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Keanu Reeves Thinks NFTs Are a Joke

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Re: Keanu Reeves Thinks NFTs Are a Joke

#81

Post by yenwel »

QuadrupleA wrote: post #74
yenwel wrote: post #37

I do think NFTs are a bubble now. By investors that think that one NFT is worth the same as the next one minted while it is just the exact pointe that they are not interchangeable. You don't get a piece unique with significant history attached. Mondriaan, Van Gogh and Monet were innovators now it is just a deep learning gan style trick. I do see the value of NFT in asset tracking of unique pieces to provide transpare…

Like another commenter said, you can do the asset tracking with digital signatures (owner signs that they've handed it off) you don't need blockchain, mining farms burning a small countries' worth of electricity, etc.

if you ever worked at the bottom of a supply chain you would understand that there are currently major issues with gatekeepers levying high margins (note I grew up on a industrial farm). If a farmer could sell his product under a smart contract that garantueed a percentage of the transaction costs flowed back to him and end consumers would have greater transparency into the origin of its product their would be a nett societal benefit. Minig farms blablabla, you can use other proofs for verification (proof of stake) or scale it with zero knowledge proofs

Re: Keanu Reeves Thinks NFTs Are a Joke

#82

Post by QuadrupleA »

yenwel wrote: post #81
QuadrupleA wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like another commenter said, you can do the asset tracking with digital signatures (owner signs that they've handed it off) you don't need blockchain, mining farms burning a small countries' worth of electricity, etc.

if you ever worked at the bottom of a supply chain you would understand that there are currently major issues with gatekeepers levying high margins (note I grew up on a industrial farm). If a farmer could sell his product under a smart contract that garantueed a percentage of the transaction costs flowed back to him and end consumers would have greater transparency into the origin of its product their would be a nett…

I don't know the specifics but most suppliers don't want to deal with the hassle of retail and marketing, so it makes sense for distribution / retail gatekeepers to charge a fee. And smart contracts aren't going to magically guarantee someone will buy your corn.

Moreover, ETH transactions often run in the $100+ range now, mind-bogglingly expensive and inefficient. Those fees pay miners to waste electricity, hoard silicon, and scorch the earth. Ethereum has been switching to proof of stake "any day now" since it's inception 6 years ago. And even if they actually pull it off I don't see why staking $20k of crypto to participate is somehow better or more fair than spinning up a $4/month cloud VM to manage a 1000x more efficient, fast, and effective supply chain database with digital signatures.

There's a lot of utopian handwavey BS around crypto, but it seems to be turning out like other magic utopian solutions in human history (gurus, communism, etc.). Wish people would divert this time and energy into things that actually benefit society.

Re: Keanu Reeves Thinks NFTs Are a Joke

#83

Post by yenwel »

QuadrupleA wrote: post #82
yenwel wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you ever worked at the bottom of a supply chain you would understand that there are currently major issues with gatekeepers levying high margins (note I grew up on a industrial farm). If a farmer could sell his product under a smart contract that garantueed a percentage of the transaction costs flowed back to him and end consumers would have greater transparency into the origin of its product their would be a nett…

I don't know the specifics but most suppliers don't want to deal with the hassle of retail and marketing, so it makes sense for distribution / retail gatekeepers to charge a fee. And smart contracts aren't going to magically guarantee someone will buy your corn. Moreover, ETH transactions often run in the $100+ range now, mind-bogglingly expensive and inefficient. Those fees pay miners to waste electricity, hoard sil…

Well I do know the specifics, I've worked on our farm. I've worked in and for processing plants and at food retailers. I did an engineering degree in agriculture with a minor in economics (plus some post grads in IT). We produced and sold our farm products at local farmers markets. I now work at the agricultural government agency of my local region. And I can tell you that the margins that those gatekeepers take are not proportional the service of marketing and distribution they provide. I'm not talking about magic. I'm talking about mathematics and logic in the form of proof systems that have the authority that would otherwise be relegated to central enforcers. There is distributed ledger technology that already uses proof of stake like cardano or polkadot. As for high transaction cost and scalability of pos you should look into zero knowledge proofs which allows to package a massive amount of transactions into one proof that hides a lot knowledge and still allows for checking transactions: https://starkware.co/

