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Comment by DantesKite | Hacker News Reader

All the Web3 criticisms remind me of my experiences with Star Trek.

For context, I never watched Star Trek. I'd read stories about fans and it always struck me as the dorkiest possible show, with unabashed nerdiness making something like the Big Bang Theory look like a sophisticated work of art.

But one day, I listened to a podcast about strength training and a question came up about which Star Trek leader the host liked more. And I was struck by how they described them. They were leaders. Competent, skilled, and wise men.

This is not the impression I got listening from their rabid fans who were at their worst, at the far end of this (at least on first and worst impressions).

I'd watch some scenes and it was in some respects closer to sci-fi Shakespeare than anything else. And so this gap between reality and impression stuck with me. How could I be so swayed by the worst version of something that never existed?

Years later and the rabid users of cryptocurrency rile me up. There's so much abuse and corruption happening in this space, metered with gambling addictions and delusions.

But the math and incentives are there. It would hard for me to make a case that eventually cryptocurrency will fail. There's a wide surface area of financial problems that even fintech hasn't solved yet. And a whole bunch of problems who we don't even realize exist that can one day be solved by these new mathematical properties embedded into software.

So I'm not too keen on stepping too deeply into the cynicism. I'd like to wait without a final judgement on what it might become.

I don't want to miss out on who Captain Picard might become.

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So, that's a good argument for why you shouldn't dismiss a show or a thing in general based only on negative secondhand impressions. The lesson to takeaway is that you should judge a thing by its own quality, not by your negative impression of the fanbase.

But from that, there is no way you should conclude that cynicism is wrong in general. You should not overreact to too much cynicism by discarding criticism entirely! You should react by seeking better information.

I don't think that's GP's conclusion. GP's conclusion is that crypto is rooted in real innovation and the noise surrounding it gives the false impression that the tech is just a scam.

...relying on the evidence-free invention of not merely some specific fictional benefits of the technology, but a category of material improvements in the world:

> And a whole bunch of problems who we don't even realize exist that can one day be solved

It's not clear that the impression is false.

I’m working in the middle of the field so I might be biased, there’s incredible innovation

"Innovation" and "scam" are not incompatible.

and what is that 'real innovation' exactly? Writing checksums of everything in multiple copies, very slowly? Databases had these features for decades.

I don’t know you could, like, read about it?

A few keywords: threshold signatures, zk-snarks, consensusless protocols, byzantine fault tolerant protocols, vrf, vdf, starks, bls

Cynicism should be discared because it's cynicism. It is a pathologicaly warped worldview misshapen by deep narcissism of people who got conned into believing something false and have instead of changing their beliefs made their disillusionment into their identity.

I think the GP is trying to say that there are some people who are so horrified by a few cringeworthy aspects of Star Trek that they want to create a huge blanket stigma against it to ensure that nobody watches it, and anybody who does watch it is buried in ridicule. Likewise, there are some people who react to blockchain scams and BS by trying to create a blanket stigma against anything related to the topic.

I haven't personally looked into blockchain or related ideas enough to get excited (I'm harder to excite now that I'm older, and I have less time) but sometimes I feel like I ought to, just because the flavor of the criticism reminds me of the smug nastiness that got directed towards people who were interested in things like computers and Star Trek when I was young. These nerds think they're onto something cool, and we have to mock them until they can't believe in it anymore. I almost feel like I should start learning the technology out of solidarity with the little kid I used to be who embraced computers despite knowing how hopelessly dorky that made him.

Of course the concept of nerdiness has been socially rehabilitated since the 1980s, and now the stigma is nominally directed towards scams and environmental waste, but the people delivering the stigma have designed the blast radius to work pretty much the same. The entire topic is stigmatized, any interest or optimism is stigmatized. I think the history of computing and the internet shows that it's hopeless to try to disentangle the utopian hope for social transformation from the grifting and greed. Scam artists can smell the hope for progress and transformation like sharks can smell blood; it means a meal for them. It's a crude distortion to argue that either optimism or greed alone properly characterizes "web3" without the other. When we look back twenty years from now they'll both be part of the story, whether these ideas fizzle out or have a transformative impact or something in between.

> But the math and incentives are there.

Can you elaborate on this?

The best critiques of blockchain tech, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, DeFi, etc. describe fatal flaws at the core of those technologies. For example, the lack of monetary policy and regulations, privacy and security shortcomings, and high transaction costs.

It'd be great to read a positive analysis of the core merits (the math and the incentives) and how those can be applied to solve problems.

Decentralized proof of ownership is the core merit, as I see it. That has some value, and NFTs are kind of the perfect vehicle to use the technology.

But does it have any practical use? That's the question. NFTs are hot right now as an investment vehicle, or as a way for artists to sell unique creations (leading to investment vehicles, I suppose). I'm not sold on the utility, long term.

> Decentralized proof of ownership is the core merit

> But does it have any practical use? That's the question.

Sounds like a solution searching for a problem.

That is, until you close on a house and spend hundreds to potentially tens of thousands of dollars on title searches and bank fees.

Then ETH at the worst gas fees looks generous

True, but the title searches and bank fees are just regulatory cruft slathered on from the real estate business.

The cryptocurrency guys who think cryptocurrencies will be immune to this are probably gonna be shocked and annoyed.

I always thought we only owned things because a central authority says we do.

