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NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

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Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#691
post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except those sorts of collectibles drive much of their value from their limited supply.

The entire point of NFTs is that you can attach a verifiably limited supply to a set of collectables. Just like with their real world counterparts, you can have knock-offs and reproductions that people collect, but the owner of the actual original one knows they have something of a limited set.

When beanie babies have limited supply, it's because the factory has to manufacture other goods for their next contract.

When imaginary cryptohashes have limited supply, it's kind of pointless, or at least there is nothing good for the buyer or society.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#692
post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

while you or I personally don’t need the 100M to enjoy the impressionist art, you can’t ignore the fact that someone out there is in fact willing to pay that for the original. There are people who happily pay $10,000+ for an Italian purse. There are people who are happy with a $10 Chinese knock-off. There are people who happily pay $2,000 for an Apple laptop. There are people who are happy with Linux on a $100 machin…

> There are people who happily pay $2,000 for an Apple laptop. There are people who are happy with Linux on a $100 machine from Goodwill. This is the weirdest sentiment that I see all the time on HN, but enough people express it that I have to accept it as both widespread and genuine. However, I think that if you think $2000 US for an Apple laptop isn't the best value for money you can get on the laptop market, then…

I have a sager (Taiwanese) laptop i7-9750 9th gen intel 4.5ghz, RTX 2060 with full on CUDA support for deep learning, 1Tb NVMe SSD, 32 GB ddr ram, and a 16" 144hz screen that cost me about $1300 a year ago. It also has plenty of IO connections (3 USB type-a ports, a single type-c USB port, smart card reader).

It's rock solid running win 10 pro, has extremely low DPC/ISR latency for ASIO music recording with Ableton, can chew through blender modeling with cycles, and I can do all my dev work in vs2019 and intellij with zero hiccups.

I challenge your assertion that you can't find equivalent if not superior hardware per dollar as what apple offers. Maybe you're just not looking hard enough.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So now you have two ledgers: one on a blockchain and another one that's just "the court said X". They will diverge over time, and eventually everyone will just use the latter one, because that's the one that counts. Before I buy an NFT, I'll have to check the GovLedger anyway to make sure that NFT is actually that person's to sell, and hasn't got a lien on it or something else that means they can't actually sell it.…

The court, in making their ruling, could forcibly transfer the NFT, as it would make sense that they would give themselves admin status in the smart contract. So there's no reason the blockchain would need to diverge. Regarding liens, it seems simple enough to say that if someone does not own an NFT "free and clear", then they cannot transfer it "free and clear". It might even be a different NFT entirely (a "liened N…

I’d add on the “why not use a database” - in general you should always prefer a database to a blockchain/DLT, all else being equal.

The typical case where all is not equal in finance is where currently parties transact via a trusted intermediary like a clearinghouse (who might take a 1% fee, say), and a startup wants to allow parties to transact directly, thereby capturing the fee as upside. Large financial institutions don’t tend to trust small startups that might implode any month, but they can (sometimes, it seems) be persuaded to trust a distributed ledger.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#694
post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What numbers are you basing that on? Bitcoin is 1.5KB/s. You know you can't verify an incomplete block, right? If you think you can just plow ahead after getting the first packet... you are going to have a really bad day once the other miners notice that you can be fooled into wasting hash power on bogus headers. You know that blocks get announced by the miners after they solve the hash, in chunks that can be up to…

> you are going to have a really bad day once the other miners notice that you can be fooled into wasting hash power on bogus headers. What are you even talking about here? 900KB takes a fraction of a second to transfer on a modest internet connection, any miner with $10 a month for a VPS can transfer that is a millisecond. No one said anything about downloading fractions of blocks, you hallucinated that. > Anyone si…

> What are you even talking about here? 900KB takes a fraction of a second to transfer on a modest internet connection...

You are assuming that there are no bad actors in the network who might not want to transfer a block in a fraction of a second, and don't have to because they control the packet rate. Also you seem really hung up on this 900KB figure, you've repeated it in 8 recent posts. You know bitcoin's 30 day average block size has been above 900KB since 2018-10-24? But why would you harp on bitcoin's block size when you are advocating for a max block size that could accommodate all of Visa's transactions? Is is because you know that a 300MB+ block guarantees the death of decentralization and you'd look ridiculous pretending otherwise? To quote you before you presumably exchanged your BTC to double down on your bcash airdrop:

"Once again, whatever people's views on bitcoin at least realize that mining hashes don't dictate how many transactions can be processed by a miner. They mine a block, then they include as many transactions as they think they can get away with and keep the latency low enough to propagate."

2016 -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11689765

> ...a VPS can transfer that is a millisecond.

Ah yes, that has worked out great for several exchanges and various other cryptocurrency related services. The cloud has been great, fill it with all the things.

> No one said anything about downloading fractions of blocks, you hallucinated that.

You don't seem to understand how packet switched networks function either. Go lookup "MTU", I look forward to hearing how even the most modest internet connection enjoys IPV6 with a 300MB jumboframe policy spanning the entire network path!

> Why do you think 32MB or more would be anything other than trivial to send and receive? Any miner can send and receive that in a second.

Except for everyone transiting a sub 256mb peering point... so alot of people: https://www.peeringdb.com/advanced_search?info_traffic__in=0...

It isn't that it'd take them 10 minutes to download the entire block... it is that they are at a 0.92 second disadvantage to their competition - this drives the physical centralization.

> Bitcoin cash already has more sustained transactions than bitcoin. Maybe you should reach beyond the propaganda of /r/bitcoin

lol, the salty salty tears.

> Miners that do that take the risk that someone else will propagate a block before them since they didn't share the previous block they found.