Re: Keanu Reeves Thinks NFTs Are a Joke

#84

Post by lelanthran »

kamray23 wrote: post #59
lelanthran wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NFTs are technically good, with strong fundamentals, and real world applications, the same way ICOs were. But the way they are used has been absolute shit, and nothing sort of utterly useless. I keep thinking that all the use-cases for NFT's can be replaced with current digital certificate signing. Transferring something only needs signing with the private key, right? What are the real-world use-cases for NFT that…

NFTs are smart contracts and as such come with automatically enforced terms. You can create a token which expires, useful for licensing. You can create a token which pays royalties to an artist with every sale. You can create smart financial instruments which are technically NFTs and which skip the regulation put on the financial industry to perform more risky investments, and even automate functions like profit shar…

> You can create a token which expires, useful for licensing.

Can you end the license before expiry? Because if you cannot, then it isn't useful. License holders like to know that they can revoke the license if terms are not met.

> You can create a token which pays royalties to an artist with every sale.

Can you end the royalties? Who gets the royalty when a dispute arises is frequently decided by the courts.

> You can create smart financial instruments which are technically NFTs and which skip the regulation put on the financial industry to perform more risky investments, and even automate functions like profit sharing or paying off a bond.

So, enable one to skip the laws? That doesn't sound very much like something society wants.

> You'd need to run a bank to get most of that and some of that is illegal on a global level so even as a bank you'd have to dip outside the law.

Using a tool or instrument to do something illegal doesn't make it okay to do that thing.

Re: Keanu Reeves Thinks NFTs Are a Joke

#85

Post by QuadrupleA »

yenwel wrote: post #83
QuadrupleA wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know the specifics but most suppliers don't want to deal with the hassle of retail and marketing, so it makes sense for distribution / retail gatekeepers to charge a fee. And smart contracts aren't going to magically guarantee someone will buy your corn. Moreover, ETH transactions often run in the $100+ range now, mind-bogglingly expensive and inefficient. Those fees pay miners to waste electricity, hoard sil…

Well I do know the specifics, I've worked on our farm. I've worked in and for processing plants and at food retailers. I did an engineering degree in agriculture with a minor in economics (plus some post grads in IT). We produced and sold our farm products at local farmers markets. I now work at the agricultural government agency of my local region. And I can tell you that the margins that those gatekeepers take are…

I defer to your domain expertise there, don't know much about the food industry and supply chain. Sounds like there are some monopolistic players & regulatory capture involved.

I don't think ZKP or blockchains are going to save you though. Say Cardano actually gets past their "Byron" ICO pump-and-dump phase and implements smart contracts, or Polkadot gets off the ground.

OK, so we have a fast, non-world-destroying blockchain computing platform and can freely write programs to exchange PolkaDots or Adas or whatever. So what? Now anyone and their brother can set up a futures exchange via smart contracts, and we can all trade PolkaDots for corn futures. Whose brother's exchange do we use? If a de-facto standard one arises, who enforces quality and resolves disputes if the produce isn't up to snuff? Blockchains tend to be immutable no-refund situations, and discourage the use of "oracles" from outside for human factors like the corn being moldy. Who regulates the exchange to prevent abuses on both sides? And couldn't MonopoliCorp still use its connections and infrastructure and reach to corner the market? You still need trucks, refrigeration, deals with grocery purchasers, etc. That's the actual important substance of the whole enterprise, not the system coordinating it. Couldn't you do all this on a non-blockchain computing platform, say with digital signatures, if you just got people to agree on one?

Not to mention the questionably-solvable problems of massive volatility in PolkaDots, unforseen smart contract bugs enabling and encouraging theft opportunities, constant hack attempts, potential that the whole platform could collapse if the currency collapses and nobody cares to stake it anymore.

Re: Keanu Reeves Thinks NFTs Are a Joke

#86

Post by kamray23 »

lelanthran wrote: post #84
kamray23 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NFTs are smart contracts and as such come with automatically enforced terms. You can create a token which expires, useful for licensing. You can create a token which pays royalties to an artist with every sale. You can create smart financial instruments which are technically NFTs and which skip the regulation put on the financial industry to perform more risky investments, and even automate functions like profit shar…

> You can create a token which expires, useful for licensing. Can you end the license before expiry? Because if you cannot, then it isn't useful. License holders like to know that they can revoke the license if terms are not met. > You can create a token which pays royalties to an artist with every sale. Can you end the royalties? Who gets the royalty when a dispute arises is frequently decided by the courts. > You c…

> Can you end the license before expiry?

