Blue verification checkmark vs. hexagonal PFPs on Twitter
perspectiveix.substack.com
perspectiveix.substack.com
Surely it is still possible to verify ownership, but who's going to do that? Won't people just go "oh hexagon, cool, it's an NFT, seems legit cuz Twitter is legit"?
I don't mean anything particular for or against Twitter or NFTs here, this just seems like a completely uninteresting use of blockchain.
Heck, even some are talking of crypto nations, which seem to want to replace/compete with/ complement nation-states directly.
So I see most of this stuff as trying to change governance without directly admitting it.
The blog is dank memes of Crypto Chads and some bullshit on how crypto is great.
Yes, yes, so much interesting.
I do think there's space for some more serious and professional lawyers to think, and possibly provide some solutions, in this space. Hell, even if you think it's a scam, it would still amount to an interesting case study in how the law intersects with technology.
Yes, it would. Because "is code law" has applications way beyond "smart contracts" (which are neither smart nor contracts).
However, LexDAO is definitely ain't it. Because you either have an interesting discussion, or you cater to crypto chads. You can't have it both ways.
The article you linked does give a high level overview of some interesting points, though, so there's that :)
I was curious. I went to the site. I saw literally nothing about the purported "exploration of legal intersection with smart contracts".
> When people don't communicate like you it doesn't mean their ideas are bad.
They have to communicate those ideas first
However, if you sell the idea that crypto legal services could exist in the future, you are selling something that is unverifiable. You will never be able to prove that the idea of crypto legal services was a scam. The idea exists and the future exists.
So these "Crypto Projects" will say something like "We are community supporting innovation in decentralized insurance and smart contracts" So all they are on the hook for is "supporting innovation". Which doesn't mean anything other than saying you on in favor of innovation.
When you ask for an example of something they support, they will list people "Doing interesting things". But those people also are just "exploring innovation", they also are not actually selling insurance policies on the block chain.
The issue with that implementation, and NFTs in general, is that you are committing not to an exclusive representation of any digital asset, but to a link to an asset. Representing that is like tatooing a logo: sure, it shows your commitment to Harry-Potter to have the Deathly Hallows thing on your forearm but… Doesn’t prove you’ve written the thing. Or read it. Just like you want people to assume that you have.
Any blockchain can independently mint the same images, or even fork an existing one and re-attribute all key assets to any wallet. The later wouldn’t be available on OpenSea or MetaMask but you can find a chain that would, there’s no current implementation that would detect near replica.
That’s kind of the problem with total decentralisation: you can’t trust anyone, or prevent anyone from doing anything, unless you have strict control of your partners. And connecting that to existing key platforms would assume a new oligarchy.
Most folks in my neck of the woods seem amped up to block them on sight instead of going “cool”.
You don’t understand how blue checkmarks make their owners feel. To them they are changing the world one smarmy tweet at a time. Blue checkmarks validate everything they say since it is a privilege bestowed upon them by giant corporation Twitter themselves.
The new blue hex is just that, but in keeping with the times.
I wrote a whole essay on it during a hackathon in SF: https://medium.com/hackmentalhealth/why-twitter-should-verif...
But saying that only relatively famous people deserve proactive protection doesn't strike me as a great look. Yes, well-known people are more likely to be targeted and the effects are likely to be greater but I'm not sure that's a justification for withholding verification from everyone else.
I don't get it either why they're holding back. I'm at some point where I want someone to make a twitter like platform with mostly if not exclusively verified people, I hope twitter does it but I doubt it, so I hope someone else will. I can get really tired of interacting with people wearing masks or people wearing masks of other people's faces.
Thousands of artists have lost money in a likewise fashion in that digital goldrush. Here's an incredibly comprehensive summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
I love this paragraph because it outlines just how disconnected from reality people actually building cryptocurrencies really are. They don't understand _anything_ about the ecosystems they're trying to disrupt. They only know that these are things that can be conceptualized as valuable and assume that because they understand one very complicated thing -- programming with cryptography -- that all other complicated things must be lesser in complexity and naturally lower in the hierarchy of reality. Nails easily driven by the hammer that they have created.
There is a lot of garbage in crypto to be sure. But what a dead-end POV.
A deep dive into the scammy world of those NFT Discord groups is a fantastic idea, it's a shame what became of the video.
What do you object to? What "provably incorrect claims" did he roll out? Back this up, yeah?
If you are genuinely interested, let's narrow it down. Which of his claims are the strongest/most distressing to you? Maybe some of those folks will stop ghosting and get into real conversation.
