How exactly is cryptocurrency disconnected from classical economics?
The Tinkerbell Griftopia
171–180 of 251 posts
Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
his company makes the closed source financial infrastructure for digitising cash for multinational corporations, that is made useless by crypto becoming popular. of course he doesnt mention this when writing hit pieces on crypto culture. https://twitter.com/TBSocialist/status/1456963980577153026?s...
Uh, that's the worse citation source I've ever seen? It's a speculative twitter post? Also, what you said is like saying someone working at Stripe felt threatened by crypto. He's still not selling you a product (anywhere I can find in his online presence!) A full decade later, crypto still isn't used for payments except in PR puff pieces, like the El Salvador fiasco. No one working in serious online payments feels th…
http://www.adjoint.io/ is the company
hes not selling me anything, but hes selling to companys who have a choice of the stuff hes making or the stuff others are making as FOSS, and the stuff other people are making is being adopted more than his stuff. I guess that would be annoying.
I do notice how a decade in, the goalposts continue to shift. The millions of users are still nothing, the daily volume of transferred value is nothing, the hundreds of daos and communities are nothing, twitter discord reddit ycombinator, all of them delusional. yes its all just scammers and people being scammed. thats the true reality.
dread it, run from it, destiny still arrives
Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really agree that it's good to go in with a level head. If you highlight the extremes of either "believers" or "non-believers", both sides seem like low effort takes. I bucketed crypto projects into two categories: (1) things that are only possible on crypto networks, and (2) things that people aren't motivated to do on other networks. For example, the US is woefully missing a banking API, especially for consumers.…
Any technological progress obtained from cryptocurrency research will be the most expensive progress ever purchased in human history. The costs come from: - Opportunity cost of having lots of smart people focusing on cryptocurrency who could have been researching medicine, clean energy, or space tech. - Money spent on manufacturing and maintaining the cryptocurrency mining equipment. Those factories could be making o…
Many people in the world don't have access to a functioning financial system- what's the benefit in building one?
Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, some people are selling a lot more art because of NFTs. For one thing, there's only so much space on your walls for prints, but a huge enormous amount of space in your wallet to hold NFTs. Whales / superfans can spend even more than they otherwise could - which isn't a bad thing for artists. Another thing is the immediacy of selling. Tweet little corners of something while you make something, tweet about it when…
> For one thing, there's only so much space on your walls for prints, but a huge enormous amount of space in your wallet to hold NFTs. Whales / superfans can spend even more than they otherwise could - which isn't a bad thing for artists. This is quite silly. Digital art has been a thing for years. By raw numbers, the majority of independent artists these days make a living doing digital art commissions. And yes, to…
Cool! So now there is one more way, especially for artists you'd rather not do commissions.
Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia
#175Yes, the bankster grandpa Dahl is right. Crypto is not for you, it is not for the very wealthy old americans that have build the 'open' web of platforms and sucked the value out of all the corners of the Earth. It's for the rest of us.
You realize that there's literally nothing stopping Old Money from buying their way into cryptocurrency ecosystems and concentrating their wealth there too, yes? In fact it's even easier for wealthy people to speculate like this, because unlike poor people, wealthy people have disposable income. Cryptocurrency is a playground for the wealthy and the model for our futuristic serfdom dominated by a digital aristocracy (a class that will have almost perfect overlap with our modern aristocracy).
Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some people really feel it, I know a few long-term collectors. Some people are into the VR galleries they assemble, others buy non-standard sized displays fit for specific NFTs to display in their homes. It's definitely an odd little community of rich people collecting digital art. And more broadly people feel attachment to their Twitter PFPs and feel like they can't truly use it unless they own it. It's a new social…
How can anyone possibly be considered a "long-term" collector of something so new yet?
It's essentially a state of intention: people buying art to appreciate having it rather than with an intention of selling. Most people in the NFT space are flippers riding bubbles, but a few actual collectors really do exist.
Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some people really feel it, I know a few long-term collectors. Some people are into the VR galleries they assemble, others buy non-standard sized displays fit for specific NFTs to display in their homes. It's definitely an odd little community of rich people collecting digital art. And more broadly people feel attachment to their Twitter PFPs and feel like they can't truly use it unless they own it. It's a new social…
But what is it really that they own? Bragging rights, that they paid for the artist to proclaim them the first (or subsequent) person to own a hash on one of multiple blockchains, that contains a link pointing to an image file of an artwork hosted on a CDN? And the artist can create infinitely more? And the image file might be taken down at any time? And while you can trace the provenance on the blockchain easily eno…
A provenance certificate which is socially interpreted as ownership. Not going to argue whether that's a good or durable interpretation of ownership, just attesting that some people really do feel it.
Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I saved a bunch of that art and can view it any time.
Original copies of (popular) physical art is expensive. Unknown imitations of (popular) physical art is also expensive. Known imitations of (popular) physical art is generally never expensive. Art isn't some magic phenomenon. Many many people know that it has value! They pay a lot of money to exclusively own something that can almost always be trivially copied, not because they care it can be trivially copied, but be…
Most physical art can't be perfectly imitated though. A print is not a perfectly accurate rendition of a painting, or even of a physical drawing.
Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Personally, I think artists getting paid does change the world for the better 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 sur…
"There are still other ways for them to get paid" is not the same thing as "they would in actuality be paid the same amount". I agreed in my message that it was always possible, and yet it wasn't happening. I don't care whether it's theoretically possible that artists could be paid, I care whether they are actually paid. NFTs are actually getting them paid. You seem to be missing, or avoiding, this point. I am not ma…
I am primarily concerned with the technology's value as regards solving problems that actually exist. You know, the way nuclear fission or NVMe storage have value, not the way that Q-Ray Bracelets have the value of being effective at separating fools from their money.
If you're going to argue that Q-Ray Bracelets are valuable, then I do not believe that further discussion on this topic is possible as we live in fundamentally different realities.
Whether or not they are actually making money for artists in a profound way, as you keep asserting, is not an argument I'm willing to engage in since I haven't bothered to look in to the subject. My assertion is that even if they are[0], NFTs are still a broken-window-fallacy solution to the problem, not a real one. As the author of the original article states, this mechanism relies on a shared delusion that NFTs actually mean something and as soon as that delusion evaporates so will the "solution".
[0] I have seen no data one way or the other, so let's steelman and assume you are correct.
Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What's the practical difference in outcome for the artist between selling an NFT and selling a print? With NFTs, the artist gets the money before they're dead!
What stops me from getting paid for selling an NFT of your art?
It wouldn't have any value for lack of actual provenance (you can test this by trying to sell your own copy of Fidenza, please report back).