You have described what a home computer was in the 80s. It found many problems.

Did it? Today's computers are mostly descendents of more heavyweight '80s computers. I know there are like a few C64s running webservers and stuff for kicks.

Home computers were good for games or learning to program, not sure they were actually that useful outside of those things.

Edit: Ok Atari STs were good for music and Amigas were apparently good for graphics rendering.

To me cryptocurrency sounds like monorail or electric bus. Both technologies were designed to fix one aspect of existing transport systems.

Monorail concept appeared around 1900, trying to reduce the elevated railways problem. One designer thought of reducing the use of metal. Wuppertal suspension railway uses much more metal for tracks than conventional trams. There is a special monorail in Britain, built in 1940s, that stands on A-shaped legs. The only rail is supported by some metal triangles, using the same amount of metal. Later models, first built in Disneyland, use concrete (which contains a lot more iron in the concrete itself besides the reinforcement), and rubber wheels (sacrificing the advantage of low friction). Their biggest problem is switches: they're heavy and huge. Suspended monorails use big box instead of a rail, because swaying carriages are uncomfortable, and to hold them, the track must resist the force of a long lever. Errr... what was the reason to go for all that, in the first place? Make simpler track and use less rails/metal? Not achieved at all.

Electric buses... just 2 words: they're 3-5 times more expensive, and a whole route of e-buses requires just as much electric equipment as trolleybus line. Plus, e-buses spend twice more time charging than riding. Which means you need to triple the fleet of triple-quintiple more expensive vehicles. Even if battery technology progresses, as some insist, let it improve for private, not public money.

It seems that blockchain is similar: couple of advantages, lots of big disadvantages.

You can use the technology to make products that are quite unique. I used a game engine to generate art and also provide a bunch of ways to interact with the art, and tokenized the generated pieces. Owners of the pieces will be able to load their art into this game and interact with it directly. Yes, I could have done this with traditional web infra, however it would rely on me managing certs to prove ownership, and there is not an easy way to transfer ownership to other users on a secondary market. There's a lot of parts of the web3 tech that I've been interested in and think it's just a pretty unique ecosystem.

The way I look at it is that this is a tool. The way it is used is up to the creativity of the engineer(s) working with it. I think that using NFTs in this manner is a lot easier for me to manage than other approaches, and it's pretty fun. Practical use? Idk it's a fun art project that I hope people enjoy, but yeah I do think it was easier for me to implement in this method than a traditional web app.

But I do think there are plenty of practical use cases that you could leverage this technology for in terms of access based on ownership of the digital assets.

Decentralized proof of ownership only matters if people with guns think it matters.

I saw a short video of Keanu Reeves laughing at NFTs because they had value but are easy to copy.

Which I found somewhat funny. Keanu gets paid a lot because he acts in things that have value but are easy to copy (movies).

The reason why those have a high value is because of copyright. The people that financed the film have control over the copying of the film. Because people with guns agree with the copyright scheme (US government).

NFTs cannot have actual value unless people with the ability to enforce that scarcity cares about them.

not only that but the idea of ownership of a token and the underlying asset have yet to be challenged in court

>NFTs cannot have actual value unless people with the ability to enforce that scarcity cares about them.

You're confusing the hyperlink with the destination. The hyperlink has scarcity and is impossible to copy. You can make a new near identical hyperlink, but it's not the same as the original, the community says so and will ignore the imposter. The hyperlink are what people are buying and flipping. It has whatever market value other participants agree it has.

NFTs do not have to be links to pictures on cloud / decentralized storage. That is just their primary implementation right now, but they can quite literally be a token to represent anything, not simply a jpg. But even in this case, yeah it's easy to make copies of the pictures. However, there is intrinsic value in owning something that is legitimate.

However, I want to focus on the other possibilities for NFTs - I am making an NFT project that does have the art aspect, however the tokens also provide access to unique services like hooking into a video game engine to allow users to interact with their art. Since it's trivial to detect forgeries and ownership, even if someone was to create an NFT pointing to even the exact same piece of art, they would be denied access to the service as it is a forgery.

Right now proof of ownership is usually in the form of discord bots allowing access to servers, but there's much more you can actually do with this concept than we are seeing now, like the example above.

How does decentralized proof of ownership better provide for developed economies than modern monetary policy with robust tooling to e.g. ease economic downturns, prevent high (20%+j inflation and prevent hoarding of capital to incentivize investment?

> Decentralized proof of ownership is the core merit

But it's neither decentralized nor a proof AT ALL. NFT literally can't facilitate anything by itself, without adding some centralized DB to it and some centralized humans governing all interactions between clients.

> NFT literally can't facilitate anything by itself, without adding some centralized DB to it

What exactly do you want an NFT to facilitate? And are you raving mad at the people who make the NFTs, the people who buy them or both?

Well at minimum at least something, at maximum - fully what cryptobros already promise today (so that their messages won't be lies) - proof of ownership, transfer of ownership, enforcement of ownership, decentralization, universal standards and so on. Nothing special, only the things crypto fans already say today to the gullible buyers.

Exactly. If you want to buy any NFT, you have to go to a centralised marketplace like opensea.io. On top of that you probably have to exchange fiat to ETH in a centralised exchange. If any of those two stop existing your NFTs become worthless, at least when denominated to fiat. And if you can't convert to fiat or buy real things, it's all imaginary.