Of course you can, you just need to specify terms. Terms that can be in some reliable way observed by the blockchain, of course, so you'd need a trustworthy oracle or whatever to actually observe activities outside the state.

> Can you end the royalties? Who gets the royalty when a dispute arises is frequently decided by the courts.

If that's part of the contract, then yes. A smart contract is not necessarily a legally binding contract, it's a computer program which can be or represent some actual legal instrument. Once a contract is written, it cannot be revoked, unless it itself contains code that allows for one or both parties to make it not function. At the moment it is created, it becomes just an entity on the blockchain, linked to the parties by nothing but the fact that under certain conditions it will perform certain actions, which can relate to certain accounts.

> So, enable one to skip the laws?

Yes, this is a fundamental belief that can't really be separated from blockchain technology. All data and all things of value are equal before the law and you can sell illegal bonds as easily as a kid can sell him ms paint art. For several reasons, you can imagine the most reprehensible type of data or instrument one could sell online, and blockchain tech would declare that it deserves to be traded on a public market like any other commodity.

> Using a tool or instrument to do something illegal doesn't make it okay to do that thing.

Something being illegal doesn't mean it's not okay to do. Using a method which makes a law impossible to actually enforce makes that thing effectively not a law, and to do or enable that is to declare to the world that this thing should not be illegal. Fundamental, again, I cannot see a way of separating this from blockchains with arbitrary smart contracts.

Re: Keanu Reeves Thinks NFTs Are a Joke

#88

Post by vimacs2 »

hresvelgr wrote: post #18
vimacs2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're "fine" to the extent that the vacuum is fine - they are complete non-entities with zero worth beyond what grifters and idiots attribute to them. I will cast a hail of stones on the concept of copyright gone (even more) batshit insane with absolutely no hesitation.

> I will cast a hail of stones on the concept of copyright gone (even more) batshit insane with absolutely no hesitation. I dislike DRM as much as the next guy, but DRM had pirates, and NFTs have right-clickers. The problem with DRM, particularly on games, is that it restricted access. Most NFTs are still just images and basic media and don't have any impediments to distribution. I think someone getting sued because…

That's exactly why I'm throwing the stones. Most corporations are still merely observing NFT's from a distance but if it gets any traction and more companies start embracing it, the next step will be to legislate this fantasy into legal reality.

It's everything wrong with late stage capitalism consolidated into one and we all know that the people with power will salivate at the prospect of more money for less tangible value.

Re: Keanu Reeves Thinks NFTs Are a Joke

#89

Post by vimacs2 »

bicx wrote: post #17
vimacs2 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are these "real world applications", pray tell?

NFTs don’t have to be digital assets. They can represent ownership or a share of ownership of something unique, like a piece of real estate. All depends on what can be legally recognized as part of the contract.

I'll grant you that but we already have something that represents ownership in the real world - contracts. I'm not clear what advantages NFTs bring to the table for non-digital assets.

Re: Keanu Reeves Thinks NFTs Are a Joke

#90

Post by rhinoceraptor »

awill88 wrote: post #42

It’s irritating to constantly read so many articles devolve into attacks on the blockchain itself, indirectly blaming the proof of work algorithm and the amounts of energy it uses. It’s always the same theme, oh this stuff is silly, oh and it’s destroying our planet too, what a terrible thing. The tone comes off as we’re here to tear down a side effect of decentralized authenticity and once exposed as a sham, we’ll g…

In practice there really is no valid use case for a blockchain. Sure, the idea of a distributed, trustless ledger is clever. But in practice the only people able to run full nodes and do transactions are the big stakeholders, either in terms of PoW mining pools or whatever proof of stake model is “totally coming soon”.

The transaction fees and excruciatingly small transaction throughout make on-chain transactions impractical for ordinary transactions, so now you’re back to running transactions through centralized exchanges, which undermines the security of the trust model.

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