to other Redditors who were hungry or down on their luck. I don't know why we should assume Redditors are less charitable than people at large when if anything they've demonstrated otherwise.

The subreddit is /r/Random_Acts_Of_Pizza and still in operation. /r/RandomActsOfPizza was a copycat started with the explicit purpose of bartering nudes for pizza (forbidden in the original). It was later shut down when it turned out it was run by a scammer.

Sounds like OnlyFans with extra steps. You can have a brilliant idea but if you don't have the right PR, the icky factor will turn people off.

Re: WallStreetBets members adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days

#157

Post by TeMPOraL »

beervirus wrote: post #140
TeMPOraL wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if the evil side can exploit this phenomenon to great success (e.g. drone strikes allowing to kill people halfway across the world, and making it feel like playing a video game from 1990s), why can't the good side? We can despair about the nature of man all we want, but if in the meantime, we can get rich people here to spend a lot of money on helping people far away, that's still a huge net benefit for the wor…

Is it really evil to use drones to kill evil people?

That's a specialized version of the question, is it really evil to kill evil people? But it's also a bit off-topic; the more important one is, are only evil people getting killed by drone strikes executed by people who (claim to) try to kill only evil people? The answer to that is a resounding no. We can debate the specifics of this, but it wasn't my point.

My point was, the concept of layers of indirection making perpetrating evil/immoral acts easier is a well-recognized one[0], and drone strikes are the usual example - the killer has no personal risk, and the act itself involves operating video game controllers while watching a low-resolution image of distant events. And, for many practical reasons, this has been embraced by the military. Cheaper, less trauma for soldiers, less bad press, less likely the soldier will hesitate or spare the lives of their targets.

And thus I'm asking: if that works so well for killing, and there isn't a big pushback against this[1], then why criticize the case where the similar levels of detachment are making people more likely to do good deeds? If people are more likely to donate to good causes further away than they are to those close to them, then why not be just happy that more people are donating to good causes?

--

[0] - It most likely has a formal name in psychology, but I'm not aware of it.

[1] - There is some pushback, but I don't see it rising to the level actually influencing any decision-making in the US.

Re: WallStreetBets members adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days

#158

Post by beaconstudios »

dmingod666 wrote: post #68
edoloughlin wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone get busy wrapping endangered species as NFT's and direct the funds accordingly' Can't help but wonder how much habitat is destroyed by the generation of a token.

Humans - that is problem number one. Like agent smith said in the Matrix. "Human beings are a disease, a cancer on this planet.." - Advocating for this cure will solve all the problems..

The whole reason we care about the environment is so we can keep living in it. What should we do instead, leave the turtles to inherit the earth and yeet ourselves into the sun?

Re: WallStreetBets members adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days

#159

Post by elliekelly »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #134
scotty79 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NFT doesen't work like that. After minting it has nothing to do with the initial cause. It could work if they released and auctioned new NFT for each gorilla periodically.

But the person who the money/etherium is sent to could be the charity, no? As in, people donate their digital art or whatever to a charity and the charity auctions off the NFTs to raise money. That’s the way real life charity fundraisers sometimes work: you donate a physical object and they sell it to raise money. The benefit over you selling at and donating the money is that you don’t have to deal with selling it. T…

> The usage of NFTs here would be to take advantage of the mass hysteria(?) surrounding them to drum up the price.

You said the quiet part out loud!

Re: WallStreetBets members adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days

#160

Post by marcosdumay »

skohan wrote: post #28
make3 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also they don't adopt them, they fund their caretaking. this title is pretty poor.

"adoption" is the terminology used by the foundation, and symbolic adoption is a known quantity in this type of operation so I don't have a problem with it. However referring to wallstreet bets users as "investors" does seem like a bit of a misnomer...

My only issue is that "Reddit investors" means people that invest on Reddit, while the article is about people that speculate with stocks (kinda ok to call them investors) and use Reddit.

Still, I don't know how to improve the headline.

Post reply on HN