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At the Bored Ape restaurant, your ApeCoin is no good now

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211–220 of 253 posts

Re: At the Bored Ape restaurant, your ApeCoin is no good now

#211
post #140
post #15

> Perhaps that was what Nguyen was thinking when he spent more than $330,000 on the various ape NFTs on display at his restaurant. Wow. I can't imagine what anyone is thinking when they pay that much to brag about some random blockchain that says they own an arbitrary URL that may or may not link to an image.

How do NFTs work with copyright laws? Does owning an NFT grant you rights and how does that work with copyright law?

I expect NFTs are most analogous to owning a copy of a work, not the copyright. So you pay $330k and you get rights equivalent to prints of a piece of art. This may come with an implied right to publicly display the art, or may not, and that right may be limited in some ways. And, like a print, you can keep and treasure your NFT or re-sell it.

But you don’t own the copyright and can’t make more prints unless there was a separate agreement to that effect.

Re: At the Bored Ape restaurant, your ApeCoin is no good now

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't take a crypto crash, crypto has been a failed currency since BTC hit a dollar... Extreme deflation is arguably more deadly than hyperinflation. If you know that by holding a dollar today, you can get 2 dollars worth of goods tomorrow, why are you going to spend a dollar? Likewise, once Bitcoin went from fractions of a penny to a dollar, what incentive was left to spend it? You could argue an ideological wan…

> If you know that by holding a dollar today, you can get 2 dollars worth of goods tomorrow, why are you going to spend a dollar? Does that mean if you can find a non-defaulting bond that pays higher interest than inflation, the US dollar will completely collapse? Because why would anyone spend $1 when they could get $2 of goods in N years...

First off, if the 5 year treasury rate ever approaches 1000%, I assure you the Fed will collapse.

Second, problems with hyperdeflation and hyperinflation are both rooted in the hyper.

If you can buy a pizza today, or have $10 million dollars in a few years, why buy a pizza?

Third, the issue isn't just deflation, it's specifically deflation of a currency. If you invest $100 in a company, there's a chance it will be $1000 next year. But your $100 will circulate in the meantime and generate value.

Now if instead there was just as good a chance you could put $100 under your mattress, and next year it'd magically have become $1000 despite never having left your grasp... why would anyone ever invest again? You get to keep your money and have it increase in value, there's no incentive to invest or spend any more than you absolutely have to.

But then as people spend less and less, there's less and less economic activity being generated. You stop wanting to pay people so jobs disappear. Eventually you end up in a game of chicken where everyone is scared to spend money.

A BTC based country (fully BTC based, not El Salvador's lip service) would be an utter hellscape devoid of any economic output other than people waiting for their currency to appreciate. Not unlike the real thing...

Re: At the Bored Ape restaurant, your ApeCoin is no good now

#213

I dislike crypto, especially NFTs. But here's my best attempt at understanding. BAYC transfers ownership of IP for the ape you've bought. It's not just a picture of the ape on OpenSean; you can use it. There's something really fascinating about this. It's one character, but it's also broadly part of the larger ecosystem. We're so used to, say, Disney owning IP. But what if you could spend $300k and have a restaurant…

>BAYC transfers ownership of IP for the ape you've bought

>>"pictures of cartoon apes that are procedurally generated by an algorithm"

'Most jurisdictions, including Spain and Germany, state that only works created by a human can be protected by copyright.' https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2017/05/article_0003.h...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/us-copyright-offic...

Re: At the Bored Ape restaurant, your ApeCoin is no good now

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so long as BAYC continue to honor that agreement . And as an owner of a second hand ape you have no legal recourse if they (or their successors, or their receivers during their bankruptcy) decide they no longer want to.

Is this fundamentally different then any other licensing agreement? Presumably if you want more security you'd get a lawyer and sign a contract but it's not something I've ever had to deal with before. If you think the company is going to go bankrupt then you probably wouldn't make the deal to begin with.

If you have purchased a license from a copyright holder, and then they go bust, and the copyright gets picked up in the ensuing fire sale by someone else, you still have the ability to go to the new rightsholder and say ‘hey, those rights were licensed to me, I plan on continuing to exercise them.’

But it is by no means clear that someone who bought an NFT from someone who bought an NFT from someone who bought an NFT from the original copyright holder has any basis for being able to expect the new holder of that copyright to continue to allow them to exercise the terms of the original license agreement made between the original seller and the original buyer.

Re: At the Bored Ape restaurant, your ApeCoin is no good now

#216
post #127
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not fully anonymous even WITH crypto. They have call centers. Banning crypto won't make ransomware go away, it will just increase the cost of ransom.

