161–170 of 213 posts
Has Mr. Graham done an honest calculation of how many lives will be lost to the environmental impacts of NFTs if they become mainstream?
Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake. Most other chains use some form of proof-of-stake.
It's not like these projects are unaware of your criticisms, nor have they stood still since you stopped paying attention in 2017.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People have been able to raise non-insignificant amounts of money selling NFTs for charities. Snowden - Freedom of Press Foundation 5.4m https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/16/22388548/edward-snowden-n... pplpleasr - Stand with Asians 550k https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/99615/uniswap-v3-nft-sol...
How is this different or better than normal donations? If anything, isn't it worse due to the NFT overhead?
Seeing pg peddle NFTs after a16z did it just a few weeks ago is kind of depressing. I guess Silicon Valley VCs must be really stinging about missing out on Bitcoin a few years ago. Not to mention that disguising what's essentially a money-making scheme as a benevolent donation is morally murky at best.
They absolutely didn't miss bitcoin. Thiel gave Vitalik a scholorship to drop out of university and work on ethereum. a16z have been massive supporters of cryptocurrency startups, as have YC (isnt coinbase their best investment?). Naval, Balajis, Alexis Ohanian. The common thread is crypto. It seems like it is just the HN commenters that don't seem to understand why and still talk about Tulips. Meanwhile reddit is wo…
You could argue against the stunt, but it requires more work that just stating "carbon costs." You'd have to check whether valueOfSavedLife * moneyRaised / 1235 + carbonCost < 0. And it looks like the auction is structured so that moneyRaised will be at least 2.5M, so the carbonCost would need to be pretty negative to make the sum negative. What is carbonCost?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know what there is to explain, but I’m always open to the possibility that I’ve missed something. Ethereum, in particular, is at least capable of interesting things. That doesn’t mean it will change the world. But I’m always interested in hearing from intelligent people who differ on why they think it will.
I appreciate this as I'm also trying to keep an open mind and understand what this means for the future. So far there are only two arguments that I understand: 1. Libertarianism: The world will be better if we remove the government and other 3rd parties from interfering in transactions between individuals. 2. Decentralization of Money (Crypto), like the decentralization of information (The internet) will unlock techn…
Cryptocurrency at the core is about solving trust issues and human coordination issues. Just because you don't have these issues in your life doesn't mean they aren't extremely important for the world. Part of the problem is that at times crypto has been sold as a consumer technology, remember before Bitcoin was digital gold it was going to be the microtransaction currency of the internet, which excited a lot of people looking through the consumer lens. But in the bigger picture of how revolutionary the technology is, microtransaction are the least interesting thing it could do.
This is a brand new technology that can solve trust problems and allow global business and trade to work more efficiently. It can allow humans to organize more efficiently and create brand new kinds of institutions (DAOs). Take Uniswap as an example. It's a decentralized exchange running on the Ethereum blockchain that has at times done as much daily trading volume as Coinbase. Now here's the kicker, they have two orders of magnitude less employees than coinbase (15 vs 1500). So not only are they vastly more efficient than legacy exchange technology, they also solve the trust problem because there is no third party taking custody of your funds, it's all done on the blockchain.
Another interesting example I've been pondering lately is automated insurance policies that run on the Ethereum blockchain and payout based on decentralized oracle data feeds from Chainlink. Imagine a farmer in Africa who doesn't have access to crop insurance, but needs to smooth out his year to year risk so that he doesn't go bust during a drought year if his crop fails. You can now write a smart contract that takes data from a decentralized oracle network providing rainfall data. A user can then pay into this contract and he will automatically be paid out if the rainfall during the growing season is below a certain threshold. So the farmer gets a slightly lower but much more predictable income stream. Someone else (who's better capitalized) can take the other side of the bet to collateralize the insurance policy, and earn a higher but more volatile payout.
This kind of efficiency per employee was never possible prior to blockchain. It's like how software and the internet allowed greater human coordination and orders of magnitude efficiency gains over legacy business organization, just applied to the world of finance. In the same way those massive gains in efficiency are allowing software to eat the world, crypto will eat the world of finance. This is a deep back end technology, and it's likely that by the time you're using it you won't even be aware of it as centralized institutions will adopt it on the backend while still providing you with a familiar user experience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The environmental harm of a single ethereum transaction is very low. Lower than a fundraising dinner. Please take your nitpicking elsewhere. They're literally aiming at saving thousands of lives and the comments are all focused on how bad NFTs are. Give me a break, talk about missing the point.
Because doing this as an NFT is utterly nonsensical. The NFT is involved for absolutely no reason. The only results of involving an NFT are (1) legitimizing a ridiculous scam and (2) causing extra environmental damage alongside the donation. Just donate the money, using a fraction of the carbon cost, and if you want to generate hype, do a match. What a waste of time and energy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would make more sense to sell this as an NFT if it were paired with a thematically related artwork. A wealthy buyer would be able to display the NFT in their home and brag about all the lives they saved when they bought it.
How do you display an NFT? Isn’t it literally just a hex code, with actual asset hosted somewhere else, which is publicly accessible by everyone? I’m serious. Isn’t that all it is? A pointer to some other resource, without access control at all? At least when I bought a beanie baby, I got beanie baby. NFTs always felt like paying money, then printing up the first picture of a beanie baby from a Google image search, a…
There will be virtual worlds where only the true owner of the NFT (can prove with digital signature) can display their artwork. It's not so different from people flexing with their skins in various games, so I don't think it's much of a stretch to imagine a virtual world where people have virtual properties, houses, businesses, etc. where they display their NFT artwork. Have a look at Decentraland for an idea of where this might be heading.