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The Merge

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Re: The Merge

#111

Post by wanderingbort »

dale_glass wrote: post #109
wanderingbort wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you (the artist) have no presence in NFTs, it’s fake. If you do, then I can trivially verify that you are the minter. Crucially, the person that has the incentive to mint (the artist) also has all they need to establish the provenance of the photo. No 3rd parties, no specialized tools/skills.

Okay, and how do you know whether I have a presence in NFTs? Go and check, and do tell me how you figure it out.

I think you are coming at this the wrong direction.

As a buyer I have to have some compulsion to buy. If that is not “I want to buy an authentic piece tied to an artist” NFTs probably aren’t for you.

With NFTs I can start at either the artist or the piece and trivially connect to the other.

NFTs don’t solve for discovery.

Nor do they provide a root of trust for artist identity. At best they can provide information to some sort of identity system but NFTs by themselves are not a complete solution for that.

As an artist who wants to sell an NFT, the onus is on you to broadcast your presence/address so that your buyers can check provenance. Post it on your Instagram maybe. It doesn’t have to be magical.

Re: The Merge

#112

Post by syntheweave »

flotzam wrote: post #56
TakeBlaster16 wrote: post #8

No mention of sanctions? It's estimated that ~50% of staked value is held by US companies. These companies are going to have to make an impossible choice. Either: 1. Sign transactions coming from the sanctioned addresses, inviting the wrath of OFAC. or: 2. Refuse to sign these transactions. 2a. If between 33% and 66% of the network refuses, the network will penalize dissenters by slashing their staked coins, until th…

> 2b. If > 67% of the network refuses, transactions can be successfully censored. Similar with PoW. For both PoW and PoS, the proper response is to socially coordinate forking out the censoring block producer majority (like with the Bitcoin UASF that was threatened over much less egregious miner misbehavior). PoS improves on PoW here in two ways: 1. Non-censoring PoS block producers can have a tiny meatspace presence…

"Socially coordinating" is how fiat works. It should only be a bootstrapping mechanism towards trustless behaviors, not the mechanism to cancel each other on-chain.

Re: The Merge

#113

Post by thesausageking »

yuan43 wrote: post #34

> Proof of Stake systems (of which they are many in the market already like Solana, Avalanche, etc) are considered more secure because the likelihood of a 51% attack is much lower. I don’t plan to lay out the argument here, but suffice it to say that Ethereum is moving to a consensus mechanism that many consider to be more resistant to attack, making it even more secure than it has been. I don't think so. At best, we…

Ever since Fred pumped $Kin, I have a hard time taking anything he says about crypto seriously. Here he seems to be again talking his book, even when the facts don't agree with him.

Re: The Merge

#114

Post by polygamous_bat »

seibelj wrote: post #80
jjulius wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>... easily charge royalties in perpetuity for resale of their art... Hi. Artist here. I have yet to actually see any example of this occurring with a piece of NFT art. Do you have an example of an NFT that is actively collecting royalties for the artist via resale?

https://opensea.io/collection/nickelodeon-rugrats-heyarnold-... My company is one of the largest NFT companies. This is one of our projects. Millions of dollars in secondaries on OpenSea and our hosted marketplace at https://Nickelodeon.xyz/ We collect all royalties and remit payment to the rights holders which include all artists and creators with residuals on Rugrats, of which there are many. They get their check q…

So, are you saying that you run a centralized third party that is charged with collecting the royalties and passing it on to the artists? Because nowhere in the ERC-721 standard is there a way to differentiate between a "sale" and a "transfer between wallets".

So tell me, please, exactly how "blockchain" is bringing "decentralization" to the art field. I am all ears.

Re: The Merge

#115

Post by brian_cloutier »

globalreset wrote: post #29
randomran01234 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This was not an issue with the old proof of work scheme. Censorship of transactions because of OFAC is already happening in PoW mining. https://twitter.com/takenstheorem/status/1560690035955011585...

Except in in PoW it only means delayed transactions, because only one miner has to "sign off" the block - everyone else accept it passively. A single miner, even with 0.1% mining power is enough to keep the network censorship resistant. In PoS majority of validators has to actively approve a block containing "illegal" transactions, leading to permanent censorship. The exact interpretation of validation vs mining resp…

PoS seems very similar to PoW, and if one is fine (as we seem to think), the other is fine too.

In POW there are only block producers, and producing a block requires actively choosing transactions and transaction ordering.

Ethereum POS includes an additional attestation step where validators confirm that they have seen blocks without exercising any control over the contents of those blocks.

