131–140 of 251 posts
>But unlike say the eternal emacs/vim war, the divisions on this topic are entirely philosophical and about culture instead of technology. What? My problem with "crypto assets" is that "blockchains" are outperformed by a System/360 while costing billions of dollars to run and drawing about the same power as all datacenters in the world put together. The fact that I like Star Trek is irrelevant.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the signatures and the economic security of that signature taking place is valuable Except, it isn't. What is the point in having a certificate of ownership of a resource so un-scare that it is practically free? We have achieved post-scarcity of information, and people are desperately trying to cram scarcity-based economics back into it because that's all our society knows how to deal with. We should instead be wor…
People need to be paid to do the work, so they can eat and pay rent. We dont actually live in a post scarcity star trek world. So we find a way that people can be paid yet the information and content can remain free to everyone. It seems like lots of people like this. For some reason some people really really hate that other people are willing to pay to make content freely available to them. The people buying NFTs ar…
We don't have matter replicators, or fusion reactors, but we've had sufficient technology to reliably give every living human a comfortable and safe existence since the early 1960s at the latest (see Murray Bookchin's "Post-Scarcity Anarchism" (1968)). Tellingly, we (collectively) choose not to. Instead, we're getting Gibson's Jackpot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So are you defending drunk driving because it helps people get to work on time?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I'm not convinced this dialog is in good faith, but no, my argument is that it is a way for artists to get paid, at a much larger scale than they have in the past. Personally, I think artists getting paid does change the world for the better, but I suppose that's open to disagreement. I'm not sure which part of that you think is a scam - are the people buying the NFTs being misled? Is the product sold not what was cl…
I don't disagree, but if it weren't for NFTs there are still other ways for them to get paid. Hell, there are still other ways to scam rich idiots for that matter. Point is, it isn't the technology of NFTs getting them paid, it's the sociology around it. My contention is that the technology itself brings us nothing of value.
> I'm not sure which part of that you think is a scam - are the people buying the NFTs being misled? Is the product sold not what was claimed?
Yes. NFTs talk about "ownership" of some work, but that's the lie. No one has any ownership in any meaningful sense conferred by the technology of NFTs. I can have the exact same thing your NFT points to; hell, I can even mint my own NFT that points to it. If I bribe the artist I can probably get them to vouch for mine being the "legitimate" one. The NFT is meaningless. It's the digital equivalent of the star name registry scam. Even if we take the NFT to be backed by some legal contract entitling the "owner" to actual factual copyright, that isn't enabled by NFT tech, it's enabled by governments and treaties and has been functioning for hundreds of years without cryptographically secure anything and, in fact, depends on so many systems that are not cryptographically secure and decentralized that adding those things into the mix only makes it more difficult to work within that system.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I saved a bunch of that art and can view it any time.
That's kinda the point. The "collector" can feel like they own it -- using an idiosyncratic new definition of ownership that you don't really have to agree with but other collectors/speculators/crypto peoplke also feel is real. The artist gets paid (kinda rare for art, much less digital art), everyone else can enjoy their artistic output. System working as designed.
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 is good art, and thanks for the link, I hadn't heard of them before.
But I don't see what the NFT aspect adds. They've been creating art for years. Are they creating more art because of NFTs? What's the practical difference in outcome for the artist between selling an NFT and selling a print?
The thing is, there isn't a bigger grifter than Stephen Diehl.
You can just admit you dont like that he casts shade on stuff you like
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.