Instead NFTs are seen as an investment vehicle — they will appreciate in price over time, just look at BAYC.
One of the other claims is that cryptocurrency largely favours existing pools of wealth and capital. Anecdotally this matches my experience — the people I know who have done really well from crypto investments are those who were already incredibly well-off in the early 2010s, and were looking for interesting places to invest.
The last claim (that I've also heard first-hand) is it's really easy to raise VC money if your startup centres around "decentralisation", which means a ton of entrepreneurs have a strong vested interest in believing that all this stuff is the future. The big irony there is a lot of the companies in this space (e.g. Coinbase) are de facto advertising themselves as the centralised hub for decentralised systems, creating big points of failure that contradict the entire ethos of the blockchain.
Again, it's definitely true... across the entire economy. In most of the economy, there are pretty much two parties that own the organizations. Those who create the organizations (e.g., founders and some employees) and those who invest in the organizations (wealthy entities). What's different in web3 is that many great projects are working to introduce a 3rd (or more) slice of the pie: the community. Some places to look for this are DAOs working on grants to underrepresented people, Gitcoin Grants & quadratic funding for funding public goods etc, any good token distributions for new tokens, or community-driven networks like Audius or Helium.
It's pretty early days, but I think lots of people _inside_ of web3 are working really hard on this problem.
Two really great Sunday evening links: This one is a fascinating argument to more precisely frame how speculation leads to innovation, so why the belief of investors is a good thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_GNLPniic4. And this one, connecting crypto to a long thread of history (and economic access) https://overcast.fm/+kmaHgw-3s
Again, probably true... but to an extent. Take a look at that Chris Burniske talk I posted in the other comment. There are many things that look new in crypto, but in fact, they are just more efficient in crypto. One of them is the speed through which the value that accrues in crypto is redeployed to fund new innovations. So when we see these huge market caps of tokens, it means huge treasuries are also being deployed to fund good (and bad) ideas. This means many founders in the space can find good homes quickly, making it more competitive for external investors to access the founder pipeline. So the strong vested interest you point out is partially just the result of this wild fast loop.
I really don't see coinbase as a contradiction. It solved some pretty big pain points that web3 alone couldn't solve in the early days. Some of that will be replaced, other parts of it probably will not be replaced. It's just one piece of a puzzle.
I guess final thought related to that last point. There is a really easy mistake that founders make all the time. They look at the market or the competitors and they assess the current state, a snapshot. It's really hard to break out of that and assess that outside of us with velocity taken into account. Where will they be in x amount of time? People will sit there and point at centralized opensea as proof of web3 failure, until opensea isn't the dominant player anymore, and they will point to the next thing. But where is it all going? Where is it already that we just cannot see from the outside?
Your first argument: NFTs are primarily successful because crypto-holding individuals see them as a place to invest without cashing out.
On trend with all my answers, I think this is true to an extent too. But what it misses is a vibrant ecosystem of experimentation that is happening with NFTs below the easily visible surface. The ecosystem is driven by creative people and consumed by people that truly believe these are worthwhile experiments to undertake.
Just a few diverse examples:
- Loot provided NFTs that is simply your inventory in a yet-to-be-made game. The creator essentially said, here, this is an open, ownable, and composable building block. Now, the owners are stakeholders in the development and success of those games. Of course the people that bought these were already holding ETH, but many of those people think something cool is happening here. Otherwise, nothing will get built. https://hackmd.io/@XR/lootwars
- Sam Harris's plans to use the membership/association behind the rise of Pfps to create a community that gives away its wealth and then virtue signals that in ways to encourage others to do the same https://docs.google.com/document/d/1u_YeUyztgJhWgLZ9YJh6eVKZ...
- CryptoVoxels sell parcels of land as NFTs. Taken together, they generate a metaverse of spaces that the owners fill out with their imagination. https://www.cryptovoxels.com/ These people are passionate about something new and different, they are building.
I personally even find the memberships and DAOs driving many of the popular Pfps (e.g. Doodles, Creature World, Coolman's Universe) to be a bit contrary to your main argument. Many of them have highly active communities that you only get to be part of by owning the NFT. So for many, it's not really a place to park or spend their ETH. The economy of those closed communities is pretty fascinating. Recall, the NFT creators (core team) get a cut every time an NFT is sold. But it's not like the 5% is going to some artist's pocket, they are building teams of devs etc to world build. It's worth taking to pen and paper and figuring out the economic game being played between the core teams that build the community and the collectors/traders that want to be part of it. They are revenue generating creative organizations... let's see where they go.