> If you want to buy any NFT, you have to go to a centralised marketplace like opensea.io.

With hicetnunc.xyz, there is already one example of a "marketplace" shutting down and being immediately replaced with alternative interfaces - which works because the underlying smart contract doesn't care what system people use to interact with it. The "blockchain is a distributed database" part does indeed work if a system is designed to use it.

> proof of ownership,

Ask for a reciept. An NFT is not selling "proof of ownership", its selling you a product

> transfer of ownership,

The so called "gullible buyers" would not be buyers without this process occurring. An NFT is not selling "transfer of ownership", the transfer is the process itself. It consists of a seller (aka crypto fan), a buyer (aka gullible buyers) and a product (the NFT). The product is what is being being transferred, so how can what is being transferred also facilitate the transfer of ownership?

> enforcement of ownership,

Again, ask for a reciept. If someone robs you, sue them or call the police. That "enforcement of ownership" you seek is a separate product.

> decentralization,

How much more decentralized do you want a jpeg on the internet to be, really?

> universal standards and so on

What universal standards exactly?

> Ask for a reciept. An NFT is not selling "proof of ownership", its selling you a product

No, it's not, unless you are calling an entry in DB with an URL inside "a product". NFT system is selling NFT only, and NFT itself is almost nothing and useless.

> The so called "gullible buyers" would not be buyers without this process occurring. An NFT is not selling "transfer of ownership", the transfer is the process itself. It consists of a seller (aka crypto fan), a buyer (aka gullible buyers) and a product (the NFT). The product is what is being being transferred, so how can what is being transferred also facilitate the transfer of ownership?

Ok, I see you really calling the NFT itself a product. This is amusing but I must tell you that you are either misled or malicious, because other cryptobros sell people not NFT but the stuff it links to - digital file usually. And they brainwash buyers that they (buyers) are really buying the digital file.

>Again, ask for a reciept. If someone robs you, sue them or call the police. That "enforcement of ownership" you seek is a separate product.

I won't write long here, but we can see here that NFT don't facilitate any kind of "proof of ownership" and even NFT fans agree with this - you need some centralized receipts and police according them too :)

>How much more decentralized do you want a jpeg on the internet to be, really?

Decentralized proof of ownership, which is impossible today.

>What universal standards exactly?

That was about new NFT fad I'm seeing - gaming NFTs, where bros expect that different competing corporations will for some reason implement a universal standard for items between different competing games and voluntarily implement and support it. Pure BS but that is one of the NFT promises today.

> No, it's not, unless you are calling an entry in DB with an URL inside "a product". NFT system is selling NFT only, and NFT itself is almost nothing and useless.

Calling an entry in a DB? What kind of db exactly... maybe a public distributed ledger (aka a blockchain)? Hmmmm..... The Mona Lisa itself is almost nothing and useless. Just some paint splashed on a canvas hundreds of years ago. Totally worthless. To someone out there. Just like NFTs are totally worthless to you. Heres a small life tip: do not waste your time, energy or money in anything in life that has no value to you, because you find it totally worthless to you. But you are just one being, among seventy billion others alive today. So what is important to you, will be worthless to billions of others. Does that make them idiots? No. But it kind of makes you one if you expect everyone else alive to value only exactly what you value. Live and let live.

> Ok, I see you really calling the NFT itself a product. This is amusing but I must tell you that you are either misled or malicious, because other cryptobros sell people not NFT but the stuff it links to - digital file usually. And they brainwash buyers that they (buyers) are really buying the digital file.

You used to term "gullible buyers". The key word here being BUYERS. The definition of buyer is someone who takes ownership of a PRODUCT... in this case an NFT from someone else. I'm glad you find the concept amusing. Welcome to the world of trade and capitalism. The buyers are usually speculators. Look that term up. Ever heard of the dot-com mania? The tulip mania? If you think they were just buying flowers, you have a lot to learn about human emotions and motivation. Coca-cola is not just selling "colored sugar water".

> I won't write long here, but we can see here that NFT don't facilitate any kind of "proof of ownership" and even NFT fans agree with this - you need some centralized receipts and police according them too :)

So what? If I buy an NFT, I wont be buying it because of "proof of ownership". The very fact that I can buy it today, and sell it to someone else at a profit tommorow is all the proof of ownership I need. Got that? Thousands of NFTs are being bought and sold daily, in a marketplace. Not sure what other proof of ownership (the ability to legally sell something) you are looking for... but like I said, it seems you're still new to this world of trade and capitalism. You'll learn eventually. Hopefully.

> Decentralized proof of ownership, which is impossible today.

It is possible. You just dont understand how it works. The only impossibility here is your ability to understand what proof of ownership in the digital word entails. Can you proove that you own the hacker news account you are posting from? How? Did you just say email account and password... DING!DING!

> That was about new NFT fad I'm seeing - gaming NFTs, where bros expect that different competing corporations will for some reason implement a universal standard for items between different competing games and voluntarily implement and support it. Pure BS but that is one of the NFT promises today.

Fads will come and go. It is human nature. NFTs are no different. Websites were once a fad in the dotcom boom. Some fads help advance our tech and knowlegde.

It is good that you are honest about crypto motivations. I wish others were at least also honest too.

