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The NFT market bubble has popped?

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Re: The NFT market bubble has popped?

#161

Post by lotsofpulp »

southerntofu wrote: post #160
lotsofpulp wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i'm opposed to financial compensation (and all forms of money) as an organizing principle of society. What does this mean? It is the nature of animals to evaluate and rank each other, least of all for mating purposes. Not using money will not change that, and another proxy will be used. > Specifically about COVID though, I don't know about where you are, but here in France "thank you" for health workers was perceiv…

> It is the nature of animals to evaluate and rank each other Not at all. Competition is not the norm in the natural world. There's the entire field of ethology to study if you'd like to know more. If you need a quick intro, "Mutual Aid" by Peter Kropotkin is really dated science-wise (it's almost 120 years old) but is still a pretty good read. If you're into TV stuff, i'd recommend Adam Curtis' series "The trap" and…

Primates and other mammals do it. Birds do it. Unless all those David Attenborough narrated shows I’ve watched are wrong or misinterpreted by me, there seems to be extensive use of competition in many species.

Or one can look at data from myriad of dating apps and websites. I would not believe anyone if they told me they did not rank possible partners in life on a variety of metrics such as health, wealth, tribal affiliations (family/other network), intelligence, humor, etc.

Re: The NFT market bubble has popped?

#162

Post by rsynnott »

bart_spoon wrote: post #134
phist_mcgee wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a little correction. NFTs, and crypto in general are critiqued as ponzis, but they are more accurately described as pyramid schemes, whereby early adopters rake in the lion's share of profits. Ponzis are where later investor money is used to pay out early investor money in a fraudulent never ending cycle.

Does that not describe crypto? Bitcoin is only making millionaires if more and more late investors are buying in and driving up the price for earlier investors.

A true Ponzi scheme requires intent and organisation (at least at some point; some things normally categorized as Ponzi schemes start off with the intent of being legitimate hedge funds or similar). Crypto things, particularly bitcoin, tend to behave rather like a self-organizing Ponzi scheme, but pedantically, they're not one, quite.

Re: The NFT market bubble has popped?

#163

Post by lotsofpulp »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #158
lotsofpulp wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which societies today function like this, that could be scaled up to country level tasks and responsibilities? Regardless of size would make it a meaningless claim, as the parameters are greatly different between a tribe of 100 vs 10,000 vs 1,000,000,000.

> Which societies today function like this, that could be scaled up to country level tasks and responsibilities? None that I'm aware of, though I am not entirely convinced it is impossible for the reasons I stated. I am forced to wonder: what is the virtue of scale like that if it is largely built on the back of human suffering?

So another tribe does not roll over you.

Re: The NFT market bubble has popped?

#164

Post by SuchAnonMuchWow »

mypastself wrote: post #159
SuchAnonMuchWow wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An actual casino without the need for a central authority can be implemented on smart contracts, and is the only real application of smart contracts that I see that is better than a centralized solution.

As far as I understand it, producing entropy, which is needed for fair distribution of odds in games of chance, is not achievable directly on the blockchain. Instead, the job of producing non-deterministic inputs is offloaded to an off-chain source, an oracle, which still requires some degree of trust in an external entity. My information might be out of date, though, and some implementations might have resolved this…

You can just make the participants of a bet provide each a random number, and xor their results. If even one of them picked a real random number, the result will be random.

This is the basis of most distributed random number selection algorithm, which existed since a lot before blockchains.

In a smart contract, it could look like something like that:

1- each person which want to participate in the bet pick a random number, then send: their bet (0 or 1), the hash of the random number, and of course money to bet.

2- after some specified time, the first phase finish and no new person can bet. now everyone has to send their actual random number to the smart contract

3- after some specified time again, every random number gathered which had the correct hash are xored. If the popcount of the result is even, 0 win. otherwise 1 win. Everyone who send their random number and guessed correctly get a share of the total amount.

edit: note that I'm not overly familiar with smart contracts, so if this cannot work I would love to be explained why.

Re: The NFT market bubble has popped?

#165

Post by jonnyscholes »

prepend wrote: post #117
jonnyscholes wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my experience. Hicentnunc (and the tezos community at large) is the closest I've felt to 00s internet culture/content which got me hooked on programming. Although perhaps paradoxically, I suspect the barrier to entry is part of this. Full disclosure: I hold a small amount of tezos.

00s internet culture was bullshit and hype from the dotcom fallout. Do you mean 70-90s internet culture where people were building stuff to see if it worked?

That's fair, and perhaps for you that true. But 99-05ish are the internet years that I remember as the most creative. It was well before everyones IRL persona was mirrored online, which is when I saw a dramatic shift in what people created online (at least where I lived). Broadly speaking it become less about experimenting with the medium and more about broadcasting what already existed.

The communities I came across were for the most part making for the sake of making. And plenty of them were building new things and experimenting.

Everyone's experience is relative. Perhaps my experiences are rose tinted by nostalgia.

All that is to say, I observe aspects of some NFT (or crypto) communities feel the same to me - new mediums, new challenges and a new excitement around them.

* However I do still think that there is a huge NFT/crypto bubble and there is cataclysmic amounts fud.

Re: The NFT market bubble has popped?

