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Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore

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Re: Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore

#91

Post by jimmySixDOF »

petesergeant wrote: post #5

For anyone else who missed it the first time around, here's Neal Stephenson originally being keen on crypto-currency: https://www.lamina1.com/

Which also includes Tony Parisi, a pioneer of the XR space going back to VRML. I am not sure if the article is as concrete as the headline suggests, but they did push back a conference date that was supposed to have been earlier this month and are still invitation sandboxed last I heard. There is a lot of the interop work going on for VRM avatar portability issues [1] loosely tied up with progress on glTF/USD extensions at standard setting orgs like the Metaverse Standards Forum [2] so something will happen in this area even if it's not Lamina1 who are at least well positioned.

[1] https://github.com/M3-org/avatar-interop

[2] https://metaverse-standards.org/

Re: Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore

#92

Post by WeylandYutani »

badcppdev wrote: post #9

Anyone who has read Cryptonomicon should remember that the hero protagonists went to a lot of effort to secure a large mass of gold to 'back' the currency they wanted to create. The Baroque Trilogy is less clear as Isaac Newton mints new currency. Does that mean that perhaps Stephenson's opinions were always that currency needs to be backed by something whether it is gold or national borders.

If you can't use a currency to pay bills or mortgage it's pretty useless.

Re: Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore

#93

Post by taeric »

senthil_rajasek wrote: post #66
taeric wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't feel that is changing my point at all? It is the value others put in that paper that makes it worth trading.

The value of paper money is in it's utility as a transaction aid. It has currency.

Right, I'm not really trying to get into an economics debate about currency. It is a far more nuanced topic than I care to discuss and is heavily "by definition" depending on when/where you are. (In particular, the easy "stupid" hypotheticals usually just boil down to strength of the one arguing.)

My point here was largely that I don't get where Stephenson was trying to argue. Even some of the points made in the slides are somewhat silly. If Jack's family could have sold their home to get enough money to build a new one and have food, they would have done so. But, of course, that wasn't the story. So trying to nitpick odd choices there are post-hoc justifications.

Are we just wanting to beat up on the silliness of scarcity in video game items? I mean, I'm all for that. It is silly. It is also silly that people are willing to pay money for the items. But that happens with or without market wide scarcity. (Just see the items in Candy Crush and its ilk.)

Re: Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore

#94

Post by JohnFen »

drexlspivey wrote: post #63
swarnie wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People still do that? I thought we all collectively agreed it was dumb 18 months ago.

They are doing it on bitcoin now by storing the whole image data in a transaction. Someone minted a full block (4MB) NFT yesterday. Since these transactions are considered non-standard and won’t be propagated by nodes they have to go directly to the miner out of band. The 4MB paid no transaction fee put payed the miner $18000 privately

That doesn't make it any less stupid.

Re: Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore

#95

Post by patapong »

hoherd wrote: post #39
badcppdev wrote: post #9

Anyone who has read Cryptonomicon should remember that the hero protagonists went to a lot of effort to secure a large mass of gold to 'back' the currency they wanted to create. The Baroque Trilogy is less clear as Isaac Newton mints new currency. Does that mean that perhaps Stephenson's opinions were always that currency needs to be backed by something whether it is gold or national borders.

Don't forget Reamde: > It didn’t take a huge amount of acumen, then, to understand that the value of virtual gold in the game world could be made stable in a directly analogous way: namely, by forcing players to expend a certain amount of time and effort to extract a certain amount of virtual gold (or silver, or diamonds, or various other mythical and magical elements and gems that the Creatives would later add to th…

Also related, from the Diamond Age:

> The media net was designed from the ground up to provide privacy and security, so that people could use it to transfer money. That's one reason the nationstates collapsed-as soon as the media grid was up and running, financial transactions could no longer be monitored by governments, and the tax collection systems got fubared.

Re: Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore

#96

Post by airstrike »

JohnFen wrote: post #70
Y_Y wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real Newton worked at the mint too, it may not necessarily represent Stephenson's views. Doesn't Snow Crash have hyperinflation followed by a plethora of private fiat currencies?

It does, yes. I think a lot of people haven't read the book or have forgotten that the world of Snow Crash is an extreme dystopia -- certainly not the sort of world most people want to live in. That's why I was so baffled as to why Facebook glommed on to the term "metaverse" with such fervor. The "metaverse" comes from that book, and is a major aspect of the dystopia. The term does not have positive connotations.

