Live data from Hacker News

The Tinkerbell Griftopia

stephendiehl.com

241–250 of 251 posts

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no particular evidence that NFTs will change the economics of art. Indeed, given the rich history of scams, money laundering, grift, and fraud in the fungible token space, I'd say there's good reason to think artist will end up at least as screwed over. Indeed, given that the traditional art world will be eager to get in on it, it could be worse. > Art NFTs actually share the values of open source [...] impro…

> The whole point of an NFT is to create artificial scarcity in a post-scarcity medium. That's not true for art NFTs. If you don't own the rights to an image, whether it's a regular old bitmap or an art NFT, there's no difference in scarcity as an observer of that image. But, as the artist who created a digital image vs an art NFT, there's a massive difference, and THAT is the whole point of an art NFT.

Nah. A post-scarcity, open-source-like solution is letting people sponsor art creation. An NFT is creating artificial scarcity: one person thinks they "own" a digital asset. And there's plenty of agita when people don't play pretend with them: https://mashable.com/article/non-fungible-tokens-nfts-right-...

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#242
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79802 MOMA is going to be so mad when they find out Starry Night is worthless now.

You're talking about a piece of art that exists on a canvas, with its own bumps/grooves, versus a photo/scan of that art. There is still only one Starry Night in it's exact, original form despite us being able to pull it up on Google Images. It will age, and change with age. A .jpg NFT can literally be saved/copied in it's exact original form an infinite number of times.

So, you're saying that those exact bumps and grooves are the repository of value for Starry Night? That if only we could perfectly replicate those grooves, then it'd have no value?

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#243
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try pricing any cryptocurrency in a discounted cash flow model.

That's not classical economics, that's asset specific. Try pricing USD or a commodity or literally any other asset that doesn't represent financial investment in a business venture in a discounted cash flow model.

Nobody is using cryptocurrency as a currency, securities pricing is the only one that makes sense.

Net trade balance (as in fx) gives them no investment value either-it's called a discount curve for a reason.

Aside from that, there's stock to flow (lol) and technical analysis of volume/sentiment which are fine for day trading but ignore fundamentals.

How would you price them on fundamentals?

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#244
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not classical economics, that's asset specific. Try pricing USD or a commodity or literally any other asset that doesn't represent financial investment in a business venture in a discounted cash flow model.

Nobody is using cryptocurrency as a currency, securities pricing is the only one that makes sense. Net trade balance (as in fx) gives them no investment value either-it's called a discount curve for a reason. Aside from that, there's stock to flow (lol) and technical analysis of volume/sentiment which are fine for day trading but ignore fundamentals. How would you price them on fundamentals?

It's going to sound hand wavy, but it is a new asset class with a novel value proposition, so analyzing fundamentals will require assessing novel characteristics.

How do you price a currency on fundamentals? Some of those indicators apply, like supply, yearly monetary inflation, reserves ("hoarding"), and some don't, like stability of the issuing state, but an analog to that would be network security.

How do you price tulips? I'm not going to pretend that there isn't a massive section of demand that is entirely speculative.

As far as a novel approach, you have to gauge potential utility, something there aren't very many analogs to in other asset classes. Can you send it over borders without being molested by various bureaucracies? Is there some guy that is going to change how things work under pressure? IMO the unique fundamentals of a cryptocurrency have to do with censorship resistance, permissionlessness, fungibility, some of the hot buzzwords that people use as selling points are more than buzzwords. And there's no century long history of refining the methodology of doing this, we are figuring out exactly what works and what doesn't, which is a part of the process of price discovery with any new asset class.

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is El Salvador a "fiasco"?

https://www.laprensagrafica.com/elsalvador/Uso-de-bitcoin-cu... - First time large protests happened against Bukele in light of this law - Adoption is low - DUI fraud is through the roof

> First time large protests happened against Bukele in light of this law Hold up, it's a fiasco because some people protested??

> Adoption is low Generally when a new thing is introduced, adoption tends to be low, it doesn't immediately blow up. However, I would like to know how you concluded that adoption is low, where are you getting your metrics?

> DUI fraud is through the roof Driving Under the Influence? What's the implication here? I don't understand how it's related to bitcoin.

It feels like you're reaching to conclude that it was a "fiasco", if large protests and disapprovals are a measure, the US is a fiasco (election protests, capitol storming, whatever is happening right now), does this mean that the US/Dollar is a fiasco?

