121–130 of 318 posts
I don't understand how any take on crypto can not mention that it is now the de-facto currency of online black markets, from pornhub to silk road 9.0 or whatever version we're up to. This is crypto's utility and the only thing I've seen crypto being used for seriously that isn't speculation. Cryptocurrency is disrupting the black markets the same way amazon/ebay/online shopping disrupted the retail markets. Crypto is…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ubisoft Quarts had 15 sales for 50$, total revenue: 745$ - https://objkt.com/collection/ubisoftquartz And only 0.665 % earns money on OpenSea. Concentration of it is way less, you can just crawl the collections. 5 collections dominate all the rest and only the first 266 collections earned > 0 eth. The other 40 k. earned 0 eth. It's obviously not a way for an artist to earn any money. https://pastebin.com/NyLMcs7c Scr…
That number seems off by a few orders of magnitude. I tried searching for familiar collections and couldn't find any of them: - Corruption(*s) - Bored Ape Yacht Club - Lonely Aliens Space Club - NFT Worlds You also have neither entries for the major Art Blocks series (Curated/Playground/Factory) nor any of the hundreds of individual artist collections contained in them. So, I think your crawl might be off. Additional…
OpenSea is still the biggest NFT market and had an api, that's why I checked their api.
Edit: sorry, the linqpad link was to pastebin instead of the source. Adjusted it
I don't understand how any take on crypto can not mention that it is now the de-facto currency of online black markets, from pornhub to silk road 9.0 or whatever version we're up to. This is crypto's utility and the only thing I've seen crypto being used for seriously that isn't speculation. Cryptocurrency is disrupting the black markets the same way amazon/ebay/online shopping disrupted the retail markets. Crypto is…
When paying for domain names or VPS (or anything online, but those are the cases where it's easy), I prefer paying with crypto because I don't want to give my credit card information to some stranger so they can misuse or lose it. This is not illegal and a legitimate use case.
I've gotten this feeling, ever since about 2008 or so, that the map that is asset prices is slowly, inexorably becoming uncoupled from the territory of the physical world. This economy-scale decoupling is the dual of each and every one of our very own psychological uncoupling from our own physical worlds, which has occurred because of the computerization of work, socialization, and life itself (the shimmering neurali…
The irony is that much of the criticism against the missing physical link / utility of crypto was surely levelled against the idea of money in its earliest days. "Coins? Why would I want those instead of food? I can't eat coins." To which the killer adoption feature was governments saying "Well, you have to pay taxes in coins, so you need some" to bootstrap & put a floor in under the system's value. Crypto doesn't ap…
Note that in the latter case, the physical money doesn't even change hands - it's all in a ledger, but the ledger is in people's heads. In fact, you could say it's a proof-of-work system, since making the stones is expensive in terms of amount of effort spent, even though they don't have any utility as such.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does this enable new people to play? The rich can still gamble the most and come in early to earn the biggest rewards. The poor still take the highest risk. As the poor buy more into it , the rich get richer as well. Maybe the poor get richer but how much money can they lock away? What stopped them from investing that money in the stock market before crypto was around? I fail to see how this creates a new economy…
Parent is referring to the accredited investor definition in the US [0] specifically ($1M+ in assets as one test), but more broadly to similar financial gatekeeping. I'm skeptical it's an overall social good to remove guard rails that prevent sophisticated sellers from fleecing unsophisticated buyers (say what you want about the SEC, but they do enforce some rules), but I agree the current scheme prevents all people…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is an appropriate time according to you then? There are only two periods of time that can be commented on. From inception to the present. From the present to future predictions. The former hasn't shown a use that can't be solved better by other methods. The latter hasn't shown any either. The printing press on day 1 had a mission statement that had no equal. So did the combustion engine. It did the current thing…
I'm not suggesting "an appropriate time" in which an invention can be deemed impactful, because that isn't how history works. This is the point I am trying to convey. If we look at other inventions and broadly speaking, "knowledge," it's quite common for the real impact to not be seen for quite a long time. E.g. the Renaissance and re-interest in / rediscovery of classical sources. I don't know why this is so controv…
I've been quietly following the development of cryptocurrencies and blockchain, although I only own a very small amount. Some thoughts I have: 1. If you study the history of technology, it becomes pretty clear that it often take decades or even centuries to see the full impact of an invention. Declaring the ultimate value of a technology barely a decade after it was invented is just ignorant. It's only been about 30…
Your first comment is a very common crypto talking point that isn't really borne in reality IMHO. It takes decades to see the impact. It almost never takes a decade to see the use, and that's what people are deriding. Crypto doesn't really solve a problem that needed solving and it is often the wrong solution for many things it's used for. All at a very high cost. Cryptocurrency hasn't really brought much in the way…
Crypto solves the same problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your first comment is a very common crypto talking point that isn't really borne in reality IMHO. It takes decades to see the impact. It almost never takes a decade to see the use, and that's what people are deriding. Crypto doesn't really solve a problem that needed solving and it is often the wrong solution for many things it's used for. All at a very high cost. Cryptocurrency hasn't really brought much in the way…
> It almost never takes a decade to see the use, If you study the history of technology, its ultimate impact is never manifest within a decade. It took decades for the Gutenberg Printing Press to spread around Europe and centuries for the consequences to see be seen (Protestant Reformation, newspapers, birth of the modern media, on and on.) This is the case for pretty much every other invention. > Crypto doesn't real…
It is, but that was because far fewer people were well educated so they didn't really see the need, and innovations tended to be physical objects that can only travel as far and as fast as the transport of the time will take them. Today most people in the developed world are very well educated (relative to the 1600s) and things based on computers travel at pretty much the speed of light. Things, particularly in tech, obviously move faster now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not suggesting "an appropriate time" in which an invention can be deemed impactful, because that isn't how history works. This is the point I am trying to convey. If we look at other inventions and broadly speaking, "knowledge," it's quite common for the real impact to not be seen for quite a long time. E.g. the Renaissance and re-interest in / rediscovery of classical sources. I don't know why this is so controv…
I just find the general sentiment very hand wavey by conflating impact and use because it doesn't say anything. It's a wait and see indefinitely to prevent any real discussion on the merits today, while being a catch all to side step critique.
I don't understand how any take on crypto can not mention that it is now the de-facto currency of online black markets, from pornhub to silk road 9.0 or whatever version we're up to. This is crypto's utility and the only thing I've seen crypto being used for seriously that isn't speculation. Cryptocurrency is disrupting the black markets the same way amazon/ebay/online shopping disrupted the retail markets. Crypto is…
An interesting tangent of your BitTorrent analogy is that, for BitTorrent the protocol, an actually legal use case was found later: it is now used to create powerful ad-hoc CDNs for limited use cases with the novel property of gaining bandwidth automatically as more clients show up. The "Linux ISOs" that actually existed were the earliest incarnation of this, driven by non-profit orgs low on cash, but the concept is now in active use also for purely commercial purposes such as downloading large game updates (World of Warcraft, StarCraft 2 etc. have been using this scheme for a long time now) or generally distributing large software packages to a bunch of clients (I've read about at least one company-proprietary project that uses BitTorrent embedded in some kind of software package distribution system to quickly roll out microservice updates in a mesh made up of thousands of servers). This may mean that it's not impossible for some of the crypto protocols to eventually end up being used for actual benefit in some legal way that is not just again financial speculation. However, it will probably be much less world-changing than the crypto enthusiasts expect.