€2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP
twitter.com
twitter.com
Then somehow the world started to join up and information began to seep into local cultures and sweep away a lot of these pre-rational beliefs. And for a while, it seemed like the direction of travel was towards a global system of thought based on a widely distributed factual, rational approach.
But in the last ten years, something seems to have arrested this direction of travel and reinstated local bubbles of thought, insulated from outside challenge.
Cryptoscams are the perfect (but not only) example of a self-sustaining shared consensual delusion. They don’t talk to the outside world. So much so that something like this happens. They are living inside a pre-rational info-bubble which has budded off from reality and floated away on its own wind.
We are not just dealing with scams and fools here. There is an intense current of reality-defiance and cult behaviour. Some people get sucked into the crypto-attractor, but other hallucinations are available.
And for what it's worth, what is considered "luxury" has become more and more accessible/affordable or is not a status symbol any more: 7-series BMW models can be leased for ~800€ a month, luxury watches have fallen out of fashion, expensive clothing items can be rented or you just go for the trend of "fast fashion", even extremely expensive cell phones like Samsung's Galaxy Fold series can be had with a contract for under 100€ a month.
And if you're just looking for something to prop up your Instagram profile, everything you need sans cosmetic products can be rented for cheap - no need to actually buy all that stuff.
This seems to be the reality for many HN users. But not being able to buy a home or even pay rent seems quite common in the general population.
Some try to ride the line and do both. Create an overpriced line that's maybe less well-made than the "real" ones, and slap your brand name all over it because some segments of society think advertising the right brand names and lots of fake gold and such are what rich people like, and they want to be like them while prominently advertising that they can afford "luxury". Then you sell them in different stores from where you sell your actually-luxury goods. A Gucci bag with the most prominent design element being "Gucci" tiled all over it isn't actually a luxury item. "Big pony" Ralph Lauren isn't even luxury-adjacent like the mainline brand is (or, at least, has been), it's trashy as hell—but they produce them for a reason, and in some stores that's nearly all they have. That's a signal of the kind of store you're in and who they're selling to, not a sign that luxury has become more accessible.
None of this is "luxury" becoming more affordable.
€800 a month? i have an income of €1100 per month. so after rent and bills (€500), i have €600 per month for all my other costs. no BMW for me.
although (like you(?)) i do live in a European country (Holland) where there is excellent, although expensive, rail/bus travel and biking infrastructure.
It's even worse than that because of the algorithms.
They show you more of what they think you like, but the bubbles are quite narrow. For example, suppose you want to see what's going on with all the vaccine skepticism.
There is a bubble centered around Joe Rogan. They're talking about how the existing vaccines aren't as effective against Omicron as they were against previous variants, and debating whether the (in both cases low) incidence of myocarditis in adolescents is higher from the vaccine or from the virus.
Then there is a bubble centered around Alex Jones. They're telling you that Bill Gates is putting microchips in the vaccines and that the vaccines cause protein folding and therefore prions.
You click on the wrong thing and the algorithm decides you want to see more of that. It surrounds you with the people who already believe those things. Now you're the skeptic and they're the establishment and you're trying to remember enough of high school biology to describe the relationship between protein folding and prions while conceding that maybe Bill Gates does suck and maybe that does make him technically a vampire, but could someone explain what that has to do with population control?
Meanwhile there are plenty of scientists who are happy to explain it to you, but once it decides you want to see fear porn, you don't get to see the people debunking it anymore.
And Alex Jones is just the canonical exemplar. The bubbles like that form everywhere. You have people who still believe that the people Kyle Rittenhouse shot were black, or that Julian Assange reports to Putin.
One of the most self-perpetuating ones is the myth that "misinformation" is caused by not banning "bad" people, when it's actually caused by not exposing everyone to contrary viewpoints so that they lose the opportunity to have their mistakes corrected.
But telling people what they want to hear sells more advertising than eat your vegetables, so doing the wrong thing is more profitable.
There appears to be a growing trend that claims it's innately harmful to experience contrary viewpoints.
I'd argue that it's really two sides of the same coin. Take a social graph where nodes are people. It's not that eliminating bad nodes is a good solution, it's just that when you eliminate the dangerously influential bad nodes (the bad ones with a disproportionate amount of connections), it can have the effect of redistributing interactions more evenly in the graph, which means any given node is more likely to be exposed to a greater variety of nodes.
Ideally, we wouldn't have to eliminate any bad nodes, but that would require a stable graph where bad nodes don't attract more and more connections. Which I believe is an alternative formulation of your comment about the need to regulate algorithms.
Ah...this has been debunked?
The story so far as I know is that "multiple US intelligence agencies" told Congress that (in 2016) people working for the Russian government hacked the DNC and provided the emails to Wikileaks.
Wikileaks didn't reveal its source, but Assange said "no, nope, it definitely wasn't the Russian government, no way".
Mueller proceeded to indict a lot of Russians who allegedly were involved.
Where/what was the debunking?
I also hope that we're in a transitional time as people get used to the new technology. I'm sure that it took people a while to understand how much they should believe newspapers or not when they first came along. And it's laughable to people now that War of The Worlds caused such a sensation when aired on the radio, or the BBC spaghetti harvest april fools was believed by so many.
Yeah, I feel like this is the issue. I've heard the theory that in the past, every village had a village idiot. The internet has enabled all these village idiots to find each other and to broadcast their idiocies. They feel strengthened in finding like-minded people and feel vindicated in their beliefs.
Due to the size of the group and how vocal they are, they're now also pulling in people who might have previously ignored the village idiot because everyone else did.
For the people on the other side of the curve from the village idiot that was true. Before the internet we (on HN I think most of us are on that side of the curve justifying the use of "we" here) had libraries and we had elaborate systems for indexing and searching [1] and providing notification of new information in our areas of interest.
