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This is unrelated to the specific story, but as more and more companies and people I respect get involved with it, the more I realize I need to have a working knowledge of Crypto Currency so at the very least I can be involved in the discussion. Does anyone have any good resources for learning the building blocks/vocabulary of Crypto Currency?
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/15-s1...
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That's a bad definition. The key characteristic of a pyramid scheme is that each person gets paid by the people they recruit. If there is a global FIFO, that's a Ponzi scheme. A pump and dump is something else entirely. It doesn't depend on an infinite series of investors, just one wave.
The general term should be "greater fools schemes". Ponzi and Pyramid are just subtypes of this. There is also MLM and PnD which have their own characteristics. All of these involve finding more and more people to invest so that early investors can exit. The reason why every greater fools scheme fails is that there is no net revenue (or too small to sustain the scheme). No matter the scheme, you will always run out o…
> No matter the scheme, you will always run out of greater fools, and so it must collapse eventually.
That depends on how you define "collapse". After a pump and dump, a stock might crash to zero, or settle back to where it was, or even settle back to a higher number than it was originally at. It doesn't require a particularly large supply of fools, and it only requires them for a small amount of time. And it doesn't have to move the stock price by a huge percentage either.
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My interest in web3 + art is from finding new livable income sources for artists generally. Less about big money speculation, more about getting more artists supported such that they don’t need a day job or purely commercial art pursuits (as opposed to “fine art”). I understand the current state of crypto isn’t near offering this outside of hyped speculative investments I’m also not interested in ideas on a shelf tha…
Unfortunately most new NFT projects are computer generated (no humans need apply). They have basically figured out that paying an actual human for the art is not needed when people will just buy cg art for the same price. There is one that just minted RGB colors. Its reddit AMA was pretty hilarious actually. Those that do include human art have a strong tendency to just lift uncredited art from Pinterest or deviantar…
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If you got into crypto in 2021-22.. you already missed the boat. This is the cashing out phase.
we haven't build economies on crypto yet. I think we are in buy-and-wait-for-price-up phase. Once we use crypto for utility, we will be in different phase.
This is what I did 2-4 years ago... then it started going down by a lot so I cashed out. I actually did lose. Not THAT much, thankfully.
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> I think the “planet-killing scam” is very HN-sphere thinking It's not, at all. I've heard that phrasing or similar (that it's a pyramid scheme, that cryptocurrencies are wasteful) from people who don't even know how to find HN. In the photography world in particular, mentioning your NFT is likely to get you laughed out of any forum in which you bring it up. IMO if you encounter any non-technical artist "excited" ab…
>IMO if you encounter any non-technical artist "excited" about NFTs, tell them to stay the hell away, or risk being seen a bad friend. Fuck that, despite me being incredibly skeptical of NFTs I’m perfectly willing to acknowledge the fact that some of my non-technical artist friends have earned 6-7 figure amounts selling NFTs.
If an artist friend of mine sells an NFT I am going to struggle with continuing to see them as a friend, because it's morally bankrupt.
If a non-technical artist comes to you and asks for help selling an entirely phantom product to their presumably only-averagely-technically-aware fans, why would you get involved?
Anything that introduces non-technical users to crypto -- which is really the main function of NFT exchanges at this point -- is a moral hazard.
This is why I am so shocked to see Stripe involved with it.
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In the current system when an artist creates something and sells it, they typically get paid once, often lowballed. The buyer may turn around and sell it for 100x. The buyer made far more than the artist, who gets nothing in this scenario. With NFTs the artist can get a cut of every transfer indefinitely.
> With NFTs they can get a cut of every transfer indefinitely How does that work? Also, what is to stop people copying it anyway and what is to stop artist from getting underpaid? All serious questions that I'd like to see answers to but don't understand how NFTs would solve any of them.
Not sure what you mean by the second question
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yes yes and let's not forget tulip mania! Did you know that DRUG DEALERS use crypto?!
Is there a rebuttal? Greater fools scheme is a valid criticism, can't just handwave it away everytime
Did you mean greater fool theory? That's not a financial scheme that's listed under Stripe's ToS (our context).
Are you arguing in good faith that Stripe should update the Prohibited Businesses section of their ToS based on what you said?
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‘A pyramid scheme is a fraudulent system of making money based on recruiting an ever-increasing number of "investors." The initial promoters recruit investors, who in turn recruit more investors, and so on. The scheme is called a "pyramid" because at each level, the number of investors increases. The small group of initial promotors at the top require a large base of later investors to support the scheme by providing…
That's a bad definition. The key characteristic of a pyramid scheme is that each person gets paid by the people they recruit. If there is a global FIFO, that's a Ponzi scheme. A pump and dump is something else entirely. It doesn't depend on an infinite series of investors, just one wave.
Please send them an email elucidating the finer points of what scheme is what.
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My interest in web3 + art is from finding new livable income sources for artists generally. Less about big money speculation, more about getting more artists supported such that they don’t need a day job or purely commercial art pursuits (as opposed to “fine art”). I understand the current state of crypto isn’t near offering this outside of hyped speculative investments I’m also not interested in ideas on a shelf tha…
NFTs are a shit way of supporting artist and a lot of high profile artist are just having people make NFTs with links to their work without permission so they aren't really making anything off this situation.
> Build your crypto business with Stripe I would hesitate building any business on Stripe. However, if you are considering using Stripe Crypto, build the integration it in a way that you can easily migrate away. We built our credit card processing and invoicing on Stripe. We've only processed $2.5m and now we are migrating away. We are 2 months into the migration. It's worth the migration cost, working with Stripe ha…
Do you mind giving more information? I've mostly heard good things about Stripe about things like their documentation and APIs. I'd love to hear stuff contrary to that. I personally don't use Stripe either but I'm interested in hearing your reasons so we don't go through a lengthy migration that ends up biting us in the back.
I worked for a company which is selling a tool that allows windows users to spoof unique identifiers of their computer. A lot of software these days grabs MAC addresses, disk and monitor serials in order to identify users. So, this tool just hooks into the windows kernel, and returns made up identifiers when a program requests them via the windows API. It does not change any files on the user's disk, and it does not modify any other programs in RAM. Literally the only thing it does is hooking the kernel like a 3rd party anti-virus. It is basically like the "randomize MAC address" and "change advertising identifier" on modern smartphones. Just for windows.
Well, one day I woke up with this email in my inbox: https://i.imgur.com/g91KDqE.png
They stopped the payouts, as this tool was deemed as a "restricted product". The cited point as the reason of the termination is the following:
> Compliance with Applicable Laws: You must use the Services in a lawful manner, and must obey all laws, rules, and regulations (“Laws”) applicable to your use of the Services and to Transactions. As applicable, this may include compliance with domestic and international Laws related to the use or provision of financial services, notification and consumer protection, unfair competition, privacy, and false advertising, and any other Laws relevant to Transactions.
As it came to light, a 70bn company namely Activision filed a lawsuit and subpoena against us as the tool is used to bypass their (poorly) implemented anti-cheat. Nothing had been decided in court yet (whether the product is unfair competition or piracy), but stripe still chose to just kill the account for our core product.
I'm glad that they didn't lock away the money for 180 days minimum like PayPal usually does. Employees need to be paid, and this just sucks for everyone.