So does "avatar", tbh

Re: Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore

#97

Post by leppr »

arcticbull wrote: post #64
leppr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Wolf of Wall Street" types and various "crypto-bros" didn't "ruin it for everyone". They tarnished the connotation of the word "cryptocurrency", and wasted a lot of people of a lot of money. But their work has been mostly orthogonal to the real work on decentralized networks being done. > The only use-case for it now is for the criminal underworld This conclusion doesn't follow, neither logically nor empirically…

It's been 14 years, billions in investment and roughly speaking zero non-criminal usage and no real-world killer use cases. That's just fact. Time to move on.

If anything, crypto at least seems to indirectly put food on your table, articbull. I would find it hard to believe you don't get any compensation from religiously covering every HN comment sections about crypto with misinformation. Surely your motives can't simply be the fear of being out of a job if bigtech fades into irrelevance. AI would logically be a way bigger threat to your occupation.

Here are some stats for any passerby who might be convinced to think crypto really has ~zero non-criminal usage [1]. Surely calling 5-25% of many countries' populations criminals (including the US), should be relegated to a fringe extremist view.

[1] https://triple-a.io/crypto-ownership-data/

Re: Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore

#98

Post by kkielhofner »

arcticbull wrote: post #64
leppr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Wolf of Wall Street" types and various "crypto-bros" didn't "ruin it for everyone". They tarnished the connotation of the word "cryptocurrency", and wasted a lot of people of a lot of money. But their work has been mostly orthogonal to the real work on decentralized networks being done. > The only use-case for it now is for the criminal underworld This conclusion doesn't follow, neither logically nor empirically…

It's been 14 years, billions in investment and roughly speaking zero non-criminal usage and no real-world killer use cases. That's just fact. Time to move on.

Thank you for succinctly saying what takes me multiple paragraphs.

One nitpick - it’s easily $10s of billions of in investment, more than likely approaching or surpassing $100s of billions.

A16Z alone has raised roughly $10b. Throw in other big VCs, a bunch of coin/crypto specific funds, likely thousands or tens of thousands of angel/seed rounds we’ve never heard of capitalizing on the hype (or just outright frauds), initial coin allocations (the Ethereum foundation alone had over $1b last I looked), etc, etc. Then there’s trying to figure how to “value” “investment” in things like ICOs and ICO 2.0 stuff like NFTs, etc.

Not to mention the tendency for crypto projects to be outright frauds from the start. OneCoin alone brought in $4b in what could be characterized as “investment” from the perspective of the victims. One incomplete analysis[0] shows this specific category of frauds (of which there are many in crypto) to be at least $26b in total.

It’s been 14 years, hundreds of billions in investment and roughly speaking zero non-criminal usage and no real-world killer use cases. That’s just fact. Time to move on.

[0] - https://www.comparitech.com/crypto/cryptocurrency-scams/

Re: Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore

#99

Post by JohnFen »

soiler wrote: post #7

This isn't about cryptocurrency at all. It's about the obviously bad idea of transferable digital in-game goods [sold for cryptocurrency]. You don't need the crypto part to see why it's not a good idea, although the model described here (selling loot to other players?) is not the extremely silly one I've heard more often (buy a CSGO skin and wear it in other games!).

The part I never understood about the concept of transferrable in-game goods is -- why bring crypto into it? I don't see how the blockchain solves any of the difficulties with the idea, either for the players or for any companies who are on-board with it.

I also don't see why any of the companies would be on-board with it, given that accomplishing it would take a lot of development effort for little reward, and the game companies are in this business to maximize their reward.

Re: Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore

#100

Post by Y_Y »

JohnFen wrote: post #70
Y_Y wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real Newton worked at the mint too, it may not necessarily represent Stephenson's views. Doesn't Snow Crash have hyperinflation followed by a plethora of private fiat currencies?

It does, yes. I think a lot of people haven't read the book or have forgotten that the world of Snow Crash is an extreme dystopia -- certainly not the sort of world most people want to live in. That's why I was so baffled as to why Facebook glommed on to the term "metaverse" with such fervor. The "metaverse" comes from that book, and is a major aspect of the dystopia. The term does not have positive connotations.

You make a good point, although I might prefer to live in Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong than in seventeenth century England.
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