#166

Post by xtracto »

tiborsaas wrote: post #19
powerapple wrote: post #6

One thing I have noticed when listening to the interviews of NFT companies is that, when describing NFT is the future, the arguments from these founders are examples of people/artists made money by selling NFT online. It has become more and more a theme for cryptocurrency technology has well: the reason you should be in is that other people have made money rather than the benefit of the technology itself. It is not a…

Lots of people got "into the internet" because others have made money on it and not for the technology (html, tcp/ip, dns...) Yes, crypto is mostly focused on financial apps, so they are harder to understand than "send me 140 chars and we make a timeline of it".

Another example is videogame development: Initially there was pure sweat, blood and passion (around the 80s for PC gaming). But nowadays most of the people in there are for profiteering.

Once the bean counters enter a tech field, they suck all the fun.

Re: The NFT market bubble has popped?

#167

Post by tiborsaas »

simias wrote: post #85
tiborsaas wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people got "into the internet" because others have made money on it and not for the technology (html, tcp/ip, dns...) Yes, crypto is mostly focused on financial apps, so they are harder to understand than "send me 140 chars and we make a timeline of it".

Imagine if Google Search achieved success not by providing a search engine but by publishing a whitepaper outlining how PageRank would eventually work, then selling $GOOG tokens to let people speculate on the hype (but not actually entitle them to anything regarding the company, so it's like venture capitalism, but worse). Then nothing happens for a decade or so, and then Google finally publishes a first version of t…

You are projecting an existing, well understood stack on a fundamentally different platform. What works on Earth would be silly to assume it should be the same on the ISS and vice-versa.

> Then nothing happens for a decade or so...

I guess you took the comfortable position to choose starting point of the internet as 1998, but what about 1980's or 70's? It was rather slow progress, just as you described.

> I also disagree that cryptocurrencies are "hard to understand"

I was referring to financial apps in general. For most people to think about interests and investments is a challenge even with fiat currencies.

I agree though that a major crypto/blockchain revolution hasn't happened yet and probably it will never replace the current internet, but it will co-exists and be much more significant than today once a group hits a sweet spot with UX, utility and adoption.

Re: The NFT market bubble has popped?

#168

Post by powerapple »

Grustaf wrote: post #120
powerapple wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has supported my trust in bitcoin from the very beginning. Why do you need NFT for money laundering when you can use cryptocurrency to achieve the same directly?

How do you launder money with bitcoin? With NFTs it's easy, you can just buy some ugly jpg for 1 m, then sell it to your shell company for 10 m.

Can you make an ugly jpg for 0 cent and sell it to your shell company for 10 m? save the first million.

Previously you can send money to mining company for machines, farm bitcoins and then sell machines back to mining company. I am not sure how easy it is now.

Re: The NFT market bubble has popped?

#169

Post by jonnyscholes »

DeliriumTrigger wrote: post #106
jonnyscholes wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my experience. Hicentnunc (and the tezos community at large) is the closest I've felt to 00s internet culture/content which got me hooked on programming. Although perhaps paradoxically, I suspect the barrier to entry is part of this. Full disclosure: I hold a small amount of tezos.

00s internet culture/content I hear everybody talking about it but I don't really get what is? Do you mean more of a feeling of companionship like in an IRC or Group?

For me there's 2 things:

Whilst being post-dotcom, where a lot of the internet was worked out technically, culturally platforms were still only just starting out. It was before social network UIs all looked the same and there was a play book for creating a network for X. Small communities were thriving and they all still had control of their ecosystems. Internet "mediums" were still in a state of flux on all fronts.

It was the start of "the masses" coming online and creating profiles - but they came online through things like MSN spaces, MySpace and geocities. Which were a lot less sanitized than today's equivalents. Everyday people experimented with their pages the same way teenages do with their bedroom walls. They looked awful, but the medium was alive.

Both of these made me feel more like making for the sake of making was less linked to ego. And overall every community I was part of was still innovating on the medium as much as their niche (be it art, netsec, photography, local history etc).

The parallels I'm thinking of in particular are both artists rushing to the platforms and trying digital art for the first time (admittedly many driven by $$). Meanwhile community leaders are having to deal with new technical, cultural and governance issues - many of which are novel issues imo.

Re: The NFT market bubble has popped?

#170

Post by southerntofu »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #161
southerntofu wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is the nature of animals to evaluate and rank each other Not at all. Competition is not the norm in the natural world. There's the entire field of ethology to study if you'd like to know more. If you need a quick intro, "Mutual Aid" by Peter Kropotkin is really dated science-wise (it's almost 120 years old) but is still a pretty good read. If you're into TV stuff, i'd recommend Adam Curtis' series "The trap" and…

Primates and other mammals do it. Birds do it. Unless all those David Attenborough narrated shows I’ve watched are wrong or misinterpreted by me, there seems to be extensive use of competition in many species. Or one can look at data from myriad of dating apps and websites. I would not believe anyone if they told me they did not rank possible partners in life on a variety of metrics such as health, wealth, tribal aff…

Do some reading on the question and make an opinion for yourself. There is some competition throughout nature but it's really far from an organizing principle as it has become with the capitalist system.

> I would not believe anyone if they told me they did not rank possible partners in life on a variety of metrics

That sounds really close to the definition of a psychopath, and is definitely not how most people live their lives/relationships. Adam Curtis in "The trap" touches on this topic and how only psychopaths and economists used to behave like according to "measurable rational self-interest". With the commodification of everything (including oneself through social media) it's fair to bet more people behave like that nowadays than previously, but it's still really far from everyone.

Why would you not believe me if i told you i have feelings and affinities that cannot be measured or ranked and do not reflect a material interest? Why is it so hard to accept that not everybody lives through live the same way that soulless suit-heads do?

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