We could do then most of what we now do on the internet as far as getting and processing information is concerned, just slower and we usually had to be fully clothed while doing it.
Like the printing press, what the internet did for us was make it so we could get that information faster, cheaper, and we could do it from home in whatever state of undress suited us.
For people on the village idiot side of the curve, the invention of the internet was not like invention of the printing press.
It was like the discovery of fire.
[1] A good example is a law library. Besides the books that contained the chronological record of cases and decisions from a given court, we had books that organized those cases by topic, books that provided summaries of the key legal points of each case, organized by topic, books that provided cross references for each case showing what later cases cited it, which points of the case they cited it for, and whether those citations were agreeing with it or overruling it.
Look at the politicians and others pushing blatant disinformation and profiting from it. They are doing this with a great degree of skillful malice. Nobody listens to actual idiots; they want to emulate and follow the successful/powerful people who are savvy enough to hone their message and their image.
Look at the people swallowing these lies. Many of them are generally intelligent and/or successful people. Many Trump supporters are quite successful and affluent. However, their faith in actual academics, experts, and traditional institutions has been shattered, leaving uniquely susceptible to malignant influences who are eager to fill this "trust vacuum."
But it didn't:
https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-wo...
Today, the majority would dismiss the broadcast as nonsense, but a small, ardent minority would form a distributed, international community around taking it seriously that would then continue on for years and rip apart friendships and families, and potentially have sufficient critical mass to do something stupid.
I feel the difference may be in the stickyness of ideas (across a wider spectrum of merit) and what enables that stickyness.
On the topic of popular scifi, I often think back to this exchange between two characters in Michael Crichton's The Lost World (1997), a bestseller at the time:
"[...] Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species."
- "Yes? Why is that?"
"Because it means the end of innovation," Malcolm said. "This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. [...]"
When I read this as a young teenager, enthusiastic about scifi and technology and curious about the internet, I dismissed it as cynical and conservative. And of course he got wrong - we don't really lack diversity of thought in the cyberspace age. Instead we managed to create a new kind of cyber-enabled tribalism. Or, maybe, one is a reaction to the other.
I must say, I don't miss that kind of conformity. It allowed for much larger tribes, but creativity was a lot harder within all of them.
I agree there is a troubling bubble here. I just don't agree that the bubble in question has anything to do with crypto, as opposed to those getting their jollies dunking on crypto bros.
How many tweets do you have to read before you escape the bubble of OP and learn that the tweet is false...? (By my count, you have to go through 320 HN comments before you will find the first deeply-buried comment pointing out that OP is false and the buyers believed no such thing; this submission is at +501 points, BTW.) Here is a quote from an article published well over a month before OP tweeted: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amansethi/spicedao-dune...
"Now that they have won the bid, Saqib and his associates must make good on their promise to bring the bible to the people and prove that their fundraising approach was not just a gimmick.
As things stand, Saqib still owns Jodorowsky’s bible but is in the process of transferring ownership to the DAO. Meanwhile, the copyrights for the bible’s contents are held by multiple artists and their estates. Jodorowsky is now 92 years old; Jean Giraud, or Moebius, the legendary French illustrator who did all the storyboards, died in 2012; H.R. Giger, who designed the creepy home planet of the House of Harkonnen, died two years later.
“We can’t just scan it and put it on the internet,” Fang said. But by raising the money as a DAO, Fang said they hoped to show the various estates and stakeholders that there is a massive online interest in making the bible more accessible to the public."
They explicitly acknowledge they do not 'own the IP' and can't just scan it etc and it is positioning for negotiation for the actual IP.
Examining mainly the pre-truth half, Carl Sagan goes into this in Demon Haunted world, and focuses on remnants that have stuck around, eg UFOs, cults etc.
This is funny because you can say exactly the same about blue state USA. They seem to live in a totally alien world.
With a large group, at some point you can no longer tell, because each source is a one-time source (or close to it). Plus, the potential profits from compromising that source become so large that, for example, newspapers get bought by corporations, to help mold popular opinion. People cannot tell who they can trust, but they know there's a lot of untrustworthy out there. So, they retreat back into a local bubble.
Whoever is in this person's local bubble, is currently getting a valuable data point as to their trustworthiness. :)
Furthermore, I characterized our previous existence as "traditional society", but it really wasn't that either. Rather it was a different post-reality as mediated by broadcast media, progressed to be owned by a handful of corporations. This kept us all on the same page and working for common goals, even if the goals weren't necessarily in our own interests (eg widening wealth gap, elective wars). That is what passed for the traditional zeitgeist that we were steeped in, and everyone accepted it because of the massive social proof from The Important People on TV. Now looking back, we can see that the traditional zeitgeist was not in our interest either, and so it does not offer a compelling focus point to return to. And so we're just kind of lost and rudderless, looking for new directions to suspend our disbelief for.
That is what passed for the traditional zeitgeist
that we were steeped in, and everyone accepted it
because of the massive social proof from The Important
People on TV. Now looking back, we can see that the
traditional zeitgeist was not in our interest either,
and so it does not offer a compelling focus point to
return to. And so we're just kind of lost and rudderless,
looking for new directions to suspend our disbelief for.
In brief, what you're describing is the default state of humanity. In colorful language, human civilization is "the war between gangs of hypnotists".
...you are using one right now
Long story short, by my estimation what has "arrested this direction of travel" and "reinstated local bubbles of thought" is fear, the mind killer, and where they've headed, is back into superstition, global superstition, where they substitute whatever comfortable story, for whatever uncomfortable reality.
Additional one could hypothesize that conspiracies are so effective here because they are (almost by definition) unfalsifiable. Similar to how churches still stay powerful by running on dogma.
