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Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT dropped 99% in value

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Re: Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT dropped 99% in value

#221

Post by telchior »

diputsmonro wrote: post #184
poiuiopkj wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No practical purpose EXCEPT for the ability to easily take assets across borders to leave authoritarian regimes, bringing a form of storing assets to the 2 billion or so unbanked individuals of the world, and comparatively cheap remittances for people sending money back to their families in another country. These are just a few of the incredibly practical use cases that quite literally change people's lives.

All of those things that make it easy to move money out of authoritarian regimes also make it easy to move money into them - see the recent North Korea hack. Turns out that when you purposefully build a system without any guardrails or oversight, then bad actors will find exploits and there will be no way to stop them. Regulation and oversight might be good things, actually.

Most of our lived-in systems have very little in the way of guardrails or oversight. We maintain our safety and happiness through a social contract, not absolute enforceability of law.

The "exploits" you're describing were possible 20 years ago through various other methods (unregulated banking, cash in briefcases, etc). The new thing is government and police having a much greater degree of control over monetary systems.

I think crypto is failing at most of its promises and it's still unclear whether it will ever live up to any of them. But rah-rah celebration of government being able to monitor and halt anything it wants to is not the way to go, either; it's actually a literal doomsday scenario (Vernor Vinge has written about this, among others).

Re: Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT dropped 99% in value

#222

Post by netsharc »

mirntyfirty wrote: post #180
poiuiopkj wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No practical purpose EXCEPT for the ability to easily take assets across borders to leave authoritarian regimes, bringing a form of storing assets to the 2 billion or so unbanked individuals of the world, and comparatively cheap remittances for people sending money back to their families in another country. These are just a few of the incredibly practical use cases that quite literally change people's lives.

This isn’t happening and it’s not the purpose. “Unbanked” is an imaginary word. If a person is “unbanked”, it’s likely that they are also “uninternetted” and/or “uncomputered.”

There are actually "unbanked" Africans, according to this article they just use their mobile provider's feature of credit transfer to bank that way: https://archive.ph/imZOj - it allows them to buy and sell things and settle debts by transferring digital money between phone numbers.

But probably not good enough for the crypto-bros, it's a centralized system!!1!!

Re: Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT dropped 99% in value

#223

Post by dmitriid »

gonehome wrote: post #203
dmitriid wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and will just argue in favor of that conclusion Because reality doesn't care about your "probably"s. Note how you immediately started calling this discussion "this type of discourse" and "you made up your mind" immediately after I simply listed facts. > but I at least recognize a new capability when it exists There's a difference between "recognizing new capabilities" and "wishful thinking". Unsurprisingly, when fa…

Come on - you didn't "simply list facts" you stated wildly confident and extreme opinions and then you labeled them facts. That you can't or won't recognize this is what I'm talking about. "Literally no new thing", "I look at reality" (implying I only make stuff up), "wishful thinking", "precisely zero knowledge", "Without fail in 100% of cases this is the case", etc. etc. There are interesting conversations to have…

> Come on - you didn't "simply list facts" you stated wildly confident and extreme opinions and then you labeled them facts

They are facts:

1. "Gated community is centralized by default" is a fact.

2. "Literally no new thing has come out of this" is a fact.

3. "Not to mention use cases where you wouldn't want to advertise your membership in a gated community" is a statment that has a fact in it: "use cases where you wouldn't want to advertise your membership in a gated community"

And in the comment you're replying to I've also stated some facts besides just opinion.

> There are interesting conversations to have on this topic, but it's hard to have them with someone only willing to engage in this way.

Please show me a single "interesting conversation" where anyone from the crypto community has anything to say beyond "there are new interesting new things you just have to believe in possibility that someday maybe this will happen".

> It requires some amount of willingness to be uncertain of what you currently believe and you're not.

I'm definitely uncertain about many things. Once again, there's a difference between being uncertain and blindly believing in snake oil. It's on the sellers of snake oil to prove their wild claims, not on me.

> The more you reply, the more you confirm my initial suspicion of bad faith.

Yup. More comments without zero substance on the "interesting new capabilites" and "interesting discussions".

> I'm not some blind crypto nut (at best I'm cautiously optimistic), but I find it hard to engage with the baseline anti-crypto hostility on HN which makes interesting conversation hard.

If there was any such interesting conversation, "not blind crypto nuts" would have already had it and had, for example, links to such discussions. In over a decade no such discussion has materialised for very obvious reasons.

Re: Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT dropped 99% in value

#224

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

silverlake wrote: post #206
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NFTs that are linked to real-world assets (through intermediaries that you have to trust That makes the NFT redundant.

I paid intermediaries $10k to transfer a house title to me. Took a few weeks and many contracts. I agree NFTs are silly, but real world systems need to improve quickly.

But is applying a blockchain the answer? What happens if someone steals your wallet or you lose it or the password to it? What happens if someone dies without giving someone access to their wallet? Do those lots now sit vacant? Sure, there's some legal cruft around this, but much of that cruft is actually there for a reason.

