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€2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

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Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neal Stephenson explored this in this book Fall; or, Dodge in Hell (And to a lesser extent, Termination Shock). In this depiction, parts of the world; especially red state USA, has succumbed to a post-truth society, made possible through the internet. The narrator implies that we had a limited window in human history where people took a fact-based approach to knowledge, starting with the scientific revolution, and en…

> especially red state USA This is funny because you can say exactly the same about blue state USA. They seem to live in a totally alien world.

There’s little use arguing that point with parent, because he was summarizing Stephenson rather than postulating anything.

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#332

I think one thing many people are missing is how much of this space is children, by now. While the past decade has been about adults risking their fiat capital, children are forced to only earn crypto onchain, as they cannot get the bank account or money without bothering their parents. It is less wise to bother their parents. People like you and I who will proselytize about crypto or any particular crypto investment…

One of the more wild things I learned in the past year came from a reasonable explanation for something I have observed for years: why is Venmo vs Cash App so radically split among racial lines? Because, to some order of approximation, they are, and I would bet many people reading this comment can reconcile this with their own experiences.

The explanation as it was described to me (though I have a difficult time verifying its accuracy): Cash App was very early on the "all-in-one banking" experience, whereas Venmo spent years as a value-addition to a bank (account/routing number) you already had. Socioeconomically disenfranchised portions of the population, which statistically bias toward Black Americans, gravitated toward Cash App because they didn't otherwise have bank accounts. Then, network effects kick in, as they always do.

Again, I'm not 100% sure on the veracity of those claims, but it makes sense; and it mirrors a similar trend across age groups. Older people use Zelle (a fully bank-sponsored product). Millennials (of any race), being the middle child, split the difference, and oftentimes have Zelle, Venmo, Cash App, and some Crypto. But all of these "official" apps still have age restrictions, and as they've matured have been forced into more customer risk mitigation, which primarily serves to do the same thing the banking system has statistically done to the black american population for decades; limit access to financial services (even if its for what we old people would call a "totally valid reason" like "dude you're 12", its still limiting access to financial services).

Capital moves mountains. The crypto markets, in aggregate, represent an absolutely massive amount of capital. Its biased young. Its very difficult to legally liquidate into the traditional financial system; but within the crypto ecosystem, its more liquid than any financial instrument ever invented by mankind. It attracts scams (like any financial product does); it attracts idiots (through virtue of being able to serve: anyone); but even among projects like this one, their idiotic understanding of how their actions could integrate with the traditional system of laws is counterbalanced with rather intelligent understanding of distributed financial systems, corporate governance, data structures, algorithms, and most of all, an undeniable love for a piece of cultural history.

Anytime anyone bashes crypto; the reasons may be legitimate; Check your age. You sound a lot like my parents wondering why my Chase account doesn't appear in their Chase home page, so they can send me money every Christmas by just clicking "transfer money". Your criticism may be totally valid and legitimate: but irrelevant. That's the curse of getting older; inescapable, undeniable, and one day you just don't matter anymore. This world isn't your's; it belongs to our Children.

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#333
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*100x. One of the other threads mentioned that they had to post their maximum bid publicly in a blockchain somewhere as part of the “dao” before the auction, so someone could easily have seen what they were willing to bid, and just bid them up to it.

I don't think that's true. From Buzzfeed article, it looks like a 25 year old crypto millionaire bid on this, and the SpiceDAO raised $12 million after the fact and are going to reimburse him (and use the rest of the funds for this derivative work)

The OP’s question was about how the bid got so high, i.e. it would take two people to get the bid that high.

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#334
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard the effect of internet compared to the effect of the printing press. For the people on the other side of the curve from the village idiot that was true. Before the internet we (on HN I think most of us are on that side of the curve justifying the use of "we" here) had libraries and we had elaborate systems for indexing and searching [1] and providing notification of new information in our areas of interest…

Could you please expand upon how it was like the 'discovery of fire'? There are many ways to interpret this, and I'm not certain I know what you are saying.

Giving fire to a society that does not have it greatly increases their power and efficiency to a much greater extent than does giving the printing press to a society that not have it.

So what I'm saying is that while the invention of the internet was a big change to everyone, for those on the other half of the curve from the village idiots it was a change that let them do things they were already doing but faster and more efficiently (an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary step, much like the Gutenberg's printing press was to 15th century Europe), but for those down in village idiot territory it allowed them to do things with information that they had not been able to do before such as large scale collaboration (a revolutionary change rather than an evolutionary change, much like the discovery of fire was for early humans.

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neal Stephenson explored this in this book Fall; or, Dodge in Hell (And to a lesser extent, Termination Shock). In this depiction, parts of the world; especially red state USA, has succumbed to a post-truth society, made possible through the internet. The narrator implies that we had a limited window in human history where people took a fact-based approach to knowledge, starting with the scientific revolution, and en…

> especially red state USA This is funny because you can say exactly the same about blue state USA. They seem to live in a totally alien world.

My dad believes 30-foot tall giants once roamed the earth, and that the archaeological evidence is being suppressed by mainstream academia and the government. He believes this based on a passage from the Bible and some YouTube videos.