There's an enormous amount of gambling going on on WSB and the average post quality is... well, there's a reason they're self-identifying as apes. But in any case, there is a key difference: WSB deals with legitimate, established companies only and have a zero-tolerance policy against pennystocks and crypto.
The one exception where your comparison is retrospectively (!) on point are wish.com and Chinese stocks, but at least for the Chinese stocks one can say that the radicality of Xi Jinping's actions on the tech/finance sector could not have been reasonably expected - and even Wish.com has been around for over a decade, whereas most of the rug-pull crypto ops and NFTs isn't even two years old.
(Disclosure: HODL'ing a couple hundred euros in Gamestop and AMC)
Been going on a lot longer than 10 years. I saw the same thing in the late 90s, and the only reason I didn’t see it earlier than that is that before then I wasn’t really looking.
I've noticed this specifically with covid denial/conspiracy nuts.
Sure, there have always been conspiracy nuts (and some conspiracy theories are later proven not theories at all), but covid-related conspiracies are a different beast altogether in terms of how widespread they got.
There seems to be a personality type that is prone to believing in conspiracy theories of any kind, and the bar or threshold for that kind of personality seems to have lowered all of a sudden -- otherwise normal people that were not particularly conspiracy theory-leaning are way into the craziest covid stuff.
The level of angst involved is also on a whole other level: while in other conspiracy theories the "Enemy" is usually a small evil cabal and the general "blue pill" public is just "misinformed sheep", now suddenly everyone _not a conspiracy nut_ is immediately evil.
Personalized and targeted ads.
[0] https://snapshot.org/#/dunedao.eth/proposal/0x2038fc240d0e85...
https://twitter.com/YOJIMBO_KING/media
Qualifications listed for their team include "Bitcoin Class of 2013", not sure if a joke or not? The impression is that this is a bunch of 13 year olds who suddenly got a windfall...
You weren't kidding, this sounds like an application for a World of Warcraft Guild I applied to in 2008 or something. I have no idea what any of this means
"Did you verify that the RVSM system was talking to the FMS after completing the JIC during the RON?" - Aviation "Are you sure the packets are flowing on UDP? Can someone check the CAT6?" - Simple networking
Etc. So I wouldn't say the jargon is constructed solely to keep outsiders out.
* The other problem with the ICO craze is of course that the combination of money up-front and no obligations and anonymity meant almost all were simply out-and-out scams.
SPACs have gotten rid of much of the diligence traditionally part of the IPO process.
But don't forget this team has the Q1 deliverable of presenting "a film treatment and budget by Roble Ridge Productions for the original animated limited series inspired by the book for a community vote on Snapshot" - which one can only assume will be a lot of work... :)
They could release a series about overpaying for a copy of dune at auction and technically fulfill their mission
I'm sorry for the confusion, but my post was supposed to be humorous.
On reflection I think there's nothing that can actually be said about this auction that can possibly be as funny/sad as the original situation.
A professional definitive edition exit scam, waiting to happen. It is ConstitutionDAO all over again, but this time without the refunds.
Almost all positions are "not to exceed X/month" for X~=7000 USD. So, not too shabby!
Funny how it could be either.
Has anyone checked if the seller is legit?
Maybe the profit was meant to be split once the item "sold".
At this point I just hope its some sort of practical joke or whatever because this just seems a bit much.
[0] https://forum.spicedao.xyz/t/nft-of-the-book-w-proof-of-jpeg...
1. Every minter is rewarded with an identical NFT of the page.
2. Every minter is rewarded with a fraction of the final NFT that contains the page. [...]
3. By leveraging progressive JPEG 7 tech, every minter gets a unique NFT which contains the uploaded image but with different degrees of quality. [...]"""
Holy fucking shit. This could be extremely high quality satire, but they're serious, which makes it even funnier.
This is both brilliant and insane at the same time. Next up, I have an MPEG stream to sell you ... where the I-frames are charged at a higher rate than the B-frames!
It reminds me of the video game SOMA, where people upload a brain-scan of themselves to live on after some catastrophe, essentially making a digital copy of their consciousness. But because they are also still physically alive, they see the digital version of themselves as a clone, someone else. To "complete the transition", they decide they must end their lives at the exact moment the scan is complete.
And the most chilling version I've seen is in Charles Stross' Glasshouse, where some soldiers fight a virus that infects the consciousness of everyone using such a transporter. They "rescue" an infected population by chopping off their heads and throwing them into a transporter hacked to remove the virus. IIRC only the heads because transporting the entire bodies would be slower and the other side is expected to reconstruct a living body anyway.
A few hundred or thousand beheaded people later, they realize that the transporter is broken and would not reconstruct anything.
Trying not to spoil it by discussing it, if anyone hasn't yet you really should try it, it's a really unique experience in gaming and that's hard to come by these days.
Compression artifacts are irrelevant if your scan resolution is significantly higher than the print resolution.
Oddly enough - the process in a library for digitising a copy of a book can be fairly destructive, as far as I understood from those doing it (at CUDL). The spine is chopped off, to make it easier to put it into a machine for scanning all the pages.
The digital images can (should?) then be stored in a format that allows zooming, for example : https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-03967/1
The general consensus among modern librarians came around on that subject, and now this kind of destructive processes is rare and generally frowned upon. A librarian friend once explained to me there was always two "schools" among librarians:
1. Those who only value the content of books. For those, copying/digitalizing a rare book is all that is needed in order to preserve said book.
2. Those who also value the physical object of the book as a historical artifact. For those keeping rare books in good condition is also necessary for preservation.
