Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Tinkerbell Griftopia

stephendiehl.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 251 posts

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#81

Post by Kapura »

danielvf wrote: post #21

I work in the crypto industry right now - my job is to keep bad guys from stealing XXX millions of dollars. I've also worked on a team that has done the tech side of several record breaking NFT's sales. And I've sold my own NFTS for fun, and strangers have bought them (wat!). I'm not a "believer". Crypto is indeed full of idiots - and scammers - and crazy people who will say anything to see the token they hold go up…

> It's easy, when you see lots of people making absurd claims, to go beyond just refuting those claims, and to slip into purely dismissing everything without ever checking to see if there's something of value there.

> But there is good, interesting stuff going underneath the madness frothing on twitter around crypto. Deep behind the apparent wall of film-flam artists, there's work going on in super weird math, formal software proving with billions of dollars on the line, new programming languages, new ways of scaling consensus, and lots of art being created.

I'm reminded of a tweet: "drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,"[1]

[1] https://twitter.com/dril/status/464802196060917762

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#82

Post by 0x1062 »

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #27
danielvf wrote: post #21

I work in the crypto industry right now - my job is to keep bad guys from stealing XXX millions of dollars. I've also worked on a team that has done the tech side of several record breaking NFT's sales. And I've sold my own NFTS for fun, and strangers have bought them (wat!). I'm not a "believer". Crypto is indeed full of idiots - and scammers - and crazy people who will say anything to see the token they hold go up…

Well, I saved a bunch of that art and can view it any time.

Original copies of (popular) physical art is expensive. Unknown imitations of (popular) physical art is also expensive. Known imitations of (popular) physical art is generally never expensive.

Art isn't some magic phenomenon. Many many people know that it has value! They pay a lot of money to exclusively own something that can almost always be trivially copied, not because they care it can be trivially copied, but because they _don't_ care.

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#83

Post by brennen »

demygale wrote: post #75

From the article: "But truly that is the message of the Andersen folktale, that power begets the capacity to inspire delusion in the masses." Does the "Andersen folktale" refer to Tinkerbell? Has nothing to do with the merit of the article or his argument, but Tinkerbell was a character invented by J.M. Barrie for Peter Pan and not a folktale at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#84

Post by trevyn »

pphysch wrote: post #48
trevyn wrote: post #13

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…

Broadly speaking, people are not buying crypto assets "for the lulz" because they have too much darn money lying around, they are buying them on the speculation that they will appreciate--like Bitcoin--and can be dumped at a profit.

This is exactly the key insight in a post-scarcity environment, though: Beyond food and basic shelter, everything is lulz.

A lot of people didn't grow up in that environment of abundance, so they still think that "profit" is serious business and not lulz, but then they use that profit for big houses or yachts or children or other lulz anyway.

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#85

Post by pohl »

AlexandrB wrote: post #67
zepto wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's no shortage of icky parts of crypto. The whole idea from the outset was to enable an end-run around societal regulation of undesireables like money laundering, hiring hits, funding terrorism, human trafficking, tax evasion, and trading drugs & child pornography.

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#86

Post by trevyn »

AlexandrB wrote: post #63
trevyn wrote: post #13

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…

> https://cryptoforthehomeless.org/ This seems like a well-intentioned project, but I have to ask: Why is crypto helpful, or even necessary here? Why not just use normal money?

Because there exist people who will donate crypto but not "normal money".

Same reason why there are charities that accept cars, canned food, christmas trees, etc.

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#87

Post by thrower123 »

woah wrote: post #12

This dude really pumps out the rambly anti-crypto takes. Too bad HN upvotes are not a cryptocurrency or he'd be rich

It's unfortunate. Before he fell into this rut of anti-crypto screeds in the past year or so, there was some pretty interesting programming language material

https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts.html

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#88

Post by asfgfsigninoi »

AlexandrB wrote: post #51
asfgfsigninoi wrote: post #6

>But unlike say the eternal emacs/vim war, the divisions on this topic are entirely philosophical and about culture instead of technology. What? My problem with "crypto assets" is that "blockchains" are outperformed by a System/360 while costing billions of dollars to run and drawing about the same power as all datacenters in the world put together. The fact that I like Star Trek is irrelevant.

Indeed. Blockchain tech, at least in its PoW incarnation, seems like a negation of Moore's law. The same operations get slower and less efficient over time.

Every incarnation I've heard of is comparably slow. People claim to have ways to improve efficiency but I haven't heard of anything within three orders of magnitude of performance of the Windows 95 machine rusting in my garage.

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#89

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

seibelj wrote: post #70
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course art has value... to society. That isn't the same thing as it being "worth $x", a statement that only makes sense in the context of scarcity economics.

In that sense yes, only physical[0] art has a dollar value determined by supply and demand because the supply is infinite when we're talking about information. An NFT's supposed "value" comes from the perversion of a post-scarcity space by artificially introducing scarcity in the form of cryptographic certificates. NFT proponents tell you that cryptographic certificate is somehow related to the art, but it isn't. That's an illusion. I can create an NFT that also points to the same art your NFT points to and we'd need non-cryptographically-secure non-decentralized context to know which one is legit, so even the point of selling to status-wankers doesn't make sense to me.

[0] if we ever get some kind of replicator technology that can perfectly duplicate a physical object, then that all goes away. Hell, I don't even personally really believe in it because I've spent a lot of time thinking about the Ship of Theseus and what it means.

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#90

Post by cinntaile »

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #78
seibelj wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can Ctrl-C Ctrl-V bits that will resolve to the exact same MD5. I cant do that with the physical Mona Lisa. I agree the art world is stupid, but using that as a justification for NFTs is also, exactly if not more stupid

It doesn't really matter if it's exact or not. People know that some NFT that cost $$$ can be copied, they don't care.

I don't think he meant is as a justification, just that the phenomenon is similar.

Post reply on HN