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#336
post #158

For most of human history, people have lived in small, local information bubbles which were hard to penetrate with facts from the outside world. We see this manifest as the pre-industrial global patchwork of weird and wonderful religious/spiritual/cultural variety. Then somehow the world started to join up and information began to seep into local cultures and sweep away a lot of these pre-rational beliefs. And for a…

I've noticed the same phenomenon. I think it is, at least partly, driven by the collapse of local power structures that the local information bubbles (great phrase, btw!) enabled. Those power structures are built into our genes, and have roots that go back ages. They are fighting back, or at least our innate responses are fighting back. It's tough to run a church or a school or a family, when those under you can reve…

This seems a really important point because it explains why this happens. It’s about power.

Additional one could hypothesize that conspiracies are so effective here because they are (almost by definition) unfalsifiable. Similar to how churches still stay powerful by running on dogma.

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#337
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the last ten years there has been a significant change in mainstream content from information (what) to personalities (who). A major driver has been the adoption of social media by the mainstream: Uncle Bob pawing his cell phone while on the toilet. Both closed circle SM (checking on your friends and acquaintances) and public facing SM (checking the influencers) have created a whole new, uncontrolled feeding groun…

> Both closed circle SM (checking on your friends and acquaintances) and public facing SM (checking the influencers) It's even worse than that because of the algorithms. They show you more of what they think you like, but the bubbles are quite narrow. For example, suppose you want to see what's going on with all the vaccine skepticism. There is a bubble centered around Joe Rogan. They're talking about how the existin…

> when it's actually caused by not exposing everyone to contrary viewpoints so that they lose the opportunity to have their mistakes corrected

There appears to be a growing trend that claims it's innately harmful to experience contrary viewpoints.

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#338
post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The filings are pretty much the same. The biggest difference, as far as I know, is there's no roadshow to get institutional investors onboard. But this isn't technically a requirement of an IPO. And a direct listing also skips that.

I think what the previous poster was referring to is that the filings for the SPAC (acquisition company) are the same as any other IPO, but there's nothing in the SPAC (just money and a management team). For the company that gets acquired by the SPAC, however, it's a different story. That company does not have to go through the IPO process itself, so it goes public with a lot less regulatory scrutiny than it would ha…

That's not really true though. The SPAC needs to file an S-4 before the deSPAC (the merger), which informs investors in minute detail about the target company and the merger deal. I don't know exactly how it compares to an S-1, but it's extremely comprehensive.

The biggest difference I can see is that a traditional IPO can't succeed without getting institutional investors onboard, and there are strict guidelines about what can be pitched to them. The negotiations between a SPAC and its target company are much less constrained.

I'm not an expert in this, so I'm probably wrong on some of the details, but my company is undergoing a SPAC merger, so I've tried to inform myself on how it works.

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#339

I think one thing many people are missing is how much of this space is children, by now. While the past decade has been about adults risking their fiat capital, children are forced to only earn crypto onchain, as they cannot get the bank account or money without bothering their parents. It is less wise to bother their parents. People like you and I who will proselytize about crypto or any particular crypto investment…

> "children are forced to only earn crypto onchain" What use do children have for cryptocurrencies? Buying items in World of Warcraft? > "I know children that have a few hundred $ in their joint bank account but $100k in crypto onchain and just waiting till they turn 18 so they can cash out without telling their parents." This entire post reads like some weird crypto-bro FOMO propaganda. To "cash out" they'll need a…

> This entire post reads like some weird crypto-bro FOMO propaganda.

Its intended to be devoid of opinion to the extent possible which is probably why you don't recognize it.

Your thoughts on what they can do are incorrect. The only thing a child still cannot do is enter into a real world contract and have it be enforceable. But in environments that require zero, or less, or different kinds of non-contractually enforced trust, with a crypto balance sheet the children can acquire goods, services and investments, they can access capital, they can pool investments and share proceeds, they can hire and fire other real world humans, they can acquire real world assets where merchants accept crypto or use a payment processor that does. And this is what some or many are doing, the path of least resistance and beyond the wildest aspirations that any multinational trade deal could ever achieve. So I’m not sure what standard you can really rely on here aside from being unaware.

If you weren't aware of a crypto centric form of wealth, where the fiat dollars are the novelty to be temporarily held, then you’re a decade behind.

The only thing new here (circa the last 2-3 years) is that its much easier for the children to earn the initial crypto, given how robust that economy is.

They’ll cash out when they are 18 if they need to. No different than people only taking money out of their stock and bond holdings for large purchases. Except its a hybrid where they earned the investments directly instead of having to initially purchase them.

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#340
post #332

I think one thing many people are missing is how much of this space is children, by now. While the past decade has been about adults risking their fiat capital, children are forced to only earn crypto onchain, as they cannot get the bank account or money without bothering their parents. It is less wise to bother their parents. People like you and I who will proselytize about crypto or any particular crypto investment…

One of the more wild things I learned in the past year came from a reasonable explanation for something I have observed for years: why is Venmo vs Cash App so radically split among racial lines? Because, to some order of approximation, they are, and I would bet many people reading this comment can reconcile this with their own experiences. The explanation as it was described to me (though I have a difficult time veri…

Yes, very good observations.

The network affects are at play here too. Influencers who cover crypto projects begin skewing younger and younger are filling in documentation and awareness far far better than any developer would.

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