In the middle 1900s with the mass adoption of the microfilm, the first school gained the upper hand, and many libraries conducted mass projects of microfilming and destroying historical archives. Those were mostly motivated by a false belief that books were super fragile and wouldn't last anyway (I mean, if you believe the book will fall apart on its own, then you would be less reticent about using destructive methods to make the best copy possible).
In the last few decades the tides changed, librarians realized that books are not that fragile, and can be kept pretty much indefinitely if closed and protected from humidity (and fire). Also they realized that microfilm is crap, and that copying/digitizing is a error prone process, so a lot of stuff was lost because someone skipped a page, or the film was damaged, and the original was destroyed. So the movement to keep originals grew in strength, being almost a consensus now a days, and modern digitizing processes/machines are specially designed to be gentle and non destructive.
http://blog.archive.org/2021/02/09/meet-eliza-zhang-book-sca...
There is the great "Codex Manesse" [1] (I once had the opportunity to see the real one in an exhibition) that is one of a kind.
It is irreplaceable and there are but a selected few people who are even allowed to touch it (with gloves). It could not be damaged, but was digitized without harm nonetheless [2].
So I actually never thought of digitalisation as a destructive process.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Manesse?wprov=sfla1
For example, many Xerox scanners "switch" numbers when scanning:
https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...
Those who used them to digitize, e.g, accounting documents, and then destroyed the originals, are proper screwed.
Not that long ago, there was a very destructive push to convert old books to microfilm. I worry that not enough lessons were learned. Here's an interesting review of a book about the subject:
https://thefateofbooks.wordpress.com/2021/11/29/a-classic-tu...
I don't think it necessarily has to be that way. I recall seeing a photo or video of a book-scanner that would project laser grid-lines onto the book, to non-destructively correct for the deformations caused by the binding in software.
Edit: not sure if this is the one, but it shows the concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03ccxwNssmo
> Here is where we make the dreams of the Harkonnen become true. [...]
I'm finding it really very difficult to imagine that someone's read/watched Dune and come away thinking the the Harkonnen are the good guys. So I can't imagine that intellectual honesty is one of their strong points.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry satirized NFTs 70 years before they were invented!
FAQS
- Can't someone else just download the image and pretend they own it? Yes, just as someone can buy a fake LV bag and show it off. Other collectors will still know, and don't care about the fakes. As the tech becomes more mainstream, sites like twitter will show whether you actually own the NFT you claim to.
- Can't someone else mint their own NFT? Yes, but like with real collectors items, provenance matters. Just like one can forge a perfect Picasso but without any plausible proof of origin it would not be worth much.
- Can't they decide to mint more "fragments" after the fact, therefore diluting the price of each of the 1000 editions. No, the smart contract that governs the NFT can't be changed.
- Won't the link inside my NFT die? No, the link is usually just a SHA256 hash of the content; with the content being hosted on IPFS. It's all p2p so as long as a host somewhere in the world has a copy, you can always find the content by hash, even if the underlying technology changes with time.
When you transfer an NFT from one address to another, you have transferred title to whoever owns the private keys for it.
Yes, you put a URL on the blockchain but it's almost always a URL to the ipfs protocol e.g. ipfs://QmVc6zuAneKJzicnJpfrqCH9gSy6bz54JhcypfJYhGUFQu
This identifier is a base58 encoding of a sha256 hash that points to the content. It doesn't actually tell you what host to use to find the content, that's completely left to the client app; so you could use an ipfs gateway like cloudflare-ipfs.com or ipfs.io or you could, imagining a future in which ipfs is not used anymore, use any other kind of p2p network to find the content.
Just like gnutella, or torrents, as long as someone out there is hosting the content it's usually possible to find it.
Actually doing something about it is a problem, as shown throughout the post-Napster era, but every node that serves an infringing copy is potentially liable.
Browse through https://opensea.io/, the most prominent NFT marketplace at the moment. Digging through the DOM of their website will reveal a lot of links to quite standard content storage solutions. They usually go through a bit of trouble to prevent people from simply clicking "view image in new tab" to reveal the actual location, but it's not difficult to get around.
> Here's what happens when you add a file to IPFS — whether you're storing that file on your own local node or one operated by a pinning service or IPFS-enabled app.
Notice that wording: “Add a file to IPFS”.
It’s likewise fine to say, then, that you “put something on ipfs”.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/03/illegal-conte...
The answer seems to be that 'nothing much happens, yet'.
[A] Tbh I don’t care too much what a bunch of normies that probably didn’t even know the book existed think. The book would still exist but digitized and in the blockchain.
[Q] Why not just use Arweave, IPFS, and a variety of other long-term digital preservation strategies? All of them are less expensive and resource-intensive.
IPFS is not permanent. If it stops being hosted it disappears. Arweave cannot compare to something like Ethereum which is a truly decentralized network. But upmost I would say that cost of uploading is a feat, not a problem. It would make our collection even more special.
These are a bunch of seriously sociopathic, inconsiderate and reckless thugs. I'm happy to see them fleecing each other.
A crude back of the envelope calculation after some googling would put the storage price on Ethereum at around 3.5eth per mb.
So that would be around 10k€ per mb. Certainly doable if they like burning money, but likely not at archival quality.
The same thing applies to blockchains. If no one is hosting it, you can't download it.
so if any of these chains only want to focus on sending/storing money (or simply address the evergrowing size of the chain), then they can start purging the old transactions from the ledger.
(yes, ETH has smart contracts, but it's not impossible to imagine that ETH will start charging gas for upkeep of that data, and when the smart contract runs out of upkeep it gets deleted.)
While the past decade has been about adults risking their fiat capital, children are forced to only earn crypto onchain, as they cannot get the bank account or money without bothering their parents. It is less wise to bother their parents. People like you and I who will proselytize about crypto or any particular crypto investment, while also having incentive to assume custody over the money and benefit from it instead.