You could argue there was a vibrant ecosystem in the dotcom space in 2000 as well, but ultimately that vibrant ecosystem was only able to exist because so much money was being pumped into the space. I don't think "some people are doing cool things" is a protection when the most visible people are doing things that seem, to me, at least a little dodgy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU
Terrible things on the internet don't make all things built on the internet guilty by association. Just like scammers and grifters finding opportunities in web3 don't make all NFTs bad ideas.
OK, but it's not like TCP requires fantastically large amounts of energy for each request. While I'm sure there are particular companies working on a solution for those problems, I've seen enough of the cryptocurrency world to understand that the big players won't shift their money into theoretical environmentally-sound currencies, because they simply don't care about global warming as long as they can be very rich.
The thing I keep coming back to is that blockchain databases don't allow me to do anything, as a developer, that I couldn't do with traditional databases and with much less power consumption. People have been buying in-game digital good for decades without needing the blockchain. Services like Venmo and Paypal make it easy to send (small amounts of) money across continents in an instant.
Blockchain databases are fundamentally unnecessary to the average person.
Edit: and it occurs to me that this is the main reason these technologies get such short shrift on HN: to most of us they seem like solutions in search of problems, and sometimes even just solutions in search of money.
This betrays complete lack of knowledge of how games work.
Just because you bought your armour from League of Legends doesn't mean it will automagically work in Lord of the Rings:
- the data is different
- the underlying character models are different
- why would developers of Lord of the Rings accept anything into their game that breaks the game aesthetic?
- anyway will not work in 2-10 years because tech changes
But sure, yeah, it's a "composable building block".
Additionally: this "composable building block" is stored on a central server somewhere, of course, because storing anything on the blockchain is prohibitively expensive.
So, you have:
- in your wallet
- some small hash,
- pointing to some proprietary model on a central server
- that with 100% certainty will only be applicable to the single game that sells it
But yeah. That "simplifies inventory in a yet-to-be-made game", for sure.
> Sam Harris's plans to use the membership/association behind the rise of Pfps to create a community that gives away its wealth and then virtue signals
I've read this sentence 10 times and I still don't know what it means
> CryptoVoxels sell parcels of land as NFTs. Taken together, they generate a metaverse of spaces that the owners fill out with their imagination
So, a game sells something in the game's virtual world that is only applicable to that game and to that virtual world. What does this have to do with NFTs or blockchains in general?
Second Life has been around since 2003.
> Many of them have highly active communities that you only get to be part of by owning the NFT.
There are many communities you get to be a part of only when you buy an equivalent of a fictional token. This doesn't make them "counterexamples".
> So for many, it's not really a place to park or spend their ETH. The economy of those closed communities is pretty fascinating.
It really isn't.
> Recall, the NFT creators (core team) get a cut every time an NFT is sold. But it's not like the 5% is going to some artist's pocket, they are building teams of devs etc to world build.
Riiight. When Patreon does that, it's evil centralised service. When "core NFT team" does that, it's "look it's a vibrant crypto community unlike the world has ever seen".
If there were any such people, we would have any number of good articles and materials on crypto explaining how crypto is good actually, and that also:
- understand how the world works
- don't rely on circular references
- actually show the need for a blockchain in the proposed solutions
However, there are none.
> So it's mostly become void of any interesting discussions on the topic.
Of course it's void. And it's due to the countless crypto shills who invariably run away from this discussions with a combination of:
- there are honest people in crypto space
- there are good projects in crypto space, not just scams
- just follow crypto twitter/discord, do your research
"Dooooes radio ring a bell?" and the crowd all laughs.
Additionally your answer is a great illustration for my point.
Other things that are overpriced to a pure pragmatist: getting your name in the credits of a video by a youtube creator you'd like to support. Tickets to a recital for a recent graduate raising money to travel during audition season. Getting a museum wing named after you. Appointing a poet laureate.
If you want to live in a world where artists can afford to devote a majority of their time to their art instead of day jobs, you have to tolerate that systems are built to fund them, even if you balk at some of the most sensational price tags or artists' tastes.
Sure, maybe that is one possible usage, i.e. artists getting paid for art, but for now there doesn’t seem to be any patronage happening. It’s all corporate press pushes or scammy looking behaviors.
If you think NFTs are such a syste, you're mistaken.
Some say that if it’s relentlessly ugly enough it’ll make itself non-fungible.
