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Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

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61–70 of 318 posts

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#61
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This means people will mostly give their money to the loudest charities that spend the most on marketing, not on their actual effectiveness. Boring yet important projects will get almost nothing with this model. Don't make the economist mistake of assuming that people are perfectly rational actors.

Quoted post unavailable.

Ah yes, taxes are theft. The solution to government-mandates taxes is _obviously_ private enterprise!

Surely no private company would ever do something as unseemly as threatening someone’s livelihood in order to extract payment.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if the developer wants to integrate them What’s the incentive for the developer to do this? And more importantly how does my M4 rifle work in an epic fantasy role playing game?

Quoted post unavailable.

Yes all the time but this is specifically about game development as a business by my reading so I’m interested in why this would be appealing in that context.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#63

NFTs in the current form might be pretty useless as such (just a proof you "first purchased" a jpeg). But I think in the gaming space this will become huge and actually makes sense - use elements (items, characters, stats,...) and their history in different and independent games if the developer wants to integrate them. No lock-in and portable, not tied to game-specific accounts.

It helps to think about this more clearly if you forget the NFT bit and think about just doing this with standard tech. What stops developers today from implementing publicly documented formats for in-game elements? What stops other developers from writing code to import these elements from one game to another? All an NFT adds is a verifiable signature and a pubic database. The signature bit seems completely irrelevant. Why would one game developer care if did or did not pay a different developer? If it's the same developer, they already have some way to track that you bought the items. The public database is more useful here, but all this data is usually sitting on your local disk anyways. Devs could make use of it today if they were so inclined.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#64
post #26

The author believes "a Twitter where your popular tweets earn you money" would be a good thing? Twitter is already full of people trying to shout the loudest - how can adding a financial incentive to shout even louder make things better rather than worse?

Youtube and Twitch already pay users so what does crypto add?

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#65
post #45

The current fiat system (and the Governments that control it) are completely enslaved to the welfare (pension) and healthcare demands of baby boomers. These demands will only multiply as the populations age, until eventually consuming the host. You can already see this in countries like Italy, which are now in demographic death spirals. If we can craft a new financial system without spending 15%+ of our GDP and risin…

Governments collected taxes on cash and non-fiat for millenia (and still do so), they will have no issues taxing crypto if they need to.

But at much lower rates. Taxes as a % of GDP didn't exceed 10% in the USA until WW1: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Federal%...

You can see other spikes related to other wars. Wars sure are great if you want to expand Government power and taxation over your own citizenry!

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#66
post #64
post #26

The author believes "a Twitter where your popular tweets earn you money" would be a good thing? Twitter is already full of people trying to shout the loudest - how can adding a financial incentive to shout even louder make things better rather than worse?

Youtube and Twitch already pay users so what does crypto add?

I believe the idea of Web3/Crypto is that it's decentralized, so there's no Google or Facebook to take a cut or control a narrative.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#67
'"Tokens align network participants to work together toward a common goal — the growth of the network and the appreciation of the token." That's great if what you're trying to do is create an ecosystem of tokens that appreciate in value all the time. What percentage of systems can be modeled that way?'

That's the problem. "An ecosystem of tokens that appreciate in value all the time". The perpetual motion machine of finance.

Bitcoin has actually been able to pull this off, more or less. Etherium, maybe. The rest, not so much.

The NFT thing is winding down. NFTs are basically Axie Infinity, OpenSea, and the little guys. Axie Infinity is crashing. SLP is down to $0.02, from $0.35 at peak a few months ago.

OpenSea is hard to measure. There's wash trading to pump up prices.[1] NFTs have no overall market price. NFT markets stall, rather than crashing - high asking prices, no sales. There's a lot of that on OpenSea. "So far, most new NFT collectors on the secondary market have yet to recoup the costs of their purchases"[2] In other words, the issuer makes money, but the suckers who buy NFTs lose. Many of them don't realize they've lost. Someday they will find out, when they try to liquidate their Bored Ape Yacht Club collection.

I kind of liked the idea of NFTs as part of an asset portability system for virtual worlds. Goldman Sachs even endorsed that. I was thinking of this for items in the US$1 - US$100 range, like game items. The transaction costs would be too high if it took a blockchain transaction to walk through a portal, even for the cheap blockchains.

Some big part of all this is probably going to come apart in 2021. Definitely Axie Infinity. Maybe Tether.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/15/22676075/opensea-insider-...

[2] https://www.ft.com/content/e95f5ac2-0476-41f4-abd4-8a99faa77...

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#68
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Popularity is not quality, usually the inverse.

If people are willing to pay for it, the people consuming it find it valuable, which is frequently a proxy for quality (in the eyes of those consumers - the ones who count in this equation). Quality of content is, of course, subjective. I have paid for Lady Gaga albums.

Don’t confuse "being paid for your popular content" and "people paying actual money for your content". On Quora you get paid for your popular content even if nobody willingly gave you money: it’s just that the website is now full of ads and you get a small percentage of that.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#69
post #26

The author believes "a Twitter where your popular tweets earn you money" would be a good thing? Twitter is already full of people trying to shout the loudest - how can adding a financial incentive to shout even louder make things better rather than worse?

I just liked your comment. I accept ETH and BTC, thanks.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#70
post #67

'"Tokens align network participants to work together toward a common goal — the growth of the network and the appreciation of the token." That's great if what you're trying to do is create an ecosystem of tokens that appreciate in value all the time. What percentage of systems can be modeled that way?' That's the problem. "An ecosystem of tokens that appreciate in value all the time". The perpetual motion machine of…

2021? That ship has sailed.
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