Re: Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT dropped 99% in value

#225

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

golergka wrote: post #205
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NFTs that are linked to real-world assets (through intermediaries that you have to trust That makes the NFT redundant.

The point is interacting with them via smart contracts and other blockchain tools. Done correctly, NFTs are simply an API from real world to the blockchain.

What's the relevant value of putting your house on the blockchain?

Re: Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT dropped 99% in value

#226

Post by postalrat »

eric_cc wrote: post #149
SahAssar wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because real world assets already have frameworks governing their ownership, and those frameworks generally do not take NFTs into account. If the NFT actually grants you ownership of something tangible (like stock, IP, real estate, etc.) then to make that legally enforceable you need to also sign a traditional contract which makes the NFT pretty pointless. If I bought your house and in addition to all the legal paper…

But in theory, a decentralized framework consisting of smart contracts and NFT’s could work. In such a framework, the NFT would be providing real utility (unlike scammy JPEG NFT’s)

How could it ever be decentralized if it requires laws to enforce?

Re: Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT dropped 99% in value

#227

Post by tablespoon »

koonsolo wrote: post #216
poiuiopkj wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No practical purpose EXCEPT for the ability to easily take assets across borders to leave authoritarian regimes, bringing a form of storing assets to the 2 billion or so unbanked individuals of the world, and comparatively cheap remittances for people sending money back to their families in another country. These are just a few of the incredibly practical use cases that quite literally change people's lives.

X: there are no use cases Y: here are the use cases X&Z: let's downvote and be negative anyway. Welcome the usual crypto discussions on HN. Why do people still bother?

> X: there are no use cases

> Y: here are the use cases

You misunderstand. My gist was there were no practical use cases, and the response was to enumerate some impractical ones. I think the thing that confuses some people is that (like cryptography) some of the biggest problems are on the onramps and offramps, not in the core technology itself.

> X&Z: let's downvote and be negative anyway.

It's right an proper to be negative about something that doesn't really work (when compared against alternatives), especially when that thing is as overhyped as cryptocurrency is.

If it actually worked, the value would be obvious, and wouldn't need to be constantly justified by the kind of contrived use cases that are usually offered.

Re: Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT dropped 99% in value

#228

Post by postalrat »

charcircuit wrote: post #171
throw_m239339 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just like baseball cards. You can certainly see baseball cards (or stamps, Magics cards, whatever) as worthless. The difference being that when you buy a baseball card, (yes a reproducible good, so its value is anybody's guess), you're not buying a link to a baseball card powered by Ethereum, you're buying a tangible product at the very least. To me the NFT is so intangible as a product that clearly its market is a…

Who cares if an asset is tangible? There's really not that much difference between being able to own and show off a CSGO skin vs a baseball card. For stocks most people prefer owning an intangible version of it. Very few people want an actual certificate saying they own it.

Valve could shut down all the counterstrike servers by tomorrow rendering your skin worthless.

The value of my baseball card might fluctuate but at least it's existence doesn't depend on the availability of servers outside my control.

Re: Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT dropped 99% in value

#229

Post by root_axis »

colpabar wrote: post #65
tablespoon wrote: post #24

From another article on the same topic https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/apr/14/twitter-n... : > Man who paid $2.9m for NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet set to lose almost $2.9m > ‘This is the Mona Lisa of the digital world’, says crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi who bought the NFT in March 2021 This is a good example of why so many people don't take cryptocurrency seriously. It full of hype men who spout tr…

This is a genuine question - should anyone take cryptocurrency seriously? To me, the only purpose of it is to make money. It's the stock market, but with less rules, and it's 24/7. People will say that crypto is important because it's decentralized and non-fiat or whatever, with the implication being that it's not controlled by a government. But we have seen time and time again that that isn't true, and if a governme…

It's not even the stock market - buying stocks is an investment into a company, meaning the company has access to more funds which can be used to grow the business and generate more revenue, cryptocurrency trading is just shifting bits around, it doesn't create any new value.

Re: Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT dropped 99% in value

#230

Post by jmrm »

colpabar wrote: post #65
tablespoon wrote: post #24

From another article on the same topic https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/apr/14/twitter-n... : > Man who paid $2.9m for NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet set to lose almost $2.9m > ‘This is the Mona Lisa of the digital world’, says crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi who bought the NFT in March 2021 This is a good example of why so many people don't take cryptocurrency seriously. It full of hype men who spout tr…

This is a genuine question - should anyone take cryptocurrency seriously? To me, the only purpose of it is to make money. It's the stock market, but with less rules, and it's 24/7. People will say that crypto is important because it's decentralized and non-fiat or whatever, with the implication being that it's not controlled by a government. But we have seen time and time again that that isn't true, and if a governme…

For most of the people cryptos are a way to make money or a way to use money for illegal purposes. Outside of that, you'll only find preachers of this tech.

Cryptos now have a lot more control in China, and the European Union is going to force the identification of those who interchange Euros or other currency to/from cryptos, so I don't know how much is going to last the bubble of earning money with that.

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