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody wins except for the part where a bunch of people wasted a bunch of energy competing to be the one whose computer confirmed the financial transaction in an absurdly inefficient distributed database. Patreon's been solving the problem of "open source funding" for about a decade without that part.

> wasted a bunch of energy competing A problem of PoW based consensus, and will not be relevant to PoS/X based consensus. > absurdly inefficient distributed database. A decentralized distributed database with read/append commands available to any participant. > Patreon A centralized company. You're not wrong, but you aren't making any points that people who are interested in crypto don't already know, or care about.

> will not be relevant to PoS/X based consensus

It's relevant now.

"Maybe someday crypto will move off of PoW so you should completely ignore the fact that there the networks exist entirely because PoW is how people get paid" is a bunch of bullshit that does nothing to change the fact that Proof Of Wasting A Lot Of Power On Nothing is how it works right now. Right now I consider crypto finding a way to work that doesn't burn shit-tons of energy to be about as likely as The Year Of Linux On The Desktop finally coming to pass.

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#247
post #49

Earlier 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…

thats just not the case.

firstly you objection to opportuity cost is flat wrong. those many smart people as you refer to them aren't going to just jump inot what ever the best for mankind research is because you want them to. Researchers and scienetist aren't a fungible resource, someone with a master ins mathmatics and a focus on cryptography isn't going to join a clean energy start up join a biotech firm or work on space tech. If crypto currency didn't exist they would probably work on other cryptography related fields.

the chip shortage has little to do with this as large scale mines use dedicated bespoke 'application-specific integrated circuit' or ASIC chips not used for anything else. try to run a mineing rig on CPU, and GPUs just isn't cost effective anymore. Secondly they didn't cause the chip shortage, shortsighted manufactures ending their orders both the immediate term and for years in advance that did. The chip foundries did the only logical thing and resold the slots for those canceled orders to keep the fabs running.

as for the enviromental impact crypto, cryto thrives on low cost energy as it gives the miners a higher coin/dollar spent mining. and currently building new solar and wind is cheaper than building coal. so really what we need to do is stop burning coal.

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#248
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats the distribution of mining power in the bitcoin network right now? Like, what % of the total are the top ten groups?

The top singular contributors to mining power are, for most coins, mining pools comprised of thousands of individuals and corporations. So, its very difficult the say; we can point to pools, but that's where the investigation stops. The pools themselves are collectives, and as such really don't hold much logical power in swaying the network. If one pool goes rogue, miners are generally pretty savvy, and would react (…

Ok. With what little I understand about the way wealth pools and congregates, and the inability to peer behind the curtain in this situation, I don't see any reason to believe that the majority of power has not centralized into a small group of people.

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

What would Taylor Swift do right now? I can rip all of her audio off of Spotify and use it in my movie without her permission even though she owns the music.

She would try to stop me - maybe send a cease and desist, sue, or otherwise seek remuneration for unauthorized use of her work.

Her proof of ownership is a signed contract with her recording company and any US copyright filings.

Your proof of ownership is an unambiguous cryptographic scheme (NFT), which you could use to secure a US copyright.

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole point of an NFT is to create artificial scarcity in a post-scarcity medium. That's not true for art NFTs. If you don't own the rights to an image, whether it's a regular old bitmap or an art NFT, there's no difference in scarcity as an observer of that image. But, as the artist who created a digital image vs an art NFT, there's a massive difference, and THAT is the whole point of an art NFT.

Nah. A post-scarcity, open-source-like solution is letting people sponsor art creation. An NFT is creating artificial scarcity: one person thinks they "own" a digital asset. And there's plenty of agita when people don't play pretend with them: https://mashable.com/article/non-fungible-tokens-nfts-right-...

> An NFT is creating artificial scarcity: one person thinks they "own" a digital asset.

This is true for most digital images, NFT or not... one person usually does own it. In either case, there is no scarcity for observers -- anyone can look at the image as much as they want.

In both cases, people can even copy the image and it use it without the owner's permission, if that's what you're really concerned about losing. But at least the NFT makes it very clear who that owner is, for those who do seek permission or licensing (unlike your average jpeg). For anyone who believes in intellectual property, that seems like a step forward.

Post reply on HN