Am not sure how you came to that conclusion of dishonesty in others. Did anyone ever claim that the only reason they were selling you crypto was because they love you, and wish the absolute best for you, and have nothing to gain at all from it other than seeing you happy? If they actually said that, they are liars, and you are a fool.

>NFTs are hot right now as an investment vehicle,

I'd say speculation more than investing.

The peoblem with public blockchains and related technologies is that they have been list in the middle of huge speculation markets... which brings all sorts of bullshit and scams.

That's why I like to look at hyperledger and similar technologies. If you remove the money incentives, you are left with the pure technology essence. And then you can judge it by what it is.

Yeah, I should have said "speculation," not investment. They smell similar, but they're definitely different.

> Decentralized proof of ownership

I mean, the 'ownership' is as real as "buy a plot of land on Mars" scams.

An inefficient distributed database filled with assertions of legally unenforceable pseudoproperty rights seems somewhat underwhelming.

well said.

If two NFTs point at the same underlying asset, how do I go about deciding which one is authoritative without relying on exactly the same sorts of trust and authority relationships that I'd use in the absence of a blockchain?

The problem (as others have said) is ownership is a legal construct not a mathematical one. A smart contract may not be recognized as a valid contract in a court of law, or have precedent over say the actual handshake agreement.

Even ignoring that, many NFTs do not convey any ownership of the digital work, but rather of the NFT itself.

So far the most likely value is in a platform that actually lets you leverage that ownership, such as Meta letting you put a framed monkey on the wall in your virtual home. But that sort of platform tie-in means it is basically the same as say the DRM-encoumbered media stores we've seen go bye - ownership which is only recognized within a platform is only really providing durable value to that platform.

There's also fatal flaws at the heart of capitalism and a centrally controlled currency whose value is manipulated at will completely outside a citizen's power to control.

These fatal flaws have not prevented capitalism from blooming all over the world.

Lest you think I'm some species of these crypto libertarians, I believe it's an imperfect solution to hand humans more greed levers to go about life dictating their actions by perverse incentives.

The solution for me looks more like a free net whose power is contributed by a mass group of volunteers. But who then will run the datacenters? With what materials will they build them and who will freely give it to them?

Capitalism needs to be ripped up from its roots before we can have a hope of a free in all senses world for all. Until then, maybe we first take control of the machinery by replacing the currency with which the state does its business of violence.

> Capitalism needs to be ripped up from its roots before we can have a hope of a free in all senses world for all. Until then, maybe we first take control of the machinery by replacing the currency with which the state does its business of violence.

I agreed up until your last sentence: is the state the bigger problem (versus multi-billion corps and capitalists)? is currency the main lever of states (versus diplomacy, infrastructures, military, etc)?

Let's just say that the geostrategically important states that tried to move away from the dollar got freedomed very quick.

Zero knowledge proofs will revolutionize civic life

solving people problems with tech.

Zero knowledge proofs have existed since the 80s. How much longer do we have to wait for this revolutionizing?

> privacy and security shortcomings, and high transaction costs

I think these are the only technical arguments here, and there's real improvements there depending on what project you're looking at.

> But the math and incentives are there. It would hard for me to make a case that eventually cryptocurrency will fail.

This strikes at one of my primary complaints with crypto/web3 discussions: Advocates switch between specific cryptocurrencies, cryptocurrency in general, and the concept of a blockchain in general as convenient for their arguments.

The concept of a cryptocurrency will always exist, but that doesn't mean that we can't be critical of the current financial shenanigans going on in the space.

If it helps, remember that the thing people talk about the most when discussing cryptocurrencies is always the price. But cryptocurrencies don't have any built-in notion of price. 1 BTC is 1 BTC. What people are really excited about is the exchanges and the on-ramps and off-ramps, which have nothing to do with the blockchain or cryptography.

> What people are really excited about is the exchanges and the on-ramps and off-ramps, which have nothing to do with the blockchain or cryptography.

Isn't that like saying that what gets people really exciting about beer is the euphoric feeling after consuming it, which has nothing to do with the liquid itself?

If it wasn't for the exchanges and on- and off-ramps then cryptocurrencies wouldn't exist at all. Potentially spending it one day is the only thing that makes the crypto world go around.

> If it wasn't for the exchanges and on- and off-ramps then cryptocurrencies wouldn't exist at all. Potentially spending it one day is the only thing that makes the crypto world go around.

"Spending" it doesn't require cashing it out in a hypothetical cryptocurrency future. People can, and do, transact in cryptocurrencies. Though it's actually quite painful, slow, expensive, and lacks all of the benefits of traditional transactions so everyone avoids it if possible.

But this exposes another flaw in the currency argument: If the on-ramps and off-ramps were to become so cheap, fast, and ubiquitous that we could transact instantly in cryptocurrencies for free, then suddenly the underlying coins wouldn't need to have any speculative value. If I could click "buy" on a product and the exchange into crypto, transfer, and end-user exchange out of crypto was basically instant, then the exchange rate doesn't actually matter at all because I'm only holding for a brief instant. Yet that would break the speculative use case entirely, so the hype tends to follow the deliberately inefficient coins. Crypto proponents don't actually want cryptocurrency to be easy to use. They only want you to buy it, then do nothing with it. Ever. If you lose it, even better (for everyone else).

> Though it's actually quite painful, slow, expensive, and lacks all of the benefits of traditional transactions so everyone avoids it if possible.