Of course violating a copyright will subject you to civil damages and in certain circumstances may be criminal.
Sometimes when you are a copyright holder it is nearly impossible to prove a fake and/or identify the counterfeiter, the idea a fake can be immediately verified via blockchain and the pirate connected to a Twitter account would generally be a welcome change in the world of copyright enforcement.
Additionally, good luck getting a court recognize opensea as a source of copyright when it's drowning in copyright infringements. I can just mint your NFT somewhere else and it'll be just as valid.
Some do, some don’t, the industry standard ”NFT License” transfers limited rights. You seem to pretty confident and feel strongly, but as an example the owners of apes you are calling dumbasses for buying apes and not having ownership, do in fact receive a license to the apes they own.
It’s pretty common for infringing NFTs and infringing collections to be removed from OpenSea using DMCA takedown requests. OpenSea is the biggest marketplace in the space and centralized so they have that power (but it doesn’t remove the infringing NFT from the blockchain). Twitter already has a built in DMCA takedown request process and team, I’m sure they will process them for official profile NFTs. And there is always the court as the last resort for copyright infringement, which you don’t seem to believe in.
Sure you can copy and “mint” an NFT all you want, no different than any other copyrighted digital work can be copied and reproduced…but you would be violating the law in either case.
Why do you think copyright protections don’t apply to NFTs and copyrights can’t be enforced when they happen to be NFTs?
None of them do.
> the industry standard ”NFT License” transfers limited rights.
It doesn't. (Also, there's no "industry standard for NFTs")
> but as an example the owners of apes you are calling dumbasses for buying apes and not having ownership, do in fact receive a license to the apes they own.
No, they don't. They receive a hash pointing to a location that may or may not contain that ape, ... and that's it.
> Sure you can copy and “mint” an NFT all you want, no different than any other copyrighted digital work can be copied and reproduced…but you would be violating the law in either case.
And the law has literally nothing to do with NFTs.
> Why do you think copyright protections don’t apply to NFTs and copyrights can’t be enforced when they happen to be NFTs?
Yes, they do. Yes, they can. And they have to do with the actual art being sold, and have nothing to do with NFTs.
Well you proved you don’t know the market at all and you’re willing to just make stuff up, so it’s kind of difficult to engage.
Anyone can make an NFT and they can attach any IP rights they want to the NFT, it can be a copyright assignment, it can be a license or it can be none. The market utilizes all the above.
> No, they don't. They receive a hash pointing to a location that may or may not contain that ape, ... and that's it.
There are underlying legal contracts that are enforceable in court that license the copyrighted work to the owners.
For fuck sake owners of Apes have used their commercial license to do everything from make comic books, to make beers, one ape owner even recently signed a partnership deal Adidas for their ape.
I know how the real world works. So no need to make stuff up.
> Anyone can make an NFT and they can attach any IP rights they want to the NFT, it can be a copyright assignment, it can be a license or it can be none. The market utilizes all the above.
That's not how copyright works.
To quote U.S. Copyright Office, "Mere ownership of a copy or phonorecord that embodies a work does not give the owner of that copy or phonorecord the ownership of the copyright in the work."
Besides, with NFT you don't even own a "copy or a phonorecord".
> There are underlying legal contracts that are enforceable in court that license the copyrighted work to the owners.
If there's an underlying legal contract, then that contract governs the license/copyright transfer, and not the NFT.
NFT literally mean zero. Nothing about them is legally binding or enforceable. They are the definition of made up.
> For fuck sake owners of Apes have used their commercial license
1. Commercial license is not copyright
2. For a commercial license you literally have no need for NFTs
So they don't get copyrights, they get a license. Do you go around saying you get the copyright to Final Fantasy when you buy a copy on Steam ? After all, you got a license.
Does buying Final Fantasy give you any commercial rights? No!
Again some NFTs do give you full copyright. What final fantasy or other video game have you ever bought where you received the full copyright?
The industry standard NFT License on the other hand gives holders commercial rights to monetize their NFT up to a few hundred thousand dollars a year.
So thanks for that, Twitter.
When tech people talk about the "unbanked", they are interested in them from the purposes of skimming money or "engagement" off them which up until now wasn't possible. They aren't actually interested to solve any of their problems or actually improve their quality of life.
As for expressing unapproved thought, I all BS on your statement. There are blue-checked people who continued to express heterodox thought who kept their checks right up until they were permanently banned for TOS reasons.
But you're free to act like NFTs don't exist without that having any impact on your day-to-day life.