Whereas in the crypto space natively they can earn and trade and acquire goods and services. Something harder for adults to even notice is possible since the fiat system serves us well enough, so it is an easier frame of reference to only think about crypto as “earn dollars, buy crypto, have more or less dollars later” compared to “earn crypto, trade crypto to have more crypto”.
There is no way to quantify it, but if you lead with this assumption you will find it.
I know children that have a few hundred $ in their joint bank account but $100k in crypto onchain and just waiting till they turn 18 so they can cash out without telling their parents.
As the things they invest in also grow 100x, this is a formidable force of capital, that would represent a cognitive distortion in the markets. So it is no longer just passionate adults that simply never traded before, its teenagers and possibly even Generation Alpha at this point.
A lot of things make a lot more sense with this assumption.
Use that information however you please.
What use do children have for cryptocurrencies? Buying items in World of Warcraft?
> "I know children that have a few hundred $ in their joint bank account but $100k in crypto onchain and just waiting till they turn 18 so they can cash out without telling their parents."
This entire post reads like some weird crypto-bro FOMO propaganda. To "cash out" they'll need a bank account which will accept their shady funds, and they'll have to prove they paid their taxes for it like everybody else. Until then, they can't do anything with it.
Its intended to be devoid of opinion to the extent possible which is probably why you don't recognize it.
Your thoughts on what they can do are incorrect. The only thing a child still cannot do is enter into a real world contract and have it be enforceable. But in environments that require zero, or less, or different kinds of non-contractually enforced trust, with a crypto balance sheet the children can acquire goods, services and investments, they can access capital, they can pool investments and share proceeds, they can hire and fire other real world humans, they can acquire real world assets where merchants accept crypto or use a payment processor that does. And this is what some or many are doing, the path of least resistance and beyond the wildest aspirations that any multinational trade deal could ever achieve. So I’m not sure what standard you can really rely on here aside from being unaware.
If you weren't aware of a crypto centric form of wealth, where the fiat dollars are the novelty to be temporarily held, then you’re a decade behind.
The only thing new here (circa the last 2-3 years) is that its much easier for the children to earn the initial crypto, given how robust that economy is.
They’ll cash out when they are 18 if they need to. No different than people only taking money out of their stock and bond holdings for large purchases. Except its a hybrid where they earned the investments directly instead of having to initially purchase them.
Kids could buy and trade items in World of Warcraft or Club Penguin for 20 years now. They collected and traded marbles, then Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh cards. Music albums and candy. Kids will always find a "currency" to play with, depending on what's trendy and hip right now.
I know under 18 year olds behind a pseudo name running large capital and lending pools in crypto. All it takes is writing smart contracts and deploying them. Voila, you can run your own automated lending or exchange pool.
Flash loans are something I have seen 13 year old kiddos experiment with using crypto. It's unbelievable until you see it.
Code written by a 13 year old managing billions of capital in crypto.
Many are even public and probbed up by VCs like founder of rari capital and many startups connected to them.
I think this is getting even truer for real world stock market.
Kids are increasingly investing using custodial accounts.
https://www.joinbloom.co/ - teen stock investing funded by YC.
There are many of these popping up
You need a bank account to buy cryptocurrencies. You also need fiat money to buy it. In the US at least, you need to be KYC'd to buy it from an exchange with fiat.
It's really tiring hearing propaganda like this, that easily falls apart under even a little bit of scrutiny. Like "banking the unbanked", it's lies being told that try to sell people on how cryptocurrency is enriching people who'd otherwise be poor, and opening opportunities to people who otherwise would not have them, but it's nothing more than preying on people's greed and FOMO, to pull in more suckers to fleece.
Read that again until you understand it and tell me why you don't understand that.
The whole post distinguished the difference between buying versus earning. If you dont get that yet, you’re in the wrong place.
The point is that this story is almost certainly a fabrication, especially since it has wild claims of teenagers making small fortunes. There's no evidence such a situation has happened, and it's extremely unlikely that it's common enough to be a thing we need to be concerned with.
If its any consolation, I don't think this knowledge is known enough yet for unscrupulous marketers to be specifically target children and their money, as opposed to merely selective evolution of which goofy projects attract an audience at all. But yeah this will increasingly be something to watch for and assume, also remember that it will be other children marketing to each other more and more, in comparison to adults taking advantage (which will also happen). Not that there will be any way to tell who is taking advantage of who.
The explanation as it was described to me (though I have a difficult time verifying its accuracy): Cash App was very early on the "all-in-one banking" experience, whereas Venmo spent years as a value-addition to a bank (account/routing number) you already had. Socioeconomically disenfranchised portions of the population, which statistically bias toward Black Americans, gravitated toward Cash App because they didn't otherwise have bank accounts. Then, network effects kick in, as they always do.
Again, I'm not 100% sure on the veracity of those claims, but it makes sense; and it mirrors a similar trend across age groups. Older people use Zelle (a fully bank-sponsored product). Millennials (of any race), being the middle child, split the difference, and oftentimes have Zelle, Venmo, Cash App, and some Crypto. But all of these "official" apps still have age restrictions, and as they've matured have been forced into more customer risk mitigation, which primarily serves to do the same thing the banking system has statistically done to the black american population for decades; limit access to financial services (even if its for what we old people would call a "totally valid reason" like "dude you're 12", its still limiting access to financial services).
Capital moves mountains. The crypto markets, in aggregate, represent an absolutely massive amount of capital. Its biased young. Its very difficult to legally liquidate into the traditional financial system; but within the crypto ecosystem, its more liquid than any financial instrument ever invented by mankind. It attracts scams (like any financial product does); it attracts idiots (through virtue of being able to serve: anyone); but even among projects like this one, their idiotic understanding of how their actions could integrate with the traditional system of laws is counterbalanced with rather intelligent understanding of distributed financial systems, corporate governance, data structures, algorithms, and most of all, an undeniable love for a piece of cultural history.
