Let people do whatever the F they wanna do with their money. If they lose it, shrug , it’s their money. I hate this idea of people telling other people what to do or what’s good for them.
Just as we ban or should ban completely rigged televised gambling games, we should ban pyramid schemes such as bitcoin. It's not because people like the rush and addiction of gambling that we should just leave it be. People are being taken advantage of and doing nothing about it is immoral.
To advance as a human species, there needs to be an environment of equal opportunities (not equal outcomes) where everyone can lead a fruitful and satisfying life, devoid of pyramid schemes preying on the hopes of someday making it. In that sense, cryptocurrencies are not helping but exacerbating the problem.
So they not only destroyed art, but also wasted energy on creating the NFT, adding to global warming. If there's anything that's not absolute evil in all that, I fail to see it.
Please, stop calling any non-essential use of energy that you're looking to smear, "evil". Are movies, which consume energy in their production and consumption, also evil? Video games? No, because you personally see the entertainment they provide as redeeming? If people want to expend their own resources on NFTs, that's entirely their right to do so, and calling it evil because the process consumed energy is absurd.…
This is basically a "what about" argument but in this case it does illustrate something valid. There are lots of things that benefit a segment of people and harm everyone. One I happen to notice regularly because I don't have one, is cars. They not only contribute massively to climate change; they also directly kill ~35,000 people annually in the US. Yet cars are beloved, sacred, unassailable to a majority of Americans. Are those people evil? No one alive can throw the word evil around without implicating oneself. The whole concept is just a religious overlay designed to try and mitigate a bunch of much older and ubiquitous human behaviors that suddenly became disruptive after we took up agriculture and settled in villages. (Which by the way, was itself "evil" in that it enabled a few to feed themselves, by taking land from "everyone" or at least all hunter-gatherers, and destroying the natural habitat that the land contained.)
It’s not anything like diamonds - diamond prices have slowly and consistently increased over the last 100 years and doesn’t see the crazy 20-30% swings in weekly prices that NFTs and even BTC sees. It’s considered a safe investment with a solid store or value. And dismissing them as “only useful for grinders” dismisses their value in jewelry. If millions find joy in having diamonds in their jewelry then I’d say there…
> If millions find joy in having diamonds in their jewelry then I’d say there’s plenty of use for them. If millions find joy in having BTC in their digital wallet then I’d say there’s plenty of use for them. The only reason diamond prices haven't cratered is because of a company propping them up.
Which company is that?? You're probably referring to DeBeers, but your diamond knowledge is like 30 years behind the curve if this is the case. DeBeers does not have a diamond monopoly! This is a myth recycled over and over on the internet from people making some fake moral anti-diamond stance. DeBeers has less than a 30% market share, and aren't even the #1 producer of diamonds any longer.
The real reason diamonds haven't cratered is because they're a commodity that's always in demand - as long as people want to buy them they won't crater.
Is it? The NBA is selling "clips" of Basketball plays. They make clear in the terms of the sale that the buyer does not have any rights to the video after buying the NFT. The NBA can do whatever it wants with the actual video including selling it again
Is it not the same for physical basketball cards? I doubt you own the rights to the photograph or even the stats on the card.
Blockchain doesn’t need to make it impossible to counterfeit real-world items to be useful, it just needs to reduce counterfeiting levels by reducing the profitability. It’s more than capable of doing that. If you can only sell at most one counterfeit item per authentic item, that’s already a multi-trillion dollar innovation.
I still can't see how a blockchain here would do something that a database wouldn't. A DB of authentic serial numbers with a way to mark them as claimed is all you need. If your new widget's serial is already marked as claimed on the manufacturer's website then you most likely have a counterfeit, no blockchain necessary.
Well, all you need is an immutable write-only (edit: append-only) database. Which is the one thing a blockchain actually is.
Particularly the "Number Go Up" section, which shows that the buyer also runs (and owns a majority of) a crypto token called "B20", which curiously enough, Beeple also has a 2% stake in.
It's stupid at face value. No pyramid required. You cannot intrinsically link real world items to tokens. The source of truth is the real world, not the token. Add an unlimited supply of unique things, and how could anyone expect to make money from this?
I will happily ignore NFTs, but look at money itself - it's a token too. It was supposed to represent and be coupled to real-world productive activity, but clearly there are many cases where the two have become decoupled. A price can be below the intrinsic worth of the item, and can be almost arbitrarily high. The source of truth is supposedly the item, the productive work that went into it, but in a heavily financialized economy, a lot of people make more money from mere price fluctuations than from productive activity.
It's stupid at face value. No pyramid required. You cannot intrinsically link real world items to tokens. The source of truth is the real world, not the token. Add an unlimited supply of unique things, and how could anyone expect to make money from this?
But NFTs can also be for digital items, which is where I was first introduced to them - like cryptokitties and other games.
In games, you have the thing of value itself. It’s not an NFT just because it’s digital.
I still can't see how a blockchain here would do something that a database wouldn't. A DB of authentic serial numbers with a way to mark them as claimed is all you need. If your new widget's serial is already marked as claimed on the manufacturer's website then you most likely have a counterfeit, no blockchain necessary.
Well, all you need is an immutable write-only (edit: append-only) database. Which is the one thing a blockchain actually is.
I think you mean append only. Blockchains are immutable thus not writeable
Someone once said that there's a sucker born every minute. It doesn't matter who said it but if you look back at the time period when it could've been said by the person it was initially attributed to, PT Barnum, then you have an approximate period between 1835 when he began his sideshow of oddities tour and 1850 when he shifted focus to theaters and a new audience. If during that time period it was true that there w…
Who is the sucker? The one who bought bitcoin years ago, or the one that didn't? Because I'm confused now. I guess it's always "the other person" that is the sucker, as long as you can convince yourself of this fact.
Why did you ask me this question if you already knew the answer?