331–340 of 427 posts
After I learned that NFTs were essentially just signed git commits, I wrote them off as a hilarious grift. I feel bad for the people that were injured, so here's my advice: run away from NFTs and crypto. RUN AWAY!
Not even a signed git commit. But rather, a signed receipt that says you paid for the nft.
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NFTs, and even monkey JPG NFTs, are perfectly sensible when viewed as art projects. (Not as finance: financially, monkey JPG NFTs are rather silly.) And by 'sensible' I mean sensible compared to weird things other people either do for art or spend money on for art. Compare eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_art (and that's far from the most egregious corner).
Arguably Christie's (the auction house) invented the concept of NFT before there were NFTs. I mean, the value of art may be undervalued by society in general , but paintings that sell for hundreds of millions of dollars is just insane. The art collectors are just using art pieces in the same way crypto folks are using NFTs. The only apparent difference is that there's no physical object for NFTs, but the physical obj…
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Wait what, I thought it was at least the hash of the image or something.
No, NFTs technically have nothing to do with images, or files at all. The way it works is that you write a random string and save it on a blockchain, which becomes the NFT. From there, you can use a lookup table to map the NFT to a URL that links to an image that's stored on the owner's server. NFTs are truly the worst of all grifts.
The way which they are mapped to images vary from NFT to NFT.
But let's look at Bored Ape Yacht Club specifically.
Collection https://opensea.io/collection/boredapeyachtclub
Pick a random bored ape. For example #1337.
https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061...
From there we can see the bored ape Ethereum "smart contract"
https://etherscan.io/address/0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061c2e118...
This contract is responsible for minting all of the original Bored Ape NFTs
Click on "contract". And then click "read contract".
Scroll down. There is a method named "tokenURI". It takes an integer as parameter. Let's query it with value "1337" (the id of the bored ape we are interested in knowing about).
Result:
ipfs://QmeSjSinHpPnmXmspMjwiXyN6zS4E9zccariGR3jxcaWtq/1337
Let's visit that URL via an IPFS gateway.
https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmeSjSinHpPnmXmspMjwiXyN6zS...
It contains JSON data.
{"image":"ipfs://QmWjXFUVNjavM4hDzXeQYGXGCXjV86mP7kPEaTeP5bohae","attributes":[{"trait_type":"Background","value":"Yellow"},{"trait_type":"Fur","value":"Dark Brown"},{"trait_type":"Clothes","value":"Bone Necklace"},{"trait_type":"Mouth","value":"Bored Unshaven"},{"trait_type":"Hat","value":"Horns"},{"trait_type":"Eyes","value":"Bloodshot"}]}
ipfs://QmWjXFUVNjavM4hDzXeQYGXGCXjV86mP7kPEaTeP5bohae
And visit that one via our chosen IPFS gateway.
https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmWjXFUVNjavM4hDzXeQYGXGCXj...
So there you have it. Via the Bored Ape smart contract we retrieved the JSON data and image file for Bored Ape #1337 from IPFS.
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+1 I've also got some friends who do sound, lighting, and DJ for anime / furry cons. It's a fun little niche.
Lots of requests for "Hamster Dance"? (Sorry, couldn't resist the pun. No actual offense intended.)
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Fast and fee-less? Does that work on a distributed ledger? Is there some magic I’m missing to make consensus quick and cheap? Micro-transactions were never going to be feasible considering gas fees required to run a sufficiently secure blockchain app. Decentralized? I’m still confused. Has anyone actually solved the Oracle problem with crypto? How are we actually getting decentralization? Anti-spam??????? Ok that’s l…
Block lattice tech has been around for seven years. All your points would be answered by looking into it - it's not a secret. Eg, Nano uses it. It's been working, efficient, safe, fast ( It's tending toward decentralization because there's no mining, no staking, and there was a genuinely fair distribution. Fee-less transactions come with bad actors spamming the network with microscopic transactions, like a DDOS. So,…
Its design flaw is the ORV system requiring someone who just wants the elevator pitch and their life to be wildly more efficient via using digital currency that's faster, safer, cheaper than their debit card having to educate themselves on what-even-is an ORV, how does the voting work, how do you know what a good representative is, and so on. And, as with a lot of the cryptos working on different vectors of what efficiency means, it's also its strength. It's, you know, how it's fast.