> Banning crypto won't make ransomware go away, it will just increase the cost of ransom. That must be why ransomware demands were so much higher in the pre-bitcoin era. Unless you're including the cost of sending a cargo jet full of cash or gold halfway around the world?

Before bitcoin was still the early days of ransomware. It existed mostly as tech support scams. Now that the floodgates have been opened ransoms will go back to being high-risk western union payments and will be much higher. You can't put the cat back in the bag.

Re: At the Bored Ape restaurant, your ApeCoin is no good now

#217
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's more on simply poor cell service if anything at all though no? The tech even then seemingly worked for you then. Your anecdotal is comparable to saying students at a college not being able to add one another on Facebook in it's early days, because the campus Wi-Fi was on the fritz.

Yes, but in real life blame doesn't matter. What matters is the alternative (a hardwired credit card terminal or cash) would've worked, and this didn't.

If you were going to talk about the beginning of the movement, and then compare it to a credit card. . Consider his this would have worked at the beginning of the credit card movement. You would have pulled out your triplicate form and your credit card imprinter and basically made your IOUs that way... And then mailed them in!

Re: At the Bored Ape restaurant, your ApeCoin is no good now

#218
post #15

> Perhaps that was what Nguyen was thinking when he spent more than $330,000 on the various ape NFTs on display at his restaurant. Wow. I can't imagine what anyone is thinking when they pay that much to brag about some random blockchain that says they own an arbitrary URL that may or may not link to an image.

Reminds me of that service that would let you “name” a star

Re: At the Bored Ape restaurant, your ApeCoin is no good now

#219
post #53

Reminds me of a time that I played a Bitcoin poker game at some Google VP's place up in the hills with Charlie Lee and a few other early crypto luminaries in 2014. It took us over an hour to figure out sending BTC to the "buy-in" pot because most of us had 2FA enabled on our Coinbase accounts and the cell reception was so bad at that we couldn't get our confirmation texts. We ended up writing IOUs on a sheet of paper…

> We ended up writing IOUs on a sheet of paper.

I imagine that the ancient version of this story is exactly how money began in the first place. "Man, it was just too hard to coordinate who got how many cows for the rocks, we just wrote a bunch of IOUs"

Re: At the Bored Ape restaurant, your ApeCoin is no good now

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's rapidly changing. Considering that Bitcoin has the potential to help more than it hurts (developing countries don't have to plan growth at the barrel of a Western gun), there's an incentive to start moving in the direction of making it a standard. See Central African Republic and El Salvador. Countries are waking up to the mafia operation that is the IMF and its favorite weapon, the dollar. Because it's still…

> See Central African Republic and El Salvador. Countries are waking up to the mafia operation that is the IMF and its favorite weapon, the dollar. I'm not an economist, but doesn't the IMF use a basket of currencies called SDRs instead of dollars? And isn't the IMF owned by member countries? Interestingly, El Salvador still owns more IMF shares than Bitcoin. - El Salvador Bitcoin: 49million USD after compunding for…

> doesn't the IMF use a basket of currencies called SDRs instead of dollars

Yes, which are just claims on that basket of currencies, the U.S. Dollar being the majority currency (in the current 5 year basket 43.38% with the next closest being the Euro at 30.93%). My point was admittedly hyperbolic, but as the majority currency in the SDR basket (and the world reserve currency) the USD has both voting and trade sway as countries need it to pay debts and acquire resources.

As for governance, U.S. votes account for over 16% (the greatest shareholder of votes) with the next closest being China at 6%. In effect, the U.S. has a soft-monopoly over the basket as the stated requirements for ranking/inclusion "take into account their current prominence in terms of international trade and national foreign exchange reserves."

Combine that with the U.S. military/intelligence threat, NATO threat, and all of the other tentacles of U.S. hegemony and its currency is—for all intents and purposes—a weapon.

Something like Bitcoin is a significant enough threat that the IMF as steered by the U.S. is incentivized to dismiss it (and has [1]).

As for El Salvador's holdings, well, yeah. Even as a Bitcoin maximalist I'd think Bukele were putting his country in a dangerous position short-term if he went all in as other countries would just threaten to cut them off from resources/aid (see link which makes my point).

A full-blown transition to Bitcoin is going to need enough countries with tradeable resources to start accepting it as payment. Again, we're in the early days of the transition away from state currencies. The real battle will be when they try to rug pull everyone with CBDCs [2] (which is precisely when the intelligent but timid will realize that Bitcoin is the only option to preserve personal/state sovereignty).

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/fbf9aef0-453f-4e61-bd83-ff2b2bc92...

[2] https://twitter.com/martybent/status/1537946342890168323?s=2...

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