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The Tinkerbell Griftopia

stephendiehl.com

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Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#201

Post by _dain_ »

Kapura wrote: post #81
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…

> 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…

is the dril tweet even wrong though?

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#202

Post by iskander »

neilk wrote: post #192
iskander wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have to participate a bit in the non-speculative side to get a feel for the culture and social movement that's brewing there. New entrants aren't the ones to watch since they're probably jumping in to make money, look to the increasing interest in DAOs as social coordination mechanisms, they will keep evolving to empower groups of individuals to have outsized impacts.

What are some non-speculative places where one can get into this?

It depends on your interests, I just joined a decentralized biotech discord where people are exploring alternative funding mechanisms for both non-profit science and biotech startups. There are quite a few art discords/communities that are focused on the actual art (and not on resale prices).

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#203

Post by RyanCavanaugh »

cwkoss wrote: post #184

There are several major issues with NFTs but I don't think this article identifies any of them: - NFTs are not durable. All of the implementations I've seen are trading "ownership" of URLs that rely on DNS and WHOIS. URL is nice for convenience feature, but they should at least include file hashes, ideally multiple perceptual hashes as well. If there is a central point of failure in a web service, the benefits of dec…

If you have a "unified 'IP Registry'", as you (I think correctly) posit would be useful, why does it have to be done with a blockchain?

Blockchains are useful for decentralized decisions, but decentralization is antithetical to the kind of thing you would need in order to take an IP claim to court. If you and another person with alleged IP claims to the same work but different registries show up to court, the court has no way to determine which registrar is authoritative for that work, and will ignore both of you. IP without government enforcement is literally useless, so your IP rights are nothing.

This is why property records, patents, etc. aren't decentralized. You and another person can't both have a legitimate claim to the same patent based on two different patent decentralized blockchain records, as cool as that concept might sound technically.

And once a system is unified, it doesn't need to be a blockchain. You can just have a simple database.

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#205

Post by 015a »

jjulius wrote: post #182
015a wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet, are you rich after torrenting that? Of course not. There's the disconnect. The phantom in the system that some people aren't groking; the leap of faith. Why do (a vast minority of) the NFTs in that torrent still have value, despite the torrent existing? Why is Disney worth $275B despite all of their movies hitting The Pirate Bay immediately upon their release? I can Google Image search pictures of the Mona Lisa…

> Why is Disney worth $275B despite all of their movies hitting The Pirate Bay immediately upon their release? Merchandise, theme parks, movie tickets, cruises, live shows (eg "Disney on Ice"), and so on. You're typically not going to find an HD quality pirated movie the second it hits theaters, only once it's released to the home or sent out as a screener. That's only a tiny slice of their diversified pie. For the r…

So, would you agree with the following statement: The value of the real Mona Lisa is dominated by its physicality; the ability for its owner to touch and feel it.

A few further thoughts to ponder over:

1) No one touches and feels the Mona Lisa. Now, that's something wholly unique to High Art, but it is worth bearing: the Mona Lisa sits in a vault, or behind panes of glass, only touched by caretakers, who don't even own it. Yet, it has value.

2) Actually, I pulled the Mona Lisa as an example, but consider: is the Mona Lisa actually valuable? By what measure? USD in a Private Sale? Is there a market (really want to stress that word, because its critical: Market) for the Mona Lisa? Is there demand for the Mona Lisa, or is the risk of owning a stolen original of the most well-recognized art in history too great? Consider how this flips the conversation: I just presented a compelling argument for why the Mona Lisa, this Thing we've been using as a stand-in to represent a "highly valuable original good", may actually be worthless! Supply, Demand, and Market Liquidity vastly dominate the Pricing of most goods/services; not Value. Art Caretakers oftentimes describe pieces of art as "priceless"; its easy to interpret that as "REALLY EXPENSIVE", but they actually mean it at face value: No one knows what the price would be, because it has no price, because it has no market.

3) Are nonphysical goods destined to be valueless? For digital goods: Isn't this already sustainably demonstrated to be false, independent of any conversation on crypto? Fortnite turns billions a year in revenue, selling digital costumes and experiences to wear them in. Those costumes hold value to people; not marketable value, but value none-the-less.

4) Does Slack have value? Woah. Think about that for a second. What is the value of Slack? Forget the stock market; think intrinsic. Its a Digital Service. So, per the argument; its nonphysical, cannot be touched and felt, and isn't even a discrete good! This should be the apex of Worthlessness in many peoples' naive model of value, which is endlessly applied in-kind to NFTs; yet Slack demonstrably and undeniably has Value. Where does it come from? What components comprise the value of Slack Inc?

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#206

Post by iskander »

NoGravitas wrote: post #130
iskander wrote: post #44

I think what Stephen misses in his campaign against crypto is that the old ideals have already been coopted and smothered with the corporatization of the web and splintering of what was a decentralized ecosystem into a megacorp walled gardens. I know there's a tiny community of non-crypto decentralized web advocates and I hope they win. But, the main force for a return to decentralization is in crypto and the only re…

> the only realistic alternative to a web3 future is one where everything is a property of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, &c Take heart! Living in a mud hut and drying jellyfish on racks over a tire fire is also a realistic alternative to a "web3" future, and a more likely one for most of us!

Maybe the most likely future of all...

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#207

Post by stanleydrew »

iskander wrote: post #68
paulgb wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also bummed by the centralization and corporatization of the web. What web3 projects should I be looking at? What stands out as promising? Because when I look, I just see things that look like grifts, platforms that eschew centralized moderation and become spammy cesspools, or projects that actually aren't decentralized but co-opt the web3 name. But I'm open-minded, if there are things I'm missing.

It's legit very hard to sift through the scamminess of the space, I've been thinking of it as the cost of revolutionary potential: exponentially more people rush in to profit off "being early". I would say start with web3 science folks like https://twitter.com/joshuaforman and https://twitter.com/eperlste who have a vision for the utility of DAOs for positive social impact that's unlinked from personal profit.

If I read something from the folks with vision for the utility of DAOs, will they explain why a DAO is meaningfully different from a traditional corporation for whatever purpose they are imagining?

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#208

Post by skohan »

015a wrote: post #170
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"

Yet, are you rich after torrenting that? Of course not. There's the disconnect. The phantom in the system that some people aren't groking; the leap of faith. Why do (a vast minority of) the NFTs in that torrent still have value, despite the torrent existing? Why is Disney worth $275B despite all of their movies hitting The Pirate Bay immediately upon their release? I can Google Image search pictures of the Mona Lisa…

Disney creates works billions of people want to see, and they have governments around the world enforce the ownership rights.

Nobody wants the piece of art associated with your NFT’s. And is there even any legally framework for the ownership of NFT’s or is it just something a weird club of people says is so?

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#209

Post by vkou »

iskander wrote: post #180
vkou wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

What part of the NFT protocol verifies provenance?

And why did this not work for Davidson Carvalho, who hasn't seen a cent of the money made by someone selling NFTs of his work? If there was no provenance, why did anyone pay $170,000 for them? [1]

Could it be the case that the NFT market doesn't give two figs about provenance?

[1] https://twitter.com/colorblindmess/status/145059819884259328...

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#210

Post by iskander »

Cederfjard wrote: post #198
iskander wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I hear you. I expect the bottom to fall out of this, abruptly and fairly soon. But we’ll see.

I thought so too but now met enough people who believe in that interpretation and seen the virality of it; feel like it might have cultural legs. We'll see if it survives the crypto bubble popping and the monetary value of all the expensive NFTs disappearing.
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