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Comment by ttiurani | Hacker News Reader

"She tells me a bit about her metaverse project, Space Falcon. I'm not really sold on it, but I'm not really an NFT person so I didn't have any reason to think it was a bad idea either.[...] It seems kind of like a get-rich-quick scheme, but again, that's kind of how I see a lot of NFTs. With all that she's doing for Arrow, there's no harm in showing a little support."

The real takeaway from this is that it's dangerous to break your moral compass and sense of reality to the point where you think helping out people who are pushing an obviously fraudulent business, is ok and normal.

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Yeah it's pretty ironic that a "legitimate" NFT venture and a project invented solely for social engineering are indistinguishable even for someone who presumably knows a lot about the crypto space.

Sure, NFTs and crypto in general may be get rich schemes at the core, but a lot of people do believe in them, so a charitable view would be that HE saw it as a scheme, but he thought that perhaps SHE believed in it.

And FWIW I'm not sure "fraudulent" is the right word. NFTs are not a fraud, you usually get what you pay for, a mediocre jpeg, and perhaps a really primitive game.

And to be fair, what are the odds his VTOL company will ever produce anything either?

I don't see it that way at all. The NFT vector is arbitrary. The point was to drain his accounts and nothing more. If a less suspicious method was available, I'm sure the scammers would have taken that one.

Is there any case of NFT that is not some combination of get-rich-quick scheme, Ponzi scheme, search for a bigger fool, FOMO-powered stupidity, extracting money from naive people or satire of NFT?

And NFT part adds anything substantial and is not replaceable by regular transfer (either transfer of money or BTC-like)?

I'm not convinced it isn't crypto itself, and NFT is just an extension of that.

It’s degrees of suspension of disbelief. Software is just tricking sand into to thinking.

I have no issue believing that an imaginary consensus stored ledger in thousands of computers all secured by massive amounts of energy and limited to 21M units over 100 years might be valuable.

The ability for people to copy this software idea? Not valuable. The ability for people to issue new tokens on existing chains? Not valuable. The ability for people to post and sell jpegs, Not valuable.

Only original ideas are scarce. It’s the first step vs the n-th step.

I think SV libertarians saw the scam of world finance and thought, y’know what if we could get in on this too and then we would never have to innovate again.

> I have no issue believing that an imaginary consensus stored ledger in thousands of computers all secured by massive amounts of energy and limited to 21M units over 100 years might be valuable.

It's not "secured" by energy. You can't convert a Bitcoin into the original amount of power required to produce it, which is the defining quality of a financial security.

It's more accurate to say that Bitcoin's value is retained by the ongoing commitment of power into the network. But that correctly suggests that the network collapses without a perpetual source of electricity, which is not the kind of positive connotation that I think you meant to supply.

Hmmm, you do agree it has value then!

It’s a little more nuanced, while some component of maintaining hashrate/energy, it’s best be be thought of as a point in time expenditure given the network size, participants and technology available. Once a block is minted at a given difficulty, it can never be undone (with a negligible probability), as a chain reorganization would need to put in more energy than that to undo it.

It’s a conversion, abstractly. Probabilistic finality at a given level of technological and economic resource exploitation.

The wonderful thing about economic value is that, for better or worse, we get to decide what has it. A large number of people have decided that Bitcoins have economic value, and it's not particularly salient to my arguments as to whether that's true or not.

The rest of what you've written doesn't really concern me, because all I was interested in was pointing out that Bitcoin doesn't securitize energy.

The person you are replying to is using the word secured in a literal sense I think. Not the financial sense meaning backed by.

Okay. In what "literal" sense of the word is Bitcoin secured by electricity? The need for electricity seems to be Bitcoin's greatest practical liability, since the entire network depends on it.

The more electricity is used to secure it, the more electricity is required to attack it

I think that fits more into "ridiculous economic Chinese finger trap" than "security feature." It's similar to calling gold's physical weight a security feature, but at least there's a consistent and non-economic relationship between how much gold you have and how hard it is for someone to pick it up and walk away with it.

