The Tinkerbell Griftopia • Hacker News Board

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#21

Post by danielvf » Fri, Nov 19, 2021, 5:44 PM UTC

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 - and scammers - and crazy people chasing a 100x buck - and more scammers. And even ignoring the scams, it's like living in an alternate Alice-in-Wonderland world where the rules of normal physics, normal economics, and normal society no longer seem to apply. It is truly a frothing zoo of non-normality.

And yet I'm not a "skeptic" either. There are really, really hard technological problems out there, and there are really wonderful people working on them. In the middle of the economic silliness, there's a lot of new things around groups and economics being tried. And amidst the flurry of insanity in NFT world, there is some genuinely good art being created.

For example, take the stuff this person creates (https://tylerxhobbs.com/fidenza). The process of making it is exactly the kind of stuff hackernews loves, and it is genuinely good art. It's stuff I put on the wall. The whole game around who gets to pay a stupid amount of money to say they own it (https://opensea.io/assets/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aeba...) of them doesn't diminish the fact that art has been created, and the art can be enjoyed anyone.

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 software proving with billions of dollars on the line, new programming languages, new ways of scaling consensus, and lots of art being created.

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#22

Post by Jtsummers » Fri, Nov 19, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

lostcolony wrote: post #19

casi18 wrote: post #4

> "Information doesn't want to be free anymore" “Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive....That tension will not go away” - Stuart Brand Think about the whole quote and NFTs will make more sense to you. NFT != DRM go wild, right click and torrent. i'll send you my nft images myself if you want them. the signatures and the economic security of that signature taking place is valuable. ther…

If NFTs get the economics right, then there is literally no need for any sort of IP law when it comes to digital assets. After all, the profitable thing is proof of ownership, not the good. And yet, no one is paying (to grab a software company out of a hat) Oracle for the Oracle "name". They're paying for the software. The closest we have is paying for "proof of authenticity", because that belied a level of quality,…

What can you do with the proof of ownership of a digital asset if everyone else can copy it and ignore that proof of ownership? It's like starting with DRM and saying, "Oh yeah, we don't encrypt it, we just trust you not to violate our terms. Now pay up."

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#23

Post by firloop » Fri, Nov 19, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #7

Anyway here you go https://thenftbay.org/description.html https://thenftbay.org/ You can have all the NFTs in existence without having to wear out your right click button. We can all be "rich"

Turns out that torrent is mostly full of zeroes: https://github.com/ghuntley/thenftbay.org/issues/9

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#24

Post by lostcolony » Fri, Nov 19, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

casi18 wrote: post #17

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #11

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…

'people buying NFTs are footing the bill for you to have that free information'

Where? All I see is people paying for works after the fact, that no one would pay for -except- buying into the idea of an NFT.

Where are the NFTs being sold for desirable creative works -prior- to their creation and distribution? Show me a movie being shot, by names good enough that they could otherwise sell tickets, that will release freely to everyone that was funded by selling an NFT to it, say.

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#25

Post by gowld » Fri, Nov 19, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

casi18 wrote: post #17

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #11

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…

NFTs aren't funding art in any substantial. They are funding some people playing the NFT/status game. People making art are supported by Patreon, commissions, etc.

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#26

Post by zepto » Fri, Nov 19, 2021, 5:46 PM UTC

convexfunction wrote: post #14

Very weird to frame crypto as contrasting with "an open source culture that, at least aspirationally, built software around ideas of abundance, post-scarcity, universal access, and equality". Were the "older grizzled engineers" all literal communists or what?

Nothing weird about it. Crypto / web3 is about financializing everything. I.e, making everything about money.

The goal is to create a gamified world in which all human interactions are controlled via financial incentives.

The contrast is not communism, but rather the current gift economy model of open source, where people offer what they want out of intrinsic motivation rather than the desire to accumulate coins in a ledger.

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#27

Post by NikolaeVarius » Fri, Nov 19, 2021, 5:46 PM UTC

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…

Well, I saved a bunch of that art and can view it any time.

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#28

Post by NikolaeVarius » Fri, Nov 19, 2021, 5:46 PM UTC

firloop wrote: post #23

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #7

Anyway here you go https://thenftbay.org/description.html https://thenftbay.org/ You can have all the NFTs in existence without having to wear out your right click button. We can all be "rich"

Turns out that torrent is mostly full of zeroes: https://github.com/ghuntley/thenftbay.org/issues/9

Issue was deleted.

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#29

Post by zepto » Fri, Nov 19, 2021, 5:46 PM UTC

reedf1 wrote: post #10

It's hard to take takes like this seriously when they get the basic premise wrong. It's flowery and cute but its a lot of writing with very little substance.

It’s very hard to take seriously critiques that say a premise is wrong but are unable to say what that wrong premise actually is.

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#30

Post by danielvf » Fri, Nov 19, 2021, 5:49 PM UTC

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #27

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…

Well, I saved a bunch of that art and can view it any time.

Open source funding hits art. Anyone can view it and get the benefit of doing so, the artist got paid to create, somebody gets bragging rights. Everybody wins.