Anytime anyone bashes crypto; the reasons may be legitimate; Check your age. You sound a lot like my parents wondering why my Chase account doesn't appear in their Chase home page, so they can send me money every Christmas by just clicking "transfer money". Your criticism may be totally valid and legitimate: but irrelevant. That's the curse of getting older; inescapable, undeniable, and one day you just don't matter anymore. This world isn't your's; it belongs to our Children.
The network affects are at play here too. Influencers who cover crypto projects begin skewing younger and younger are filling in documentation and awareness far far better than any developer would.
Silliness aside though, this highlights a point to me. Methods of organising are (1) very important (2) relatively undiverse (3) hard to create out of whole cloth.
The creation/ascendance of "modern" joint stock companies circa 1600 was (arguably) responsible for some serious revolution. The 90s produced some very interesting examples: GNU, Linux, Wikipedia, WWW... These are "organisations" organised in unconventional ways and they produced results that a conventional non profit, commercial or government organisation could not have produced.
New ways of organising are potentially very powerful.
CryptoBro naivety isn't necessarily terrible for this end. It'll produce a lot of stupid moves, but stupidity and creativity are often neighbors. CryptoBros' typically mercenary and/or ideological tendencies might be more of a hurdle.
Besides laws, norms & regulatory structure, what's the difference between a DAU and a joint stock company?
That seems to be true in movies, but in the real world new advancements are created by experts that know the basics. Serendipity is part of that, but you need to have the basic knowledge.
I will concede, thou, that ideas to be rich can come from anywhere as the only metric is to convince investors, to produce something useful is not required.
I certainly wouldn't have elected to create the current blaze of cryptmadness, but the fact that most of what it produces is scams and bullshit doesn't mean nothing else can come out of it.
OTOH, I think cryptocynicism may be blinding us to the possibility of doing exactly what this hapless bunch did, but actually ending up owning the copyright to something... as they intended. The road from there to something noteworthy is still long, but I don't think it's inconceivable.
As I said, silliness is prevalent. That doesn't mean something useful can't emerge. But obviously, yes, most of most of the stuff happening is a comical blend of mercenary, hapless and foolish... guided by the smell of riches.
That already happens. People who know what they are doing (i.e. professionals) already buy scripts and book rights and make movies out of them. It works pretty well already.
This might have been a rhetorical question but I'll give an answer anyway - this article [0] makes the same comparison and discusses that exact analogy
It is not really the "Dune" book, but rather its storyboard, more details and a few photos here:
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20211122-doomed-dune-s...
I see nothing perplexing about it because this was not an ordinary auction, but an auction with one member being a public DAO, where the amount of money the DAO will bid is thus public.
Let's say the DAO bids $100, but they have $200 in contributions. Someone can then safely bid $190, knowing that the DAO will raise to $200. It's in the agreement for the DAO more or less, and because it's on the blockchain and organized in a public-ish discord server, their cap is absolutely public.
So, who has the motivation to make these known-bad bids? Anyone who profits off the sale being more, and anyone who just doesn't like crypto-techbros and wants them to lose more money than they would otherwise.
I think the use of DAOs for auctions is quite funny for this reason. A private company that kept the total contribution amount private until just after the auction ended would end up with a much more favorable dynamic than this "the amount we can bid is on the blockchain, you already know our move when you bid".
Disclaimer: I know nothing about this specific auction, and may be missing some key detail. This is simply an observation and speculation from a naive bystander
Sorry, but how do you know it was a DAO (whatever it is)?
From what I could find:
https://www.capital.fr/economie-politique/dune-le-storyboard...
>Les enchères se sont rapidement envolées et ont donné lieu au final à une rude bataille entre deux enchérisseurs étrangers, au téléphone. L'enchérisseur gagnant est américain.
it was a normal auction with two bidders (on the telephone).
EDIT: Ok, found some more info: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amansethi/spicedao-dune...
the winning bidder was a guy for TheSpiceDAO, but who was the other bidder?
Googling finds this website: https://dune.foundation/, and some info about the etherium they raised here https://juicebox.money/#/p/spicedao
Maybe this is some sorta elaborate hoax, but it looks like it's real eth, so unless juicebox is also in on it, it seems like a hard hoax to pull.
Although I assume, like everything crypto, there’s some centralized SPOF; in this case, the one guy from the “team” making the actual bids, who could stop things from getting truly out of hand.
2. And what luck the runner-up must feel. (Who may now perhaps offer the winner 40k for the book.)
[0] https://snapshot.org/#/dunedao.eth/proposal/0x2038fc240d0e85... [1] https://robleridgeproductions.com/about/
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amansethi/spicedao-dune...
I don't know what they're doing, but it seems that they are at least a bit aware that they don't own the rights.
Who exactly are they trying to convince, and about what? I mean they don't just need the rights to the art in the book itself, but they also need to get the movie/TV rights for Dune itself.
Is this really spending €2.6M just to get a foot in the door, to be able to spend, what, another $200M for the actual rights?
But even then, why do they think this DAO is the best way to execute this vision?
They could just go "oh, people are interested in Dune? Ok, let's make a movie, but without involving these DAO people". Oh wait, there already is a Dune series of movies currently being made/in theaters.
But also: The contents have been on the internet for years, apparently: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNGBuasYa_WETf7sF6Q9W3S... (from the twitter thread)
Now it will be hosted on some other server as well (THE REAL DECENTRALIZED SERVER) but wrapped into some NFT, where they will sell each page - or even better - each square of the storyboard, coated into some fucked up story like:
"You can own a piece of a future TV Show based on this story board!"