But this is exactly what PoW miners do when they extend the chain: every block is a vote for all previous blocks in the chain.

Re: The Merge

#116

Post by solveit »

klez wrote: post #72
kranke155 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure what you mean. NFTs allow for a market for digital art, in that there's an immutable ledger where artists can say "I am selling 10 'signed artworks' of this piece". Because the ledger is known to be immutable, and it allows for transactions between users, you have a market where there wasn't one before. The problem of authenticating art before this, for a digital artist, was that you HAD to have a gallery do…

That rises another question, imho: who cares? I don't mean that in a dismissive way, I actually mean why is authenticity important or even desirable when using a medium that allows for infinite copies at near-zero marginal cost? It's just not the right medium for it. It would be like expecting to be able to digitally transfer a statue.

This has been mysterious to me for a long time and it still remains mysterious to me, but I have to accept that people do care. This isn't just limited to NFTs, people buy signed copies of things despite signatures being trivial to forge, people buy authentic branded items even when indistinguishable counterfeits are available, people pay more for "original prints" of digital photographs!

In short, people care about provenance. NFTs guarantee provenance for data, even if the process of "attaching" it to a jpg or whatever is a bit clunky. I don't understand why people care so much about provenance, but they do, and NFTs provide a partial solution.

Re: The Merge

#117

Post by randomran01234 »

rufusroflpunch wrote: post #93

The idea that Proof of Stake is more secure against attack is beyond absurd, frankly. However you feel about the energy usage of proof of work consensus mechanisms, they are far more resistant to attack and centralization.

Why? PoW can only afford to be attacked twice. It even has a name: “spawn camping.” In proof of stake, this is pretty easy to defend against repeatedly.

https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html

Re: The Merge

#118

Post by Ruphin »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #107
rufusroflpunch wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think they wouldn’t turn they screw when the time came?

They might, but speculating on what the Gov might do is tough. I was very convinced that Bitcoin and all derivatives would be outright illegal just a few years after they went mainstream, and that has definitely not happened. In a sense every self-hosted bitcoin wallet could be seen as violating payments laws.

Making it illegal to have Bitcoin is not very easy.

What you call a "self-hosted bitcoin wallet" is just knowing some combination of bits that happens to be the private key that gives you the ability to sign transactions for some Bitcoin. How do you make it illegal to know something? What if I tell you my private key, does that mean you are then suddenly violating payments laws? What if you stumble upon it by accident?

Technically any string of 32 bytes is a valid private key that can hold Bitcoin. There just might not be any Bitcoin in the address associated with it at this time. What if I "know" a random string of 32 bytes, am I then suddenly in violation of laws when someone randomly deposits Bitcoin to the corresponding address?

The legal difficulty is that the action of having or holding Bitcoin (or mostly any cryptocurrency) is something that has no physical representation and is purely information based.

Mining or making transactions is a different story altogether. These require, amongst other things, that you send specific digital information across the internet which is certainly something that can be made illegal.

Re: The Merge

#119

Post by wmf »

mypastself wrote: post #110

Can someone clarify the point about expected price action changes for ETH/USD and other pairs? Presumably the author believes a smaller proportion of Ether will be regularly traded than on the PoW system, but will the total staked (i.e. held) amount be sufficient to impact prices significantly? Also, why would we expect stakers to not take their profits on a regular basis? What’s the meaning (and reasoning behind) th…

Also, why would we expect stakers to not take their profits on a regular basis?

Currently it's impossible to unstake so the existing stakers are self-selected hodlers. Longer term some stakers will hodl and some will take profits.

Re: The Merge

#120

Post by seibelj »

polygamous_bat wrote: post #114
seibelj wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://opensea.io/collection/nickelodeon-rugrats-heyarnold-... My company is one of the largest NFT companies. This is one of our projects. Millions of dollars in secondaries on OpenSea and our hosted marketplace at https://Nickelodeon.xyz/ We collect all royalties and remit payment to the rights holders which include all artists and creators with residuals on Rugrats, of which there are many. They get their check q…

So, are you saying that you run a centralized third party that is charged with collecting the royalties and passing it on to the artists? Because nowhere in the ERC-721 standard is there a way to differentiate between a "sale" and a "transfer between wallets". So tell me, please, exactly how "blockchain" is bringing "decentralization" to the art field. I am all ears.

A sale happens in a marketplace. Marketplaces collect royalties and forward them to the address specified. We are indeed a centralized player, just as all NFT creators are centralized entities (i.e. people) but the assets trade on decentralized networks.

I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how all of this works and have a sneering, dismissive affect because this is something you don’t understand embraced by people who don’t care what you think.

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