So yes, o boy, if people just adopted it, informed themselves about it, and used it in volume "phase 2" could commence and as with crypto it comes in the form of major traffic revealing scalability necessities. Unfortunately who is going to do that to see in X years what the issues are, when there are the grandfather cryptos that do what they do and work how they work (sidestepping the "how they were meant to work/layer2 protocols don't count/cup of coffee as priority or no" dramatics).
And so its largest general population adoption, friction creating flaw is that people do not want to be their own bank. This is absolutely where the smugness from the tech sector comes from regarding the unwashed masses clicking excel macros from email scammers and uninformed people not having a functioning BS-detector and opting in to be the greater fool because they know there is bound to be many more greater fools than themselves.
The other bit that was omitted in your "we fixate on bitcoin and nfts and failures and dismiss the advancements smugly" is how many more declared-better-than cryptos have there been that didn't even make it to the scalability discussion that mature cryptos have and have modified and built systems around the transaction issues?
Case in point, you say "genuinely fair distribution" but that's a massive *citation needed. Back to genpop, they will never think it is fair if they didn't know about it and someone they consider their peer was able to obtain it with relatively less work or cost than they'd have to right now.
One of the key features of bitcoin (and maybe a small handful others) were that there was no ICO, and no opportunity to be unfair past you were either there and aware or you weren't. Now that more people are aware of the space in general, you cannot simply flip the switch without bad actors doing their thing. That era will never happen again, it was those people (or mmm intel agencies) at the forefront of dropping the tech in the wild interacting with it.
That said, there-and-aware with those early cryptos had a relatively massive near decade-long runway. I honestly would not know where to begin with assessing all cryptos around in 2020 to form an opinion on viability for 2030. Those good ol' days had what, 6-12 to sort out and work on?
Between 2018 and 2022 there are around 1,000 dead cryptos alone. I don't have the time to parse them all out and barely have the knowledge to assert that one that is dead should not be and has something worth pursuing.
I don't want my jadedness of being in the space for 15+ years at this point to lead me by the nose, but my bias would definitely be "if it was worth pursuing, one of the big ones' communities would pursue it as it means more value and a better product" (conspiracies about new world order digi-currency agenda aside).
Case in point, NFTs. Those in the know understand the potential value of an NFT and how they're not just "goofy internet jpgs" and have built in versions of systems accomodating them, or, you know, let parallel tech be the guinea pig. I can see use cases for them regarding licensing, but I can also see very little incentive for any entity to lose their centralized power to accomodate a tech that directly usurps it over time.
it was the My Eyes Are on Fire Festival
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> two guys from Florida And that's all I need to know. I avoid buying from, selling to, or doing business with anyone from FL if I can, I've been burnt too many times. I'm not sure if the state attracts shady characters, or produces them, or both.
I would hope that this is a forum where we can do better than broad generalizations about a place with over 20 million people.
Can anyone recommend an insurer where can I take out an insurance policy that covers against this sort of thing and any other weird and random spookie stuff at a distance, in order to cover medical costs and any quality of life issues that result? Some sort of literal insurance policy would make me feel better after reading stories like this. It probably wouldn't be too expensive, people tend to inflate risks based o…
Or temporary disability insurance
After I learned that NFTs were essentially just signed git commits, I wrote them off as a hilarious grift. I feel bad for the people that were injured, so here's my advice: run away from NFTs and crypto. RUN AWAY!
The big difference between git and a blockchain like Bitcoin and Ethereum is how you do "pull requests". On git, usually, there is a designated central repository that is controlled by project maintainers, and when you submit a pull request, they check it, merge it to central, and others get it back from here.
With blockchains, there is no designated central repository, to merge a pull request, you have to win a sort of lottery, commonly by reversing a crypto hash (mining). The more invested you are into the system, the higher the odds. If you win, you show it to the the world, do the merge, and everyone pulls from you. By randomly selecting who does the pull among the most invested limits the chance of one bad actor ruining the system for everyone. In case of a conflict, the branch with the most commits wins, because that's the one with the most "lottery winners" and therefore the most likely to be the right one. To encourage others to merge that pull request, there is usually a reward for those who do (transaction fees).
Technically, it is very sound, just like git is, in a sense. The "proof-of-work" lottery is wasteful in electricity though, and of course, what you do with it is another matter. Just like git can be used for good (ex: linux) or for bad (ex: developing malware).