I didn't realize it was that easy to produce another Woodstock, or that the only purpose of music and festivals was profit maximization/economic equilibrium. Silly me.
The whole point of capitalism is that economic equilibrium is also value equilibrium. So if you think it's good to have a Woodstock, unless you like artificial scarcity, you should think that having two Woodstocks is approximately twice as good. Now maybe you cannot produce another Woodstock, like there's some inherently limited resource like management effort or willingness or space or licenses, but that's the idea.…
Yes: Tor is "somewhat decentralized" in that there are 9 servers run by people to maintain the directory instead of 1, and Roger Dingledine--one of the main people behind Tor--claims to have met in person only like 2/3rds of the participants; but is it as centralized as Etheteum? No. Most "web3" tech (god I hate that term as someone actively in this space :/), BTW, literally are based at least some way--if not extrem…
Now you have me digging through the stacks at seclab.cs.ucsb.edu. I recognize the webdesign and some of the titles. Is this the UCSB I2P takedown you refer to? I'm curious who you might mean, but there are only 3 UCSB authors listed. I'll do some more digging. https://sites.cs.ucsb.edu/~chris/research/doc/raid13_i2p.pdf Only found a very little bit about their work on cryptocurrencies. https://sites.cs.ucsb.edu/~chri…
The seclab people are not the same professor I was taking about who worked on decentralized systems (and didn't work on security): you are mixing up two stories I told about people in two different subfields.
Yes: Tor is "somewhat decentralized" in that there are 9 servers run by people to maintain the directory instead of 1, and Roger Dingledine--one of the main people behind Tor--claims to have met in person only like 2/3rds of the participants; but is it as centralized as Etheteum? No. Most "web3" tech (god I hate that term as someone actively in this space :/), BTW, literally are based at least some way--if not extrem…
doh: "but is it as centralized as Etheteum" -> "but is it as DEcentralized as Ethereum" :/ (the pain of quickly typing a message on your phone that you purposefully don't want to spend much time working on or caring about ;P)
> Because the thing that it’s representing could still disappear or go away. Not if you, the owner, or someone else, stores a copy. Even if the URL associated with the URL is broken, it doesn't change the fact that it still represents the thing people want it to represent. NFTs are not a backup system for your data.
And how do you want to prove that the copy you made had the same content that was stored behind the URL? What if the host changes the content behind that URL to something completely different. No one can prove that it's actually the thing you copied that was behind this NFT. It's really worthless in my eyes.
A hash of the bytes is really is really useful for this kind of authentication. But for actively traded and popular NFTs that isn't strictly necessary. The community knows what they represent.
Similarly, the value of the NFT is not in the token but in the community (artist, other NFT holders) honoring it and sometimes enforcing certain rights.
But you can't verify that the content behind this URL was the same all the time. How can you enforce rights in a court if you can't prove that the content was the same.
If you have a hash of the content in the NFT verifying what it pointed at is trivial.
> A lot of Web3 platforms are in fact centralized. Your wallet (MetaMask), marketplaces (OpenSea), APIs (Alchemy) are all central platforms. Sure, they use a distributed database (blockchain), but before that it’s still a Go app on AWS, meaning its centralized. > Your wallet (MetaMask) Run your own node. This is lazy reporting to reach the end point about fawning over FreeBSD (its in the article, literally an article…
I could also not do any of that and trust an authority to provide that service for me.
Society encourages specialization and most people will not start to self-host for some idealistic reasons that they might not even share. Unless self-hosting is more convenient and has better UX the majority will not adopt it.
Even if you as an individual want decentralization, you will still be affected by this creeping centralization. Tokens on platforms (like OpenSea) will have more value and liquidity than trying to trade directly. If your NFT gets blacklisted on OpenSea it will lose value. Even if you never intend to use OpenSea, if the majority uses it to verify "authenticity" it will become a central authority.
Just look at all the phished NFTs. The owners (not anymore) immediately rush to OpenSea trying to get the "stolen" NTF blacklisted.
1. Nope. Still need to convert it to real money for buying something. Gas fees > transfer fees. 2. Nope. It doesn't grant any ownership. It's a just a pointer to a file on third party server. Ownership is enforced by a central authority. Code is not law. 3. Nope. Without an underlying economic activity it's all a ponzi scheme. There is no finance in DeFi. Just scammers running pump and dump schemes and rugpulling sta…
>3. Nope. Without an underlying economic activity it's all a ponzi scheme. There is no finance in DeFi. Just scammers running pump and dump schemes and rugpulling starry eyed idiots who think centuries old financial principals are useless and want to make a quick buck without doing anything. There's plenty of projcts ran by people who are clearly not trying to scam anyone. Time will tell whether they will actually be…
There is a lack of balance here. Yashg is not wrong in his assertions, and nor are you, that time will tell if the non-scammers are successful or not. I was laughing at the concept of bitcoin when it was mere cents to the coin and some pizza was bought. I'm not laughing now, but I'm also well aware that if you need to explain why something is NOT a Ponzi scheme, it's a Ponzi scheme. I've done a fair bit of work in the NFT space, and saw myself how riddled with fraud it is - not the operation itself, but the punters trying to scam the platform for a free token. I also saw how brittle the concept really is. In many cases, the smart contract is simply saying address X owns the number 4. That later gets translated to some URL which is not guaranteed to be there in 10 years time. Storing the actual asset on the chain would have been preferable but is not practical. So where does that leave us? How does one's ownership of the number 4 translates to them owning a deed to a building or a picture of a monkey, in the sense that you could explain it to your grandma?
I'm on the fence here. I want this to work, but I also understand how it works and know that it's not a simple task.
Not really the ability to physically occupy the house is one of the rights owning it gives you. There are other ways to gain that right but there is conceptual overlap there.
My tenant in the UK does not own the flat they occupy; my landlord in Berlin does own the flat I occupy. There are rules to say that landlords can’t just enter on a whim, and rent is a very common way to occupy a property.
Yes exactly, ownership gives you the right to occupy the property and you can also trade that right for rent as well as reaquire it. Hence conceptual overlap.