(It's also not immediately obvious that "more electricity" is needed to attack it, since a handful of extant larger pools could just conspire as-is.)

Larger pools doing that would be subtracting energy from the honest side, and adding it to the dishonest side, so the logic still holds

> Larger pools doing that would be subtracting energy from the honest side, and adding it to the dishonest side

Why would that be the case? It isn't necessarily zero-sum; the more realistic scenario is that the remaining honest participants ramp up their energy consumption in an attempt to prevent the attack.

But that's still only the most boring of the many, many latent threats to Bitcoin. Solar flares and electronic warfare strike me as more interesting.

To be fair, most human technology is vulnerable to these. The nice thing about a distributed ledger is that as long as one copy remains it can be bootstrapped back to full form. One Pi sitting in Africa could do it. Try that with your banks SQL db backups, which all tapes disks and ssds were erased in the solar storm.

“Technology” is the operative word. Cash works just fine.

Once again: the bar for cryptocurrencies to clear isn’t to be “as good as” traditional finance. They have to do better, given the additional middlemen and costs they shoulder on all of us.

You’ve failed to demonstrate that they clear that bar: a single surviving backup of a distributed ledger isn’t distributed in either the trust or failure senses, and is thus no better (and possibly worse!) than us trying to piece the world’s financial system back together from everybody’s paper receipts. Oh, and the whole “cash” thing continues to work.

If anyone knows of one, please post. As far as I know, there are none in the Metaverse area of NFTs.

Discussion on Reddit's r/metaverse [1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/metaverse/comments/sr0sqz/what_meta...

NFTs could be used to manage domain names, which might be a helpful replacement for ICANN.

How would it work and what aspect would it improve?

The NFT part keeps track of who owns what domain. It would improve the situation by getting rid of the questionable organization running things presently. (See: the .org scandal)

Obviously the NFT would "keep track of", but you have to be more specific.

And changing the organisation is a completely separate question from which database technology they use. IF you just switch from SQL to NFT the organisation will not suddenly become less corrupt, or whatever the issue with them is.

If you're asking for the implementation details, there's a group trying to do it right now. You should look them up if you're interested.

>IF you just switch from SQL to NFT the organisation will not suddenly become less corrupt, or whatever the issue with them is.

It's true that it won't make the managing organization less corrupt - it will make them nonexistent. That's the idea behind decentralized decision-making. The people running the database don't have to have the power to change it or bend the rules: that's what this whole crypto thing is about.

How would you be able to get rid of the organisation? So many people talk about various crypto use cases but they can almost never explain how it would work.

From land deeds to insurance to domain registration to in game assets etc etc, people have all these wonderful ideas. It would be interesting to one day have at least one of these ideas explained.

It's literally whoever owns the keys listed as the registrant owns the domain. If you lose your keys you lose your domain. You have no recourse if someone squats on your domain, uses a lookalike domain for phishing, steals your domain, etc.. And for the privilege of having a judgement proof blockchain with no oversight you get to buy your domain from an early adopter that's squatting (investing) and you get to pay fees every time you blink.

All the crypto bros printed (mined) a bunch of monopoly money (coins), invented assets (NFTs), bought (allocated to themselves) all the assets (NFTs) using their monopoly money (coins), and want us to buy into these crappy systems with real money so they can sell us the assets (NFTs) while still being the landlords (transaction processors) that charge us rent (fees) on everything forever.

> It's literally whoever owns the keys listed as the registrant owns the domain.

Sure, but even so, how is this implemented? Presumably some organisation needs to uphold this connection. Simply "owning" a domain, in the sense that you "own" an NFT, is not very helpful, you need some kind of actual control over it. Presumably a server is needed to forward the domain to your IP, and someone needs to run that server, right?

