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The Tinkerbell Griftopia

stephendiehl.com

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Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#111

Post by Tossrock »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #73
casi18 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have every single game ever made for every console generation from 1978 through 2002. This cost me next to nothing I think you are confusing the cost of production of these things, and the cost to you personally. There is a cost (material) and scarcity(human time) involved in making things. I think we have got away as a society with not paying artists and musicians and demanding their content be free and "post-sc…

> I think you are confusing the cost of production of these things, and the cost to you personally. No, I'm not. The fact that artists need to be paid for their work so they can continue to exist within world of scarcity economics is orthogonal to the fact that information can be copied and disseminated for an effective zero-cost. Let me put it this way: if, instead of minting and purchasing an NFT, the potential buy…

So why didn't people do that? There has been the option to give artists money forever, and yet as a society, we generally haven't. NFTs are demonstrably transferring massive amounts of wealth from crypto bros with too much money to artists who need it. It's revolutionary because _it's actually happening_. Even though it was theoretically possible in the past, _people didn't actually do it_. The traditional art market doesn't care about an artist until they're dead. The value of NFTs is that a massive new market for art, from living artists, has been created ex nihilo.

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#113

Post by trevyn »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #94
trevyn wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there exist people who will donate crypto but not "normal money". Same reason why there are charities that accept cars, canned food, christmas trees, etc.

That kinda just reinforces the point though that all of this cryptononsense is a scam. Sure, here's a group exploiting Bitcoin Iditiots LLC for a good cause, but they're still exploiting.

It's completely orthogonal to whatever you believe about crypto.

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#114

Post by iskander »

AlexandrB wrote: post #92
iskander wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then that infrastructure manages to survive and continue to provide value even after the cryptocurrency house of cards collapses. That's my optimistic forecast for what happens after the current speculative bubble pops. We'll be left with e.g. universal sign-on via crypto wallet that's not owned by any corporation and can be used for cryptographic signature / voting / &c. We'll also have increasingly robust decentr…

> That's my optimistic forecast for what happens after the current speculative bubble pops. We'll be left with e.g. universal sign-on via crypto wallet that's not owned by any corporation and can be used for cryptographic signature / voting / &c. This seems entirely self-contradictory. How do you certify that a nominally anonymous cryptographic ID represents a particular individual for the purposes of signature/votin…

Why assume you need a pseudonymous persona to map onto a real world ID? Check out how DAO proposals work at e.g. https://gitcoin.co/grants/

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#116

Post by trevyn »

pphysch wrote: post #98
trevyn wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the key insight in a post-scarcity environment, though: Beyond food and basic shelter, everything is lulz. A lot of people didn't grow up in that environment of abundance, so they still think that "profit" is serious business and not lulz, but then they use that profit for big houses or yachts or children or other lulz anyway.

Is it lulz, or is it a desperate attempt to find a financial/economic foothold when traditional footholds (bearable careers, houses, etc.) are increasingly out of reach for Millennials and onward?

The traditional footholds are no longer relevant.

Millennials and onward live on their phones, not in a house or at a workplace.

From the traditional perspective, this seems like a loss.

From another perspective, it's not.

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#117

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

Tossrock wrote: post #111
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think you are confusing the cost of production of these things, and the cost to you personally. No, I'm not. The fact that artists need to be paid for their work so they can continue to exist within world of scarcity economics is orthogonal to the fact that information can be copied and disseminated for an effective zero-cost. Let me put it this way: if, instead of minting and purchasing an NFT, the potential buy…

So why didn't people do that? There has been the option to give artists money forever, and yet as a society, we generally haven't. NFTs are demonstrably transferring massive amounts of wealth from crypto bros with too much money to artists who need it. It's revolutionary because _it's actually happening_. Even though it was theoretically possible in the past, _people didn't actually do it_. The traditional art market…

So your argument isn't that this is a useful and revolutionary tool that will change the world for the better, your argument is that it is a useful way for artists to exploit idiots? A.K.A, a scam?

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#118

Post by woah »

notpachet wrote: post #66
woah wrote: post #12

This dude really pumps out the rambly anti-crypto takes. Too bad HN upvotes are not a cryptocurrency or he'd be rich

Too bad being rich is such a temptation to people, or he'd probably not have to spend time writing these anti-crypto takes decrying the rampant greed that's undermining the technical foundations of internet culture.

A huge number of people are now paid to work full time on the cryptography, networking, and distributed systems challenges of creating decentralized tech, and open sourcing most of their work. This is paid for by cryptocurrency siphoning off a tiny sliver of transaction volume from the opaque, cronyist, closed source traditional financial system.

You want to go back to the old days where decentralized technologies were mostly created as a cute hobby by engineers getting rich off surveillance technology, or by phd students studying to get a job getting rich off surveillance technology?

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#119

Post by _nhynes »

s5300 wrote: post #99
iskander wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have to participate a bit in the non-speculative side to get a feel for the culture and social movement that's brewing there. New entrants aren't the ones to watch since they're probably jumping in to make money, look to the increasing interest in DAOs as social coordination mechanisms, they will keep evolving to empower groups of individuals to have outsized impacts.

> feel for the culture and social movement that's brewing there. It might be slightly cool if they weren’t 99% either grifters or people who can’t actually do anything. Like, even basic programming that would actually make something real. The current “culture” is literally just saying a lot of words and making absolutely zero point. Sort of like Kanye said “No one knows what it means, but it's provocative Gets the pe…

> “No one knows what it means, but it's provocative. Gets the people going”

This is actually a high quality quote from Blades of Glory, a high quality film. Apt reference either way, though.

https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Blades_of_Glory_(film)

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#120

Post by mysecretaccount »

Kapura wrote: post #81
danielvf wrote: post #21

I work in the crypto industry right now - my job is to keep bad guys from stealing XXX millions of dollars. I've also worked on a team that has done the tech side of several record breaking NFT's sales. And I've sold my own NFTS for fun, and strangers have bought them (wat!). I'm not a "believer". Crypto is indeed full of idiots - and scammers - and crazy people who will say anything to see the token they hold go up…

> It's easy, when you see lots of people making absurd claims, to go beyond just refuting those claims, and to slip into purely dismissing everything without ever checking to see if there's something of value there. > But there is good, interesting stuff going underneath the madness frothing on twitter around crypto. Deep behind the apparent wall of film-flam artists, there's work going on in super weird math, formal…

Remove "drunk" from that tweet and the opposite point is made: why must we demand that a thing is all bad or all good?

Edit: not sure why this is being downvoted. I am not defending NFTs, just saying that a comparison to something clearly wrong like drunk driving needs to be established with more evidence than hyperlinking dril.

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