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

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

#191

Post by detaro »

stale2002 wrote: post #179
k__ wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The (non-) fugibility of a token is just one aspect of it. You can code a non-tradable NFT no problem. Tradable NFTs are just the hype right now.

> You can code a non-tradable NFT no problem. WTF does that even mean? Do people remember what a blockchain even is, at this point? A blockchain is a chain of transactions. You take away the transactions, and its not a blockchain anymore. Unless we really stretch the definition of a "transaction" or blockchain...... Cryptocurrency has lost the plot. People are talking about blockchains, that don't have mining, or tra…

Creating an NFT is a transaction.

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

#192

Post by mywittyname »

wpietri wrote: post #156
mywittyname wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does seem to be used by people transferring funds internationally, especially from SEA to the USA.

Oh? What percent of international transfers are using it?

No clue. I just know people who do it.

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

#193

Post by dkersten »

stale2002 wrote: post #179
k__ wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The (non-) fugibility of a token is just one aspect of it. You can code a non-tradable NFT no problem. Tradable NFTs are just the hype right now.

> You can code a non-tradable NFT no problem. WTF does that even mean? Do people remember what a blockchain even is, at this point? A blockchain is a chain of transactions. You take away the transactions, and its not a blockchain anymore. Unless we really stretch the definition of a "transaction" or blockchain...... Cryptocurrency has lost the plot. People are talking about blockchains, that don't have mining, or tra…

So you limit the types of transactions in your blockchain to "this thing has been issued to this person/id/hash/whatever" and do not have any transactions of the type "this thing has changed ownership to a new person/id/hash/whatever". A bank account that allows deposits but no withdrawals/transfers, its still a ledger, it just limits the operations you are allowed to do (not the operations you could theoretically do).

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

#195

Post by pornel »

lostcolony wrote: post #109
21eleven wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about NFTs is that many people who buy them "don't get NFTs". All an NFT is is a token that represents ownership, like if the title to your car or house deed was on a blockchain. NFTs have some sane use causes like designating the owner of a valuable asset or creating electronic tickets that can be resold or transferred without some centralized entity like ticketmaster. Prior to NFTs existing, would you pur…

Yep. It's a completely made up problem. It's maybe useful in enforcing existing IP law (i.e., I can prove that that picture is mine), but even that is questionable (proof of ownership of digital IP has already been proven satisfactorily for courts of law to rule on it). The fact there is a new way of proving ownership doesn't make the thing owned valuable.

NFTs don't actually prove ownership of anything but themselves. Owning a hash of a URL has no connection to the real world, and can't prove that the NFT was created by the author of the artwork.

It makes me doubly furious that NFT is advertised as caring for artists. In fact, NFT makes it easier than ever to sell stolen artwork. NFT itself doesn't contain any copyrighted material, and selling metadata/URLs is not illegal, so it's likely that fraud through NFT is de-facto legal if you just carefully word it as selling the NFT of the artwork, and not the artwork itself.

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

#196

Post by iscrewyou »

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.

The problem with NFTs and blockchain is that they purport that anyone can have access to it…the whole decentralized thing.

Except all these NFT stores require an invite from another artist. As someone who loves taking photos but isn’t socially connected because it’s a passion and not a job, it seems very elitist. Maybe it’s that way because I don’t have access to it and my brain is just playing tricks. But it seems like one of those “you aren’t good enough for this” kind of thing. Some of the online stores like Foundation app have become gatekeepers rather than outlets.

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

#197

Post by ItsMonkk »

ironSkillet wrote: post #25
snarf21 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the trust is distributed. One single person can't cause the entire system to break down or steal all them money. With blockchain coins, the incentives are aligned. The weird thing that happened with BTC that I don't think Satoshi could forsee is that the more valuable it got, the less usable it got. This is one of the unsolved issues: how to create decentralized consensus very very quickly that can't also be…

Do you know of any lines of research that are out to prove mathematically that it is impossible to have these desirable characteristics simultaneously? I.e. any improvement in consensus efficiency necessarily gives up some amount of decentralization, appropriately defined.

This is the sort of thing that really needs to be questioned.

1. How much security do we need for this transaction?

2. For this block of transactions?

3. Can we have varying levels of security?

What we are ultimately trying to know is, is it profitable to double spend? If the answer is yes, then no one should be transacting, and anything they do transact is a gamble. If the answer is no, there's much less risk, and the farther the answer is no, the safer the transaction.

But we likely don't need as much security as we do now. In fact, it's very easy to handle at a user level.

A. Put the transaction on the blockchain.

B. Wait for additional blocks.

C. If your transaction is huge, wait for more additional blocks. Wait a week, a month. This is an important transaction. When the blockchain has not reverted for such a long time, finally do the transaction in the real world.

If you are transacting with yourself, you don't need any security at all. If you are transacting with a bar and the bar knows you, much like a tab, you don't need much security. If you are transacting with an anonymous person, you want high security.

So security is currently handled on a blockchain by blockchain basis, where it should be a transaction by transaction basis. What if you can't wait a month? Then you should put heavy fees on that transaction and it should be put in with other higher fee transactions.

4. How does security change with transaction size? Does it make sense to have limits?

5. How does security change with total transaction block size? Does it make sense to have limits?

6. When the coin price goes up, how does that change these factors?

7. When the mining reward in coins drops, how does that affect security?

8. When Bitcoin, in 100 years, moves to 100% transaction fee system, what happens to security? What would the transactions fees look like?

9. In 50 years when the block reward has been halved 5 times, either the price of Bitcoin moves to $1 million, or the security drops. Is that okay?

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

#198

Post by useful »

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…

I'd argue that BBS and compuserve/aol were in the 80s. It took 30 years before everyone had a computer in their pocket and Amazon took off.

A debit card is similar to crypto. Is a debit card any different than cash for an end user? Did it cause big changes in banking? I can show you my account balance with a debit card. It may convince you I have the assets to buy whatever you are selling. I can bring a debit card to another country and exchange it to local currency. The merchant is passing on the 2-5% fee to you so that you can use a debit card. There is a huge organization of people behind that debit card.

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

#199

Post by Synaesthesia »

jcbrand wrote: post #190

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 t…

What has happened in those 12 years has been a great deal of scams, get rich quick scheme a and instability. Bitcoin has also become dominated by a few major players and is a power structure in itself, not really benefitting ordinary people much at.

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

#200

Post by cratermoon »

cperciva wrote: post #144
21eleven wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about NFTs is that many people who buy them "don't get NFTs". All an NFT is is a token that represents ownership, like if the title to your car or house deed was on a blockchain. NFTs have some sane use causes like designating the owner of a valuable asset or creating electronic tickets that can be resold or transferred without some centralized entity like ticketmaster. Prior to NFTs existing, would you pur…

Thing is, NFTs don't represent ownership, absent some external legal documents which tie ownership to the NFT. (And even with such external documents p perhaps not; see e.g. the statute of frauds which restricts in what form land ownership can be transferred.) I can sell NFTs of bridges all day long; doesn't mean anyone is buying a bridge.

Yeah, an NFT is more like a receipt. Except when you buy one, you only get the receipt. The actual item remains "out there".
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