It’s really not. For several years, paying with crypto has been faster and easier than credit card or PayPal.

No arbitrary blocks, guessing traffic lights, aligning shipping and billing names and zip codes, figuring which card will work for what country and payment processor, biyearly renewals, SMS confirmations, risk of having it abused despite having good opsec, being on the phone with PayPal, etc etc.

I just open my wallet, unlock it used my preferred method, [scan a qr code/copy-paste something], click OK, done.

I understand that many people on HN get profiled “white” enough by “the algorithms” to not have to experience the Kafkaesque frustration of the status quo.

For the rest of us, cryptocurrency is faster, easier, and sometimes cheaper. Today.

This concept (context switching) reminds me of the current USSR fans (yes, they exist). They pick and choose ONLY the positive parts of each specific decade of USSR history as it fits them and blindly ignore all the negatives. E.g. some bit of space race (the successful part of course) ignoring gulag which facilitated it; the victory part of WW2 ignoring all other countries and it's own participation in 39-40; the corruption trials ignoring literal mass killing with out trial at the same time; cheap budget living ignoring dying economic of the same period; and the list goes on.

Crypto bros do the same. Adoption - "look, Bitcoin", but its not working - "look, shitcoin1", but it's premined - "look, shitcoin2", but it's used by 3 persons including devs - "look, Bitcoin". And so on and on.

You'll find you can play that game with anything people are passionate about. Global warning, the US, Trump, Obama..BLM..Cuomo, Rust

> It would hard for me to make a case that eventually cryptocurrency will fail.

It's easy for me to make that case. Ransomware aside, there's no underlying value in cryptocurrency, unlike currencies which have the full faith and credit of governments. This is a fundamental problem that I see no way around.

I’d argue there’s an underlying value in tokens like Ether that is similar to paying for compute power and storage on AWS. I’m not saying the price right now is correct, but that there is an intrinsic value.

It cost compute power to produce the tokens, but that's sunk cost, not intrinsic. All that matters afterward is whether people want the tokens and will exchange things of value for them.

Is fiat currency any different? My coins and bills don't have any intrinsic value either, but they are still currency.

If your debts and bills are denominated in the currency of your country, the bills and coins have value because you know how many of them you need to pay what you owe. So yes, if we ever got to the stage where your rent is priced in some coin, that coin would correspond to a currency. But until then, it's more like a volatile stock and "currency" is a misnomer.

I think the intrinsic value is coming from the fact that you need to spend eth to run smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain.

I mean the use of those to power arbitrary computation on the network. It’s not dissimilar to AWS tokens.

What if the value store is the network itself.

At this point currency is an abstraction relying on computers. I handle cash personally once a month.

Amazon cashier-less stores are just as much to normalize the behavior of not paying as reducing jobs).

Producing currency, securing it, moving it, the old banking infra just for finance management has a huge environmental impact.

Banks are easily socially engineered. Corruption is rife.

Eth shouldn’t be pegged to a dollar. It’s not a currency. It’s an information network.

What crypto should be is not property but the technical network abstraction we develop and roll over.

Grifters are trying to generate traditional wealth off the idea it’s a literal thing but we could just keep rolling new protocols out. Up to you to store your work.

It’s a logical substrate for transmitting and storing information that can’t be monopolized like physical money if we see it as such.

Unlike banks with full vaults, ephemeral network control can be coded out. No one person can become a black hole with disproportionate pull on social agency.

> there's no underlying value in cryptocurrency

Of course, there is a value: it's a decentralized write-only database that can be used for things like proof of ownership without the requirement of a central authority. A famous use-case is the illicit online drug trade, which cannot currently be achieved (to my knowledge) with fiat currencies.

It might never replace government-backed currencies (or it just might, who knows), but to say it literally has no utility betrays a lack of knowledge about the system.

No, it can't be used for "proof of ownership" at all. Crypto only barely works because it lives inside blockchain completely. Anything external to the blockchain (which is practically everything) can't be verified using blockchain. Only using some centralized and opaque/corrupt additions to the blockchain some rights can be maybe transferred (but not enforced even then), but at that point blockchain is useless can be safely removed if data is stored centrally.

It can be used for proof of ownership not to be confused with proof of identity because anyone can check the public blockchain to determine that funds sent from account a belongs to whoever setup account a.

It allows proof ownership without proof of identity.

No it doesn't allow proof of ownership. Ownership is a set of intellectual rights encoded via laws. NFT can't do anything about IPs or laws, and won't be able in future.

Having a private key provides ownership over an account. That ownership allows you to transfer money. It allows you to accept money.

This is outside of IP or laws. You can move money without laws.

NFT are a differet topic. NFT are a way of having a digital token attached to something that can be used to determine ownership to an account. Do they need to be decentralized? No but it opens up ownership to all not just the approved.

> Only using some centralized and opaque/corrupt additions to the blockchain some rights can be maybe transferred

Hmmm... centralized and opaque/corrupt. So like a traditional bank?

Assuming if the banks are bad, please tell me why are we replicating them them again but in worse way? (opaque, unregulated, anonymous and usually sitting in offshore fearing IRS sanctions)

You seem to have a very flawed, fundamental misunderstanding of either the term opaque, or what a public ledger is. There is nothing opaque about bitcoin transactions. They are all (every single one of them) open to the public. They are more traceable than cash transactions and more public than bank transactions.

