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Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

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Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#51
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so what, taxes now become a voluntary contribution to whatever charity you want to donate to? And you don't see any scale issues with that?

>taxes now become a voluntary contribution to whatever charity yes >And you don't see any scale issues with that? No. I see it vastly superior as private competition ensures people can donate to charities they find most effective, rather than monopolized government with little incentive for efficiency.

The idea that privately-managed charity could adequately address even one of the numerous structural-level problems in our society is tremendously naive.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#52
post #47
post #26

The author believes "a Twitter where your popular tweets earn you money" would be a good thing? Twitter is already full of people trying to shout the loudest - how can adding a financial incentive to shout even louder make things better rather than worse?

People willing to pay for quality content is always a good thing for content authors. By nature of their willingness to pay, it's a good thing for content consumers (otherwise they wouldn't do it). Nobody requires anyone to use any website that they don't want to (except perhaps irs.gov). You are always free to ignore it, like you are free to ignore Twitter. Giving people more options rarely makes the world worse.

Popularity is not quality, usually the inverse.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There might be many, this is a new field. A starter would be an existing userbase holding NFTs that enter the game. Different forms of monetarization (entering with NFTs, storing progress on the NFTs, marketplaces,...) might be a thing.

There might be none as well, this is a new field. The problem with your first suggestion is that you do an awful lot of work to map another games NFTs to your own items but presumably get none of the money from them. You also have an immediate balancing problem. And the better way is to just make a game that those players want to play, which is how game populations move around now anyway. The only way I can see suppo…

Valid points, time will tell. I can image there will be neutral intermediate services (NFT-platforms) that provide assets and smart contracts/APIs for integration for small fees.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this runs into the boundary issue, though. getting your hat asset you bought in HatWars into your Garden Town save file isn’t trivial. the two games’ developers need to use the same assets or one needs to remake the asset. it’s cool for the player but work and money for the developers that i’m not sure provides them much value

NFTs don't have to be (are not) the asset, just parameters/stats and the graphical representations can look different according to the game.

Right but then the developer has to decide what the stats are and make a graphical representation for every NFT. In fairness that could just be some free currency for owning an NFT but it’s not exactly compelling. The compelling version makes the item worthwhile but that’s a lot of work the holder of the NFT essentially expects for free.

The metaverse version of this is NFTs that drag around their own code, art and so on. That can run in a sandboxed way and there are protocols for game entity communication and so on. But this level of interoperability is a pipe dream outside of games like Second Life.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#55

NFTs in the current form might be pretty useless as such (just a proof you "first purchased" a jpeg). But I think in the gaming space this will become huge and actually makes sense - use elements (items, characters, stats,...) and their history in different and independent games if the developer wants to integrate them. No lock-in and portable, not tied to game-specific accounts.

Back here in the real world, game publishers are instead selling non-transferable serial numbers on skins as ‘NFTs’.

None of the things you mention are happening or likely to happen.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#56
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>taxes now become a voluntary contribution to whatever charity yes >And you don't see any scale issues with that? No. I see it vastly superior as private competition ensures people can donate to charities they find most effective, rather than monopolized government with little incentive for efficiency.

This means people will mostly give their money to the loudest charities that spend the most on marketing, not on their actual effectiveness. Boring yet important projects will get almost nothing with this model. Don't make the economist mistake of assuming that people are perfectly rational actors.

No post body was provided.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The current fiat system (and the Governments that control it) are completely enslaved to the welfare (pension) and healthcare demands of baby boomers. If we can craft a new financial system without spending 15%+ of our GDP and rising on Pensions, even with some inefficiency its still worth it. Avoiding sales taxes, platform commissions, and income taxes is a major advantage. So you think the problem solved by crypt…

50% of healthcare costs are incurred in the final 5 years of life, and in much of the world private healthcare is accepted and efficient. I'd rather euthanize myself at age 80 and pay much lower taxes throughout my adult life than die at age 85 in a gold-plated Government hospital. Sanitation and public transport can be directly charged to end-users based on usage. Education can be funded with land value taxes. Feder…

> in much of the world private healthcare is accepted and efficient.

It is accepted in many parts of the world, unfortunately, but in what part of the world is it "efficient"? Can you give an example? Is "basic medicine costing $500 (see insulin) to the few that can afford it and the rest dying because they can't access it" what you define as efficient?

> I'd rather euthanize myself at age 80 and pay much lower taxes throughout my adult life than die at age 85 in a gold-plated Government hospital.

I'd rather not. I doubt many people would be okay with that. I like living and being healthy. You can still feel free to do that in either situation.

> Sanitation and public transport can be directly charged to end-users based on usage.

So the rich should get clean streets and running water while the poor walk on their own shit? Should we charge per poop? As for public transportation, you think it would work if I didn't pay taxes for it and it cost $80 for someone to take it because they can't afford the $20 Uber ride?

> Federal Government bureaucracy just exists to support itself.

This is objectively not true. Many techies (not just crypto people) tend to forget why societal structures were invented in the first place. No one's saying inefficiencies don't exist but disregarding all of society seems to be specifically tailored to get a rise out of people.

I don't know how I can explain to you that we all need to care about each other, otherwise we'll all go extinct.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#58
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People willing to pay for quality content is always a good thing for content authors. By nature of their willingness to pay, it's a good thing for content consumers (otherwise they wouldn't do it). Nobody requires anyone to use any website that they don't want to (except perhaps irs.gov). You are always free to ignore it, like you are free to ignore Twitter. Giving people more options rarely makes the world worse.

Popularity is not quality, usually the inverse.

If people are willing to pay for it, the people consuming it find it valuable, which is frequently a proxy for quality (in the eyes of those consumers - the ones who count in this equation). Quality of content is, of course, subjective.

I have paid for Lady Gaga albums.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#59

NFTs in the current form might be pretty useless as such (just a proof you "first purchased" a jpeg). But I think in the gaming space this will become huge and actually makes sense - use elements (items, characters, stats,...) and their history in different and independent games if the developer wants to integrate them. No lock-in and portable, not tied to game-specific accounts.

What incentive does the developer of the second game have to support a portable account? We've seen how it played out with social networks. And if both game 1 and game 2 are by the same developer, then all that's needed for portability is a common account management service owned by the said developer.

valid question.

Possibly the big fan-base ready to play a game where there can log in easily and use some of their hard earned collector items.

True, with social networks it played out differently, but social networks is a rare category where the almost only thing you care is having/finding all people you know, all other features are kind of irrelevant. Joining another social networks adds close to nothing (as long as you can chat with those people) and only add friction. A bit like money… the more uses it, the better, it doesn’t need to do many things, the very only thing you care, is all people you know using the same.

Many other things work similarly, but no way in that extent. Mostly you care a lot more about additional features. For example Airbnb works better the more people use it, but you also care about important features, and you would switch to another similar service if it was a lot better and has a reasonable amount of choice/venues, as you don’t need everyone around you using it (which is the case for money and for the main social network you use… at least for the masses who want the fastest solution on most days)

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#60
The "True cloud computing" angle is interesting if a little dubious in its over promising and under specified downsides. No closed source, after all. No private execution etc. Why not just open source the code and have those interested parties run the source directly? What does the blockchain add here?

That said, I think there's probably a good idea in there though. AWS, GCP or a niche player could essentially add a donation API to their serverless platform. This would create a similar promise of a service that can be directly financially maintained by users with some added benefits like support for closed source, and a protected execution environment.

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