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Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

defector.com

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Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#181

Post by sercand »

marban wrote: post #5

The whole NFT craze lost me when tech founders I once highly respected started pushing and showing off their ugly gifs and trading cards on Twitter. Bad taste of the bored rich is not a new thing, but I hope NFTs won't become a noble tradition.

I didn't understand NFT storm as well then I made a 10K collection of NFT images with my friend (I wrote the smart contract) in three weeks and earned $3M from that. I made a lot of money and now I'm part of the creator community but I still sometimes ask "Why?"

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#182

Post by TigeriusKirk »

rchaud wrote: post #134
TomGullen wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must be getting old because I just don't get NFT's. They look stupid and I don't get why anyone would buy them. Declining tech companies and startups seem to be trying to crowbar them into their products much like Blockchain when it was new and shiny. Perhaps younger me would of seen something I can't anymore.

The only implementation of NFTs I've come across that doesn't look like a fly-by-night operation is NBA's Top Shot, where you can buy video NFTs of special moments in NBA history. At the very least, you can buy a piece of IP directly from the IP holder, and receive a package that's nicely presented. It's still totally overpriced, but I can see at least some value. It still needs to go a step further technologically.…

My main complaint with Top Shot is that the moments exist only on the proprietary site. They also can't be traded anywhere but that site. This removes any value the nft aspect brings to the table as it's now single-point-of-failure.

There was talk about expanding off the one site, but I haven't seen any progress there.

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#183

Post by m12k »

sercand wrote: post #181
marban wrote: post #5

The whole NFT craze lost me when tech founders I once highly respected started pushing and showing off their ugly gifs and trading cards on Twitter. Bad taste of the bored rich is not a new thing, but I hope NFTs won't become a noble tradition.

I didn't understand NFT storm as well then I made a 10K collection of NFT images with my friend (I wrote the smart contract) in three weeks and earned $3M from that. I made a lot of money and now I'm part of the creator community but I still sometimes ask "Why?"

I understand why people make NFTs (to cash in on the craze), but I still don't understand why anyone buys them (outside of money laundering).

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#184

Post by endymi0n »

TomGullen wrote: post #84
marban wrote: post #5

The whole NFT craze lost me when tech founders I once highly respected started pushing and showing off their ugly gifs and trading cards on Twitter. Bad taste of the bored rich is not a new thing, but I hope NFTs won't become a noble tradition.

I must be getting old because I just don't get NFT's. They look stupid and I don't get why anyone would buy them. Declining tech companies and startups seem to be trying to crowbar them into their products much like Blockchain when it was new and shiny. Perhaps younger me would of seen something I can't anymore.

I feel exactly the same way when thinking about the 90s. Telemetry and multimedia... two words that back then had exactly the same vibe to me. Both sounded as ambitious as ambiguous, raised millions and made zero business sense despite sounding glamorous and all-encompassing.

The writing was on the wall when the big newspapers gave stock tips for consumers on the hottest newest telemetry startups.

We all know how it went.

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#185

Post by dkersten »

k__ wrote: post #161
TomGullen wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Permission to an API service maybe, the rest of the examples create more problems than they solve.

How come? Just think about all cases of fake liceses? This could be verified rather easily with an NFT while faking it would be quite hard.

How? Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying.

Since drivers licenses are linked to individuals, and cannot be traded, the traffic cop that's checking your license will need to compare it to your government issued ID. Then they look it up to see that its valid and linked to you as a person.

How is doing this as an NFT (or other blockchain thing) any better than having a government database they look up?

This is a big problem I have with most blockchain tech: yes, it can be built on a blockchain, but it doesn't need it and alternatives tend to be simpler and cheaper.

I'm overall pro cryptocurrency and blockchain, but if we want people to still take it seriously in twenty years time, we need the use cases to actually make sense. I don't see how NFT's make sense here, unless I'm missing something.

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#186

Post by capableweb »

root_axis wrote: post #171
Joeboy wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An NFT is decent evidence in favour of the keyholder being the creator of a work, if there's no earlier evidence of somebody else being the creator of the work. When people first started talking about them I thought that was the idea - a kind of people's copyright registry on the blockchain. Which seems like a fairly reasonable idea, as far as it goes. Edit: To be clear, I mean a copyright registry that is used for t…

> An NFT is decent evidence in favour of you being the creator of a work, if there's no earlier evidence of somebody else being the creator of the work It's really not at all reliable. I could create an NFT for the "Joeboy" HN account right now, and ostensibly become the owner of your HN account since such an NFT does not already exist. Obviously, this makes no sense, the NFT is meaningless.