> please tell me why are we replicating them them again but in worse way?

But this is just your disputed opinion. It is like asking "why is Kanye always singing and selling bad new songs, and we already have the beatles". Because they can and want to.

Bitcoins are transparent, that I don't contest. Now please tell me how do Bitcoins specifically facilitate "proof of ownership" of stuff? Because that's where this thread started, that crypto will somehow do this, according to crypto fans.

Short answer: passwords The very same way your online bank account facilitates "proof of ownership" of that said bank account.

Lolno. You are completely mistaken about what ownership means. I don't own my bank account (it's complicated), I don't own my HN account. Password is only used to authenticate and authorize me on the digital property owned by someone else - PG or bank corporation.

You do own your hacker news account. If someone hacks into your computer, and makes stupid comments while pretending to be you, you have every right to seek compensation. Because you actually OWN your hacker news account, in the very same way you OWN the house you are renting. Your landlord cannot just rock up to your house tomorrow, walk in and sit in your yard for an hour because they "own" the house. So yes, you are right! Ownership is and can be complicated, and NFT ownership is no different. ;)

I'm sure you'll roll your eyes at this response, but a large chunk of economists don't believe there is value in anything. Your definition of "value" might mean "utility" or "what the US treasury says this is worth", or something else entirely. Starting a discussion with "well, it doesn't have any value" is more or less meaningless, and borders on economically illiterate, excuse the harshness.

My stuffed animal from when I was a baby has no "value", but I find it quite valuable. This isn't pendantics either - it determines more or less your entire economic perspective. If you believe in a utility or labor theory of value, of course crypto is a scam. A subjective theory? Not so much.

If someone trades an ETH for a Dollar, has value been changed? Moved around? Created? Has someone been scammed? Has wealth been created? Has net happiness been increased? Value is an extremely non-trivial thing and will lead you to love or hate the exact same situation depending on your chosen definition.

At any rate, I agree, crypto contains no value intrinsically. That said, I'm buying at the current price!

Those crypto-fans who are saying "ah well the -network- has intrinsic value" are missing the point. Value does not exist in the world. Value is like beauty or color - it's a subjective experience. All statements in the form of "X has no value" must be concatenated with "to me".

If anyone finds this incredibly interesting, and a fairly ignored part of epistemology, I strongly recommend reading Carl Menger's "The Origin of Money"

What's going to happen when people start trying to retire by selling crypto?

Many people will be selling at the same time, and suddenly the subjective value for everyone will be lower because it will be easier and easier to buy it.

My sense is that there is a cap on the demand for purchasing crypto, but the supply is very low because mining decreases over time, and generally people holding lots of crypto are younger and have no need to sell in order to pay for things, they can just pay with their fiat income.

This equation will change drastically as people start to retire and need to sell lots of crypto in order to fund their lifestyle without working.

The value of whatever coin you have may go down. Planning a retirement around a lottery ticket is fun but you still stuff your retirement fund.

Bitcoin slows down ensuring it's value continues to increase with fewer buyers.

Proper retirement planning means moving from 100% risky in your 20s to 50/50 in your 40s to 10/90 in your 60s.

What happens when people start generally moving away from crypto towards less risky assets as they age? This hasn’t started yet but it will

Move value to me to value to many within a society and everyone can be on the same page

> I'm sure you'll roll your eyes at this response, but a large chunk of economists don't believe there is value in anything.

Food and shelter have value which is pretty near to objective. In fact it is routinely used to compare economic levels throughout history or societies. In fact it's quite useful to distinguish market price from usage (intrinsic) value. Usage value is variable from individual to individual, but there is a hierarchy of things we usually agree on, at the bottom being water, then food, then light, ... (biological stuff) then social interactions, intellectual stimulation, ... (more complex social stuff), then things like healthcare or gun access which will obviously depend on your political ethic (but which still are largely clustered, just not universal). So sure market price doesn't denote value, and intrinsic value is a fuzzy hierachy that is more and more precise given more and more assumptions on social norms, but the bottom of this hierachy is non-trivial (not everything at 0) and the top isn't that diverse.

Marx & Engels had a (critical) theory of capitalistic value where value is actually pretty well defined, as the amount of human work which has gone into something. That may be seen as an extension of what i first said (the value of human time being at least cost of life for that time).

While pragmatically what you've said is entirely true - if we treat the subject with some rigor it's extremely easy to find examples of people who have valued food and shelter at zero. What of the self-immolating buddhist? They valued Tibet's freedom over their own life, and certainly over food and shelter.

So sure, most reasonable people would agree on food and water - but that's introducing a very very powerful new actor - your ability to judge other peoples actions as reasonable or rational. If you reserve that right - then sure, let's call crypto irrational - let's stand on the sidelines and say "well I wouldn't do that!" - let's start building the hierarchy of "reasonable values". I'm only suggesting that our ability to call someone else's valuation irrational behavior is dubious at best and aggressively violent, the birth of social engineering, the sourge of humanity, at worst (hyperbole maybe, but maybe not).

That impulse to guide "rationality" is exactly why we have modern monetary policy, and the only philosophical reason to like cryptocurrencies: a well designed, well distributed immutable ledger is more or less immune from such "guidance".