And they will probably come out profiting because people will buy this illusion.
Edit: From a quick Google search there's around 3000 drawings, so 3000 NFTs at some absurd price that people will want for a piece of the pipe dream. They didn't even had to pay an artist or create a story this time around...
Beeple sold 5000 renders for 69 million.
They can't, of course, sell the images themselves; they don't hold the copyright. But they can sell URLs referring to the content.
That's pretty clever. I mean it's super dumb, but it's clever.
By that I mean that an NFT whose content is an URL to an image you don't own, is dumb. But it's clever to "mint" these, and you'll find more fools to buy the NFTs if you give the appearance of legitimacy.
In other words: They have no more rights to sell NFTs for the contents than I do, but they'll be more successful at implying to buyers that they do.
The most interesting thing about NFTs (and most blockchain tech) is the question "is this actually fraud, or is it merely stupid?". It's philosophy about the meaning of "fraud".
For example, a company called MSCHF sold 999 fake Warhol drawings and 1 real[0], all mixed up so no one knows which one is the real one, for 250$ each... can they do this? Is this legal? At least people were aware of it, so I doubt it's fraud.
Here's the math of it:
- they paid 8,125$ for the original;
- they sold 1000 for 250$ = 250,000$
- they profited 250,000$ - 8,125$ = 241k$
Of course this was also a mix of a PR stunt, still, if you can do PR stunts and profit... I mean... isn't this what Supreme has been doing for years?
So I don't even think the legality of it all is a issue, because has you hinted, people are deliberately rolling into this...stupidity(?).
I think all of these use similar emotional mechanisms of gambling, which if you think about it, most of the current collectibles market nowadays is gambling for everyone, kids included.
[0]https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/art-pranksters-sel...
"NFT stands for non-fungible token, which basically means that it’s a one-of-a-kind digital asset that belongs to you and you only." https://fortune.com/2021/12/18/nft-making-selling/
Fortune, e.g., misinterpretes it in that same way. Anyone can make copies of an NFT backed asset unless you use other legal or technical methods to limit copies.
> 1. Make the book public (to the
> extent permitted by law)
Seems like NFT logic in reverse, lol
Let's not pretend some low quality jpegs in a Google Photos album is an acceptable archive for this work.
1. This was a normal auction and not an NFT one. How is a DAO enforced in this case? What happens if the nominated bidder decides to go rogue and bid more or less than the decided cap? What happens if the price of Ethereum drops to the point that the DAO is no longer able to find the 2.6M they need?
2. If this is an auction then there has to be another bidder (I doubt even the people in this DAO are dumb enough to make their initial bid 2.6M). Who was bidding 2.5M against them?
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amansethi/spicedao-dune...
It doesn't matter how decentralized your blockchain or "DAO" is, ultimately all interactions outside the blockchain will rely on one or more trusted parties that can go rogue or be coerced... at which point you may as well not have a blockchain and just trust these people directly.
For context: I also set up a group to bid on the book. Our intent was to spend $100,000. He reached out to offer to join forces.
I mentioned that the goals of the DAO, the use of proceeds, and the general vision were pretty blurry and might not work.
He said he had been in touch with Jodorowsky and Moebius and they're excited to work on an exhibition or such kind of event with him.
When I pointed out that Moebius died in 2012, he paused for a few minutes then said oh I meant his estate.
I don't believe there's been any proof of such communication or plans with the estate yet.
Your $100,000 goal wasn't unreasonable based on the estimates. What were your plans for the book if you'd won?
These "investments" are all backed up by some fantasy that works in their "realm" - like buying an avatar that will be used in "the metaverse", being the metaverse a collective fantasy and illusion.
Just like these fellows are so emotionally invested in this fantasy that they were already selling the rights of a TV Show to a streaming service... and I bet that if you go to them now they have the narrative that this will be sold to some yet to exist streaming service of the metaverse based on NFTs.
https://www.chron.com/life/article/Barry-Tate-s-taste-in-art...
I wouldn't really say that it makes up much of the art market, though they always get a lot of news attention when they appear.
"VAT at the rate of 5.5% will be due on the total of the hammer price and fees charged to the buyer."
<s> But then that'd devalue the NFTs, so F that. </s>
(They no more own the rights to "Dune" than you would if you bought a DVD in a second hand shop and decided to start selling copies of it.)
It'd have been a lot cheaper to ignore the NFT nonsense entirely, engage a motion picture rights agency, and pitch direct to Jodorowski and the Herbert estate for permission to use the IP.
Cryptobro logic.
This strategy is also used a lot in Tik Tok videos for example: you write the caption with some obvious errors like "your" instead of "you are" and people starts correcting you in the replies making the tik tok algo rank your video higher
Though by the end of the documentary, you'll definitely arrive at the conclusion that it wouldn't just be another $5M, and the project had so many problems beyond money; it is interesting to think about how Dune (2021)'s budget came in at ~$165M. We missed out on something truly unique for sure; probably an acid-fueled fever dream, but I totally understand why some people have an obsession with the work Jodorowsky put into the adaptation, and would pay to own a piece of that history.
It not a copy of Dune, but a copy of a book created to show the vision of one of the first (failed) movie adaptations. French director Jodorowsky had an official adaptation of Dune (and had collaborated with Herbert) [0]. The adaptation failed after running out of money. Notable is the scope of the adaptation: 14 hours and millions poured into pre-production.
Subsequently, a documentary [1] was made about this failed adaptation. I think the parent link is to this documentary.
[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel)#Early_stalled_a...
In ConstitutionDAO’s case it means they were narrowly outbid. In this case the suggestion is it makes it safe for any second buyer to make high bids, knowing the DAO will counter up to a certain amount.
Where did the 2.6 million come from?