No, you could create an NFT that supposedly represents that but unless people buy into the idea, no is becoming the owner of anything.

If instead Ycombinator would release each user as an NFT, and allow people to buy/sell then, then yes you could become the owner of an HN account via NFTs. But until then, the one who knows the password is the owner.

People seems to have some sort of problem with trying to understand NFTs were all thoughts and logic go out the window as soon as NFTs are mentioned.

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#187

Post by Trasmatta »

rchaud wrote: post #165
useful wrote: post #113

Selling a future that hasn't happened is fine. If you saw the initial version of the internet or a cell phone you'd likely dismiss them. Crypto is rebuilding the same things that already exist but that process has the chance to remove people from a system who used to provide services and replace them with an algorithm. Most people would dimiss a NFT but some of the use cases could be great. If most laws/rules were en…

This is all pie-in-the-sky theory that has already been used unsuccessfully to exhort the merits of cryptocurrency. Where is the evidence of any of these benefits in practice? Crypto has been around for over a decade, yet its only uses post-Silk Road have been for ransomware and NFTs. The Internet changed how we communicated and shopped in well under 10 years, and in an era when 56kbps modems were a luxury, and nobod…

Cryptocurrency has even become less useful as time has gone on. The utility of the internet and smartphones was immediately apparent. Cryptocurrency fans are always reaching for that analogy, but it's fundamentally flawed.

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#188

Post by anonporridge »

somenewaccount1 wrote: post #148
anonporridge wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an NFT which is the best description I've ever seen of what NFTs actually are, https://foundation.app/@visualizevalue/nfts-explained-12012 It sold for 74 ETH.

Which is about approximately $240,000 USD. Hrm...I wonder if I should mint some nft's? And so it begins.

This is the equivalent of someone seeing how much a Picasso sells and wondering if they should become an artist. For every success, there are 10,000 failures.

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#189

Post by stephen_g »

skinnyasianboi wrote: post #129
marban wrote: post #5

The whole NFT craze lost me when tech founders I once highly respected started pushing and showing off their ugly gifs and trading cards on Twitter. Bad taste of the bored rich is not a new thing, but I hope NFTs won't become a noble tradition.

It's not just ugly gifs. It's digital art, your online game items, concert tickets, supermarket vouchers and so on. Quote from statista: "In 2020, global gaming audiences spent an approximate 54 billion U.S. dollars on additional in-game content". But the players don't own their purchases. You don't play the game anymore, servers go down or you get banned and all your stuff is gone. Think about that. Edit: Of course…

But it’s not. It’s a token on a blockchain with some metadata. You’d actually need a separate legally binding contract to link it to actual ownership, and at that point you could have just made up the legal contract without any blockchain or token…

With your example, if the game goes down, an NFT of the in-game purchase isn’t going to be very useful. What’s the difference between having a token or not of the content if there are still no servers for the game either way? Maybe the NFT still points to a screenshot? Great…

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#190

Post by jcbrand »

This article conflates NFTs with cryptocurrency, in a way that looks to me to be intentional in order to bolster his argument that crypto is for rich people to conspicuously consume and to pump and dump on the plebs.

NFTs aren't money, or currency and just because they can be created on some blockchains doesn't make them so.

I also don't see a genuine effort from the author to really understand why proponents think that this technology will positively change the world. You might not agree with them, but at least then rebut their arguments instead of creating straw men.

Bitcoin is open source, the original founder is nowhere to be found, there were no VCs involved in its creation or in the distribution of the coins and the entire network is run out in the open. The Bitcoin network is a commons.

The permissionless, decentralized, p2p and stateless aspect of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin is as revolutionary as it was 12 years ago, and in these 12 years "normal" (i.e. non-rich) people had access to them as much as anyone else. Heck, 10 years ago there were faucets that would hand out 5 bitcoins if you solved a captcha.

The people who are today involved in the creation and distribution of fiat money have incredible power, a power which is largely hidden from view, but which actually drives and shapes a lot of what we see. Of course these people won't take an open source competitor lying down.

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