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The Merge

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21–30 of 184 posts

Re: The Merge

#21
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NFTs work and they allow artists to - make money off digital art in a global permissionless market (didn’t exist before) - easily charge royalties in perpetuity for resale of their art Some aspects of DeFi - the ones that were properly audited and whose function is not a ponzi derivative - work absolutely fine. Compound, AAVE, Uniswap, Curve Finance.

> - easily charge royalties in perpetuity for resale of their art Can they really? The art itself is not recorded on any blockchain. Just the link and/or hash can be stored there because of costs. Both can change without noticeably modifying the art. Thus a working legal system is still required and blockchain does not provide any meaningful benefit over a standard contract.

Those two things don’t cancel each other out.

The art being recorded on a blockchain or not doesn’t matter - what you’re selling in an NFT is a signature not the art. An NFT is a decoupling of the art and the signature, because digital art is infinitely reproducible. The NFT introduces scarcity - but only for an authentic signature (which can’t be faked) not the digital art itself.

And want you’re saying is not necessarily true - my understanding is that some markets do place the art on IPFS, but I’d have to look into it’s exact working to know for sure.

But I believe for the old Hic et Nunc that was the case.

In this particular case - it is better than a standard contract because the previous method of authenticating work is hugely expensive for the artist and has immense gatekeeping. Minting an NFT takes 30 seconds. Getting you work into an art gallery takes months if not years of battling and requires other people to make the decision whether they want your art in their sales space or not. In crypto you can just do it yourself and figure out your own personal authentication method (usually twitter).

Re: The Merge

#23
post #18

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…

Re 2b: While the scenario you're outlining certainly isn't ideal, I don't think it's fair to say that the transactions are "censored". All they can do is not validate blocks with this transactions in them. It's only a matter of time though before a block is validated by someone not under the purview by OFAC.

[deleted]

Re: The Merge

#24
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im not sure what you mean by perpetual controversy either. What I mean by “less terrible” is socially, not technically. Centralised datacenter based development leads to digital feudalism, where the owners of the datacenters take control of the “digital land” and build moats around them (often fake, imaginary - see how text messaging has no interoperability anymore when 10 years ago it did) In blokchain / decentralis…

- Who pays for the low latency high capacity data storage costs? - The ad-model subsidizes almost all costs for the end user. I couldn't even DREAM of storing an arbitrary amount of photos and videos and text spanning years, highly available all the time, ability to search and communicate with anybody etc for free without this. There are huge costs involved with this that the "data moat" subsidizes. Note that I'm not…

Those are all great questions. I honestly don’t expect rich media to be stored on chain for a long, long time - not unless some Pied Piper type solution shows up!

On monetisation structures - no idea, the only thing blockchain does is build a permissionless system where people will be able to experiment wildly with different models. Like Jobs said when he launched the iPhone “I’m excited about the stuff we don’t know about” more than what’s out there now (Ethereum being at best now a rough Beta project).

Certainly the monetisation of digital art has changed a lot of what some of my favourite 3D artists have been doing - they no longer compete for likes on Instagram (worthless) but actively promote their NFTs from which they can make good money out of. They are producing the exact same kind of output - digital art - but NFTs are quietly taking over the whole space and changing the whole economic structure.

Re: The Merge

#25

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…

> 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...

Re: The Merge

#27
post #18

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…

Re 2b: While the scenario you're outlining certainly isn't ideal, I don't think it's fair to say that the transactions are "censored". All they can do is not validate blocks with this transactions in them. It's only a matter of time though before a block is validated by someone not under the purview by OFAC.

All blocks are voted on by the validators. If 67% of the network is censoring transactions, someone else could not just pop in and validate a block, because they would not have 67% of the votes.

Re: The Merge

#28

People should really try to understand what’s happening in blockchain. Eventually the computational capacity will reach the levels that virtually any app can be replicated inside of it, with a much lower fee for the developers/owners/users and often having full open source code for the components. The blockchain development environment is fundamentally less terrible than the centralised database world, and eventually…

> Eventually the computational capacity will reach the levels that virtually any app can be replicated inside of it, with a much lower fee for the developers/owners and having full open source code. How do you figure? Skilled developers have struggled to efficiently scale an application from one to two rack servers connected with Infiniband, never mind a hodgepodge of heterogeneous hardware and WAN interconnects runn…

I assume something like Moore’s Law applies tbh.

I agree of course it makes order of magnitude slower. The point is - how long until this slow is good enough to perform immensely useful things, with a better distribution of wealth generation than the current datacenter model?

I would say in the next 5 years we’ll start seeing breakthrough apps.

Like I said above I don’t expect everything ever to go on chain in the near future, you can have very useful apps that only touch on chain for the truly necessary. Even doing the “truly necessary” was painful until very recently, but now with Ethereum Layer 2 solutions, Algorand, Polkadot and Solana, it’s becoming more and more accessible over time.

Re: The Merge

#29

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…

> 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 responsibility in face of law and passive vs active is fuzzy , but it leaves miners is better legal position.

Re: The Merge

#30
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - easily charge royalties in perpetuity for resale of their art Can they really? The art itself is not recorded on any blockchain. Just the link and/or hash can be stored there because of costs. Both can change without noticeably modifying the art. Thus a working legal system is still required and blockchain does not provide any meaningful benefit over a standard contract.

Those two things don’t cancel each other out. The art being recorded on a blockchain or not doesn’t matter - what you’re selling in an NFT is a signature not the art. An NFT is a decoupling of the art and the signature, because digital art is infinitely reproducible. The NFT introduces scarcity - but only for an authentic signature (which can’t be faked) not the digital art itself. And want you’re saying is not neces…

Decoupling of the art and the signature??? Do you read what you write before you write it?

There’s a reason NFTs are easy and gallery placements are hard: one has value

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