And yet they do it, because it has been mathematically demonstrated to be a winning strategy - even before block bloat induced propagation delay. The rest of the statement is simply nonsensical.

> In your last message you compared something with a 10 minute window to millionths of a second. For some reason you ignored this and ignored the actual numbers of modern bandwidth. You keep using hyperbole but won't quantify anything because the numbers don't add up.

Yeah, you clearly don't understand the comically simple idea that a consistent head start on your competitors guarantees eventual domination. The 10 minute window is completely immaterial to the point. If you can consistently verify the newest announced block 1 second before every other miner - then your average solve rate is guaranteed to be 1 second faster than their average solve rate.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search "govops ca kai stinchcombe" and you'll see the doc. > So, not even the value proposed by blockchain but the hypothesis of the value? Of course. This is a nascent and emerging market. To act as if this is anything but a hypothesis on what may be valuable is a lie. This is true of every emergent market ever. > What would those values and hypotheses be? See my other comments in this same thread if you'd genuinely…

> Search "govops ca kai stinchcombe" and you'll see the doc. Did you read the file you're referencing? Let me quote it for you (emphasis mine): --- start quote --- Permissioned blockchains as a datastore Solutions can be built on either open source datastores (like mysql or postgres), on proprietary datastores (Oracle), or on blockchains. Our position on this topic is that the proof is in the pudding: let the bidders…

He's still recommending blockchain. Four years after writing the initial article, you think it'd be easier just to say its worthless...but he didn't.

There's quite a bit of spirited discussion regarding these points elsewhere.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#696
post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is only a short term issue. ETH is currently transitioning to proof of stake with ETH 2.0

OK read the article again because it addresses two different and significant reasons why that doesn't solve the problem.

Their arguments seem to be

1) Eth2 has been "coming soon" for a long time, so it will never happen. (Yes progress has been slow, but it's happening, with phase 0 live now.)

2a) In PoS, the rich get richer. (Not true in a meaningful sense. Staking rewards are neutral with respect to economic inequality, since everyone has access to the same rate of return.)

2b) PoS is a social issue. Climate change is also a social issue. Therefore, a PoS is a climate issue. (This is a converse error.)

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#697
post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possession of the private key also allows you to create signatures which prove your ownership, while not revealing your private key. Artworks could be encrypted and only decryptable by such signatures. Client applications could be built to incorporate this. We have a big problem today in that our information technology's ability to infinitely create copies of digital artifacts seemingly breaks the incentive mechanism…

> For a hacker & technology forum, Hacker News is remarkably negative on crypto topics. … The crypto space has been growing for 12 years ... is it really just a giant fraud at this point? No value, nothing of interest at all? The negative reaction is _due_ to HN being a technology-heavy forum: the blockchain field is a marketing invention and divides into two camps: Merkle trees, which are useful but not new, and eve…

> where’s anything clearly better than its predecessor?

At the moment, there isn't a single alternative product for a state-free currency as a store of value that has reached the valuation of Bitcoin.

I'm not even a Bitcoiner, but if this isn't proof to you at this point, nothing will satisfy you. The proof doesn't have to convince you it's the future of currency, but it should certainly statisfy the question of "how has blockchain enabled anything new and interesting?".

The truth is, blockchain is less of a technological innovation than it is an organizational one. It is technology that attempts to digitize human organizational patterns as opposed to simply analog processes.

Those selling crypto to the moon and profiting off of the hype certainly ruin it for everyone. The promises, the lies, the failure to deliver is certainly an issue to take up. At the same time, there is quite a bit behind the lies that is worth looking at.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#699
post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> being drip fed a bunch of transactions Where are you getting ideas like this? How fast do you think internet connections are? Only in the context of bitcoin do people start thinking 250 byte transactions are somehow difficult to send over gigabit connections. The average bitcoin block is 900 -kilobytes- at most at 10 minutes on average. How is it that people have absorbed propaganda that makes them actually think t…

> Where are you getting ideas like this? How fast do you think internet connections are? As fast as the packet source wants? The only way to defend against a slowloris DoS is by accounting for it at the application layer, which is both unusual and difficult - as DoS attacks are usually handled at the transport layer. In this case that could mean applying a deadline for the block announcement in its entirety - which m…

Now you are trying to say that for after 11 years, miners will for some reason sit and wait for someone that isn't sending them a block fast enough and that other miners will attack people like that.

No one is waiting. If someone tries to send out a block slowly, someone else mines that block and sends it out fast. This is not difficult to understand.

It's amazing all the made up nonsense you've thrown out to try to predict a future that has already come and gone. Why are you so desperate to prove something so ridiculous? What you are talking about doesn't happen at all at any throughput on any cryptocurrency.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#700
post #456
post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let's say I buy a NTF $1000 and get a digital copy, what prevents me (barring legalities) to perfectly duplicate it and massively redistribute it (not the token, the distributed supposedly high quality file) for a fraction of $$$ and turn a profit The file is usually publicly accessible, why would anyone give you money for something they can just download?

Some rich dude has bought the "first tweet" for $2.5 million, despite the fact that it's publicly accessible [0]. I imagine it's about showing off how rich they are. They could achieve the same result by throwing $2.5 million into a furnace. https://twitter.com/jack/status/20

It's not just some "rich dude". The highest bidder [1] (so far) is Justin Sun, creator of TRON crypto [2]. I see this as a big publicity stunt for his personal branding.

Not too different than paying $4.5M to have a dinner with Warren Buffett [3].

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-is-offering...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Sun

[3] https://www.coindesk.com/trons-justin-sun-finally-gets-4-5m-...

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