Edit: Obviously, I disagree strongly with the labor theory of value. I don't have anything handy, but there is a lot written on this (and I think the labor theory of value is fairly well demolished!). Let me know and I'd be happy to send links!

I'm gonna nitpick on your nitpicking, but for me the self-immolating buddhist did value life/means of existance just like everybody else, it's just that they valued some more complex thing more (that thing being of course extremely rare). I mean i'm pretty sure my view is (at least superficially) consistent (eg i believe i can find alternate interpretations for any counter examples) so we have to look a bit deeper!

About your pick on judging other and building a hierarchy of reasonable values: well that's politics/ethics/moral (i'm no philosopher so i don't fully understand the difference between these concepts)! I'm not here saying there a is a total order between value systems, mostly a partial order based on inclusion/precision. And i'm asserting that whatever the set of living things you're taking, they'll have a non-trivial greatest lower bound (eg there is a common notion of intrinsic value) (but i think you got that).

About rationality: perhaps we don't understand the same thing by rationality but i believe one cannot be irrational, it's kinda vacuous. One can be in irrational with respect to some value system, but every one is (boundedly) rational with respect to his values (and it's by this axiom that we can infer peoples value systems). My comparison of value systems isn't on qualitative comparison between alternatives (me good you bad), it's a comparison on commonness/shared-base (this specific to me, this specific to you, this common).

on your edit: :) you feel nice to disagree with, send already, but i'm not promising i'll read! Btw i'm not sure i'll actually disagree with such critics, i personally don't really believe in value (as a homogeneous unit) because different things aren't always comparable and even different orders of magnitude of the same thing aren't always comparable (i've got no value for 0.01 house or 100 house, or more precisely it's not 0.01 resp 100 times my value for 1 house).

Most currencies have no underlying value. The value of a dollar is drawn from dollar supply and trust that others will accept and value the dollar.

When a currency goes through hyperinflation, that generally happens because the government goes crazy printing the currency and the trust that others have in accepting the currency goes down.

If crypto collapses, it will likely be because it just becomes computationally infeasible to work with. The problem with the blockchain is that every action on the blockchain requires the whole blockchain. As time goes on simply storing the blockchain will be something that's simply not reasonable.

An issue specifically with bitcoin is that as time goes on, transferring a single coin in a day, month, or year becomes computationally impossible. Bitcoin is quickly rushing to a point where holders of bitcoin will be incapable of trading it.

That, IMO, will be the collapse of crypto. If you can't move the currency, it doesn't matter how much others value it. It'll become a game of hot potato. with the last few holders getting more and more desperate to unload the potato for money.

Hyperinflation after money printing is not the result of "trust going down". It's the result of increased dollars increasing aggregate demand in a system that cannot keep up with productive capacity.

Thats the rub - a currency which you can't actually spend is more of a speculative investment. A currency which you can only exchange for other more stable currencies even more so.

When you try to take a digital currency and exchange it for digital items and digital ownership, you do so in a realm where "information wants to be free" - ownership of data is not often as interesting a concept as you want.

Finally, when you try to exchange digital currency for physical goods, you start to realize ownership itself only means anything as part of the existing legal constructs - a distributed ledger "title" will only be valid when the government says it is, and a successfully executed smart contract can be effectively overturned by a judge's order.

The parties/exchanges that don't acknowledge any of this and push the decentralized, out-of-government-control messaging seem like they are tending to be the ones who are structured corporately to be highly resistant to being taken to court over false claims by their customers/victims.

Why, there is value in crypocurrency. Maybe not the kind of value society actually wants. Crypto can be redeemed for drugs on the darknet. And you can use it to launder money, or to dirty money (taking your legitimate income and funneling it anonymously somewhere else).

Many cryptocurrencies have been ruled securities. Securities are not "currencies", but still have value, don't they? Even if it is just speculative value (you don't know whether the underlying business is goiong to be successful, or if it is even a scam).

Instrumentalizing a show whose essential message was that living in a post-scarcity society is possible and where people pursue their interests genuinely rather than in the name of economic gain to make a case for crypto is so on brand with the actual post we're commenting on you could put it directly on the website

Let's just listen to the man himself for a second, while we're talking about star trek and money: https://youtu.be/PV4Oze9JEU0?t=143

It's even more ironic, because the entire point of NFTs is to create artificial scarcity in an environment without scarcity (the digital world).

I guess you could argue that NFTs isn't the main aspect of cryptocurrencies, and I think you'd be right, but I find cryptocurrency projects in general seem to lean heavily into the scarcity aspect, and promise that early adopters will be able to cash in that scarcity later.

> I guess you could argue that NFTs isn't the main aspect of cryptocurrencies

Not even a major aspect. Just like neither are the main aspect(s) of Web3.

Despite what con artists and puppet farms on Reddit and Twitter are pushing.

(The web3 moniker in its current form came years before the first NFT contract)

Problem is blockchain is a test to see if humans will set their own home on fire, while they're still living it, for the promise of a quick buck.

Promoted by people who think government is a terrible idea, an idea so terrible that literally every large group of people invented it.

Of course if I had mined some bitcoin when it was new, I'd be telling you how great it was to ensure my own profits

I wouldn't say large groups of people invent governments. I think they arise from infighting between small groups of people and then a majority of people that didn't really care much about what was being fought about are just "ok with it".