How many other bidders were there?
What was the auction model used?
How are they going to recover the investment now? And if they won't how will they deal with the write-off?
So many questions...
Crypto gains (scammy or otherwise), NFT sales, etc. The phrase 'cryptobros' is used to refer to people who got rich off of crypto shenanigans.
I'll add one: why does the thread mention "cryptobros" about buyers when the auction was nothing related to crypto in any way?
Is it just becoming a generic insult to dumb people or am I missing something?
Because the group who won it crowdfunded the money via cryptocurrency, wants to turn the book into NFTs and is organized in a DAO, if I looked into this a bit more I am sure I would find something about web3 and metaverse and whatever else fits in the bullshit bingo of current discourse around the whole crypto scene. If this does not count as „cryptobros“ then I imagine nothing does.
Yep, cryptobros it is.
This site has scans/photos of most of the content: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNGBuasYa_WETf7sF6Q9W3S... (from https://www.muddycolors.com/2020/03/moebius-dune/).
Apparently it envisioned Gurney Halleck as a dwarf: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNGBuasYa_WETf7sF6Q9W3S...
But I think the most likely explanation is that they’re not this stupid. That it’s some form of fraud.
What I'm focusing on is how everyone loves to feel smart, and most do that by making others feel dumb. And when you are anti-something (yes, I am anti NFT), you have further motivation to just chalk it up to, "haha look at these bozos."
The more useful, and in my opinion, more likely hypothesis to spend all our oxygen on is, "what kind of fraud might be going on here?" For example, did someone just make a ton of money by convincing a bunch of chumps to fund this?
so we raised a bunch of funds and bought a cool book. now we are making an animation. we've been discussing ideas like sending funds to the makers of Jodorowskys Dune documentary which didnt even break even, as a way of thanking them too.
y'know, playing in the way we were taught, as hackers, as kids who grew up on the internet. To go out and do things, make things. hang out with our friends.
but hn would rather take a few snippets, call us all scammers and frauds, and hate on us.
but whatever.. we're gonna keep having fun ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
For about 100x its estimated value. I'm not sure that's really playing with a hacker mentality.
The plan is also to burn the "cool book". Again, I'm unsure how that fits into a hacker mindset.
and no, the plan is not to burn the book. there is an ongoing joke by a few people in the dao. but they do not represent the majority and the aims of the dao explicitly are to do with the preservation and protection of the book. so thats not going to happen.
but people arent actually interested in conversation here. hn hates crypto. we get it. people hating something they arent a part of and dont understand. But we are still going to have fun and make things, and the good vibes win in the end.
With it there are 4 Dune "movies" out: the 1984 Lynch version, the 2000 Sci-Fi Channel one (a 3 part mini series, nearly a movie), the aforementioned 2013 one, and of course the 2021 Villeneuve one.
It’s actually a pretty good description for a bunch of guys passing the same tokens around for ever increasing amounts, thinking they’re getting richer.
How is this even possible? Didn’t they tell anyone about their plan before executing it?
I first thought this was some elitist meme, but their following is taking it seriously.
Are we sure this isn’t just another elaborate scheme to launder money?
And I thought the work video from 5 months ago was surprising coincidence, given I otherwise only know him from The Technical Difficulties: https://youtu.be/3rEEnjA1_eA
No. He underestimated the final price by 2M, which means he offered ~660k.
I watched the auction, there was one person from Colorado (possibly the DAO creator), and another person from Europe.
Someone actioned a book, and some genious paid 3 million+ dollars for it.
3, 2, 1, sold.
> I see a whole new wave of fouls about to lose their money to ponzi schemes and over-hyped "investments", much like it happened with the bitcoin/crypto train.
In fact, the winners of the book auction do understand that they do not own the intellectual property. They have a goal of using their remaining funds to acquire the intellectual property.
See https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amansethi/spicedao-dune...:
> As things stand, Saqib still owns Jodorowsky’s bible but is in the process of transferring ownership to the DAO. Meanwhile, the copyrights for the bible’s contents are held by multiple artists and their estates. [...]
> “We can’t just scan it and put it on the internet,” Fang said. But by raising the money as a DAO, Fang said they hoped to show the various estates and stakeholders that there is a massive online interest in making the bible more accessible to the public.
Then maybe when they wrote
We won the auction for €2.66M. Now our mission is to:
1. Make the book public (to the extent permitted by law)
2. Produce an original animated limited series inspired by the book and sell it to a streaming service
[1] https://medium.com/@spicedao/roadmap-timeline-ae319c92505d
If that's true, then they deserve to be ridiculed and more.
To make this easier to understand, substitute "Dune book" with "Gutenberg Bible" or, even better, "historic, ultrarare, pre-medieval parchment of a Bible translation".
The new owners of that Bible probably do not think (and do not intend to promote the idea) that they now own the property rights for "the" Bible, or for all Bibles, or for any Bible - except for that particular instance of the Bible.
Rather they now own that parchment, with all its decorated pages, handwriting, scripts, gemstones, peculiar translations, and compilation of Gospels and Letters.
These content, drawings and illustrations inside that Bible are really unique, unless the monks decided to draw everything ( or even more often.)
This content could indeed be monetized, or shared with the world, for the greater good.
I suggest you read the rest of the discussion. No, it can't be shared, and it can't be monetized. You said it yourself - they do not own the intellectual property rights. They own a printed version of that content that does not include any rights for digital reproduction, derivative work or anything of the sort. Like any other book (!).
Yes, by the IP owner. Not by the owner of the book.
And as the sibling comment said, this is not the only copy (but seeing elsewhere in the thread that they’ve talked about burning it, perhaps they thought so, too. That’s honestly not an impressive amount of due diligence in that case, to put it mildly).