Well, I saved a bunch of that art and can view it any time.
Open source funding hits art. Anyone can view it and get the benefit of doing so, the artist got paid to create, somebody gets bragging rights. Everybody wins.
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.
'people buying NFTs are footing the bill for you to have that free information' Where? All I see is people paying for works after the fact, that no one would pay for -except- buying into the idea of an NFT. Where are the NFTs being sold for desirable creative works -prior- to their creation and distribution? Show me a movie being shot, by names good enough that they could otherwise sell tickets, that will release fre…
Retroactive sales have long been the way most art (and most stuff in general) is funded. Art is made and then sold, then the artist can keep making things. Someone makes them then sells them then they can keep making more. There is also the smaller market of commissioned work, which is popular in illustration and graphic design, but not so much in fine arts as it strips agency from the artist (you are asking them to…
Not really answering the question there, which was specifically in reference to "People need to be paid to do the work". Clearly, they don't. They do the work first. Maybe if they were not paid they'd not do -further- work (though "starving artist" being a thing tends to imply people create because of a desire to create, not because of how lucrative it is), but with NFTs...no one is actually paying them to do the work. There could be an NFT with no artwork attached (in fact, there is no artwork attached; there's just a link, pointing somewhere on the internet, that can be changed out at any time by the creator).
I think he missed the part where the crypto infrastructure is aggressively based on open-source, abundance, post-scarcity, universal access, and equality. The current "assets" that are traded are indeed meaningless, as is most of what people buy with money beyond food and basic shelter. This is what initial post-scarcity looks like: people being ridiculous with assets because they realize that assets themselves are r…
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…
> But, the main force for a return to decentralization is in crypto and the only realistic alternative to a web3 future is one where everything is a property of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, &c It'd be awfully nice if said decentralization was offering more valuable things than just naked ponzi schemes. I'm on team "we're in an ad bubble and it's disgusting that these major companies created a surveillance state" but…
I think it's easy to miss the content at the core of the movement given how thoroughly it's wrapped in gold rush and scamming. But the more time I spend around the space the more it seems that there is a legitimately transformative force which attracts the gold rush in the first place. And the ethos of people working on e.g. research DAOs, decentralized publishing, crypto art, &c feels right compared to the web2 world.
NFTs are like a combat mech the size of the Solar System. Someone can use it to have a really ironclad DRM implementation, guarding the art you saved and to make sure only its approved owner can view it (mimicking the tyranny of physical scarcity of meatspace for cyberspace goods). The reason you saved it and can view it is that nobody's doing that yet. And because there are way easier and cheaper ways to implement D…
Please explain how someone can have an ironclad DRM implementation that guards access to download a link to a jpeg on a public blockchain that you want everyone to be able to view.
DRM is a fundamentally broken concept. I feel like there has to be a mathematical proof out there somewhere that it is impossible to both make information consumable and, at the same time, prevent its duplication.
This dude really pumps out the rambly anti-crypto takes. Too bad HN upvotes are not a cryptocurrency or he'd be rich
Too bad being rich is such a temptation to people, or he'd probably not have to spend time writing these anti-crypto takes decrying the rampant greed that's undermining the technical foundations of internet culture.
Very weird to frame crypto as contrasting with "an open source culture that, at least aspirationally, built software around ideas of abundance, post-scarcity, universal access, and equality". Were the "older grizzled engineers" all literal communists or what?
Nothing weird about it. Crypto / web3 is about financializing everything . I.e, making everything about money. The goal is to create a gamified world in which all human interactions are controlled via financial incentives. The contrast is not communism, but rather the current gift economy model of open source, where people offer what they want out of intrinsic motivation rather than the desire to accumulate coins in…
This is the really icky part of crypto. It would be deeply ironic if crypto, which was supposedly created in opposition to traditional banking institutions, was able to open the door for those institutions to financialize every nook and cranny of our lives.
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…
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".
Devil's Advocate: Do cryptocurrencies have _any_ legitimate use case? I can see that some newer and non-mineable coins, Solana, Avalanche, Hedera, XRP, XLM, etc don't have mining issues that the big coins (BTC, ETH, Chia, etc) have. Is what I am seeing from critics that there has been absolutely no progress whatsoever in this space?
Of course they do. The biggest one to me is micro transactions to me. Of course being required to pay capital gains on every transaction kills that.
It opens up ways to run ad free online services without thinking of dumb schemes like charging exhorbitant amounts of money for digital “stickers” and other crap. Like tipping with a small percentage going to the platform, charging tiny amount per min/hour of usage, tiny subscriptions. In game currencies/economies that use regular crypto.
I can get a super zoomed in high-res version of the Mona Lisa, print it out with the highest quality, and mount it on my wall, but I don't own the Mona Lisa.
The only reason there is any value at all in owning the Mona Lisa is that it is a physical object that cannot be perfectly duplicated. Even then, only status-wankers would care to. NFTs aren't the Mona Lisa, they're a Certificate of Ownership for a digital Mona Lisa that entitles the owner to nothing. Everyone and their mother can already have an indistinguishable duplicate of digital Mona Lisa for free.
You admit that art can be high value - and everyone who believes art can be worth millions is a "status-wanker" apparently - so therefore NFTs can be high value. Or is it only physical art that can have worth, but digital images cannot?
This is what drives everyone crazy - the art market itself is irrational. NFTs are the same thing, but digitized and hyper efficient.