I don't know if government is a terrible idea, but if you agree that monopolies are a terrible idea then maybe at least you should give people against the concept of a government some attention regarding the "monopoly on violence" contradiction that's pretty much alive in all forms of government in place today.

There's no large functioning society without government though, it appears to be the natural stable state.

If you want to gather 100,000 of your most random friends and try a new idea though, that's great.

But history suggests you'll invent government.

You could have said the same thing but change "without government" to "with electricity" in like 1830 and be right. History doesn't suggest anything, people suggest things, and "it didn't happen yet so it will never happen" is useless as a historical argument.

History suggests what the stable state of something is as much as reading tea leafs suggests it.

And all the people who choose to live without electricity are weird.

Many groups have tried to live without government, which have succeeded at scale?

The math is there, yes. Its cool and exciting. But thats all. All the incentives are to control the plane and grab the next big thing, like Facebook and Google grabbed the Internet Advertising. Any form of decentralization is not possible, it won't work. Just look how hard it is for people to agree on anything very basic. The higher the stake, the more people will try to grab as much as they can. How would imagine for people to get a consensus about upgrades and changes in the protocol. Just look how much bitcoin staled because of that. Everything is controller by developers of given technology. If there is a reason, they will force their agenda. It's been happening over and over.

While I agree with all your sentiment here, I think it's ok to be critical of web3 and still see a future for crypto. With all of the hyperbole and real issues both technical and social around the web3 ecosystem I'm reminded of being an outsider spectator of the dot com bubble crash. I was a senior in high school living in the east bay and something that kind of blew my mind at the time was grocery delivery. The idea of ordering some food online and getting it delivered was very exciting, the reality was it wasn't a tenable service. 12 years later with the advent and proliferation of smart phones the idea had legs and now I can and do order groceries from a variety of stores. Including a local speciality asian food place. I feel like the promises of web3 is in the phase of some good ideas that aren't ready for mainstream, similarly to grocery delivery in 1999

Like that one episode of TNG where they wake up all the people from the nineties, but it's one guy who keeps asking Picard how much BTC is at, how the blockchain is doing, etc.

edit: https://youtu.be/XQQYbKT_rMg

Love this take.

It's kind of how I feel about crypto – cautiously observing, investing money I can afford to lose, toying with ideas on how and which real problems it could solve, and doing my best to ignore the parts that smell like pure hype, MLMs, and land grabs.

There is something here and I don't know what yet. I doubt NFTs are it. And we already know it doesn't quite work as a currency.

> But the math and incentives are there.

Cui bono as they say. Crypto won't fail because of the group that is driving most of the demand. It's a small group of people with lots of money. If it was a big group of people with little money, you could make the case that cryptocurrencies will fail. It's success has little to do with the math and quality of the technology.

You could have said the same thing about the ~2017 ICO bubble, which had a bunch of smart money VC involvement. As far as I can tell, the big VCs did just fine, because they liquidated enough of their tokens on the little guy before the market crashed.

Exactly. Unfortunately the little guys don't decide the winners and losers so they suffer as they must. You saw it in the end of the 90s with the tech bubble, and in the 1980s with personal computing. I doubt anyone would agree the best technology won during any of those periods. I mean, would anyone consider Windows, for example, the pinnacle of OS tech? Or even today, bitcoin and ethereum the pinnacle of blockchain tech? When a small group drives most of the investment and decision making, you end up with a lot of collateral damage. It's actually sad since there are likely really technically great blockchain systems out there that will just die in the wind, and it will have nothing to do with the system's quality.

It doesn't matter, it revolves around a bizarre ideology that doesn't and can't work in theory or in practice. I suggest everybody look up the story about the cruise ship Satoshi to get a glimpse of how deluded these people are.

Oh my! https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/sep/07/disastrous-voya...

Bitcoin has merit. There is a finite amount of it, and that's it. There is no more bitcoin after the whole 23? million are "minted".

Alt-coins/shitcoins are grifts, they can be worth what people want to pay but anyone can spin up a new coin. And they do. Pump and dump for chumps.

NFTs are the same. Anyone can create an NFT for whatever. There is no value in it whatsoever.

They literally don't have money in Star Trek. Their society considers itself to have advanced beyond the need for money entirely. This couldn't be further from the future envisioned by web3 people, who seem to want to further financialize, marketize, and commodify all of human experience and interaction.

I’ve never really watched Star Trek either. Now my impression of it is that people watch it for the same reason that they watch The West Wing;[1] to fawn at the Leadership and Decorum of the Wise men (and women!).

(Probably not though.)

I’d rather interact with cosplaying nerds than with those haughty-taughty process and procedure geeks.

[1]: I of course have not watched that, either.

I’ve spent enough time in fintech to know where this ends.

The interest in it is purely because of the vast problems it creates are opportunities to gain something. These are numerous compared to the roughly single benefit and the technology itself.

It’s yet another market created to manipulate arbitrary wealth tokens. The masters are different that is all.

Math is indeed there, multiplication, division etc. I just fail to understand why is that important for you? Incentives are also there - the infamous FOMO. I think it's not a thing to be proud of.

Captain Kirk was a better captain.

This is a superb metaphor.

Spot on.

Easy to destroy a poorly constructed argument.

Those who could have a well constructed argument often choose to spend their explanation energy on those who are less skeptical.

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