There is a smart contract that supports features like domain name resolution and transfers. The data and code needed to resolve the domain to your IP would live on the blockchain, so effectively every node in the network is hosting it. The smart contract could be totally immutable; nobody would have special permissions.

The resolution would work by executing some "lookup" smart contract function on a node (you could run your own local node for lookups, or use a public node similar to hitting your ISP's or Google's DNS server).

None of this is really cutting edge, it has been possible for a long time now.

We all understand the first part. Storing information on the blockchain, that's easy. But where almost all use cases fall down is in interfacing with the real world.

In this case it sounds like that is solved though. I know very little about the structure of the internet, but it seems you are saying that instead of asking a DNS server, every computer would ask the blockchain to resolve the domain name, correct? But wouldn't that require every single device that connects to the internet to "update its firmware" or something? Or could this decentralised DNS somehow emulate the old fashioned kind?

Right exactly. I think from the perspective of devices (say your laptop) it looks pretty similar to the current system. You give it the IP address of a "DNS server", but now it's hitting an Ethereum node who is doing the DNS lookup. There is danger there that the node could lie about the state of the blockchain, so it does need to be trusted. The paranoid can always run their own node and be 100% sure.

I do think you could expose the same interface as traditional DNS but backed by the registrations in the blockchain. There are browsers that will resolve Ethereum Name Service domains today, but I'm not sure how that's implemented (probably lookups on a public ETH node).

The important improvements IMO are on the registration, transfer, renting of the names rather than the lookup side which doesn't look dramatically different except that other code running on the blockchain could do the lookups too.

My domain is secured by the ministry of telecommunications of my local government. To transfer ownership of my domain requires a hard copy of a random code snail-mailed to me by the ministry. It's literally tied to my legal citizenship. That's the opposite of "questionable."

That has some obvious downsides. It probably doesn't matter for you personally but being able to take someone's domain away for political reasons isn't ideal.

Ownership as a concept is backed and secured by law (and enforcement), an inherently political system in democracy. It's the most ideal system successfully practised around the world today.

The next best thing is securing one's property by practicing personal violence, and as I've no interest in shooting anyone for mere robbery, I'll take political ownership any day of the week.

If my very countrymen (and women) collectively decide I can't have my domain, then so be it. The obvious upside is that while they do uphold my ownership, it's as secure as any of my earthly possessions. Stealing my domain amounts to stealing my mail, which is a crime.

Not everyone in the world has access to a government that will uphold their ownership in a just way. Like I said it this likely isn't valuable for you personally, you are not looking past your specific situation.

But everyone in the world has access to a cryptocoin that will uphold their ownership in a just way?

Is that the argument? Crypto is "more just" and "available globally" and affordably?

We're talking about domain name registration right? No reason why it would need to be more expensive than the current system. The argument is that ownership is upheld in a totally programmatic way. Just is a value judgement, not sure about that. It depends on what you value. Available globally yes.

What's "totally programmatic"? Is that where programmers never make mistakes, protocols never have bugs, users always remember their secret keys, read and understand the code they're running, on the computer they wholly own and trust, with perfectly functioning hardware? And somehow resistant against the $5 wrench attack and state-level seizure?

Protocols have bugs, yep. Audited and battle tested protocols, less often though. For example, there are hacks every day where people exploit smart contract bugs, yet there are contracts securing billions of dollars that have not been hacked. Both can be true at once. Something like this wouldn't be widely used without lots of iterations to iron out issues like that.

$5 wrench attack is easily thwarted by splitting ownership across multiple geographically separated people, easily doable by giving control of the domain name to a shared contract. This would require lawyers in the current system!

If you think it's so easy, maybe you should do it to demonstrate.

If you mean that it'll become easy enough over time, that's an assumption I don't buy.

Similar software already exists.. https://ens.domains/ as does other blockchain software handling tons of value..

It was probably thousands of talented dev hours, who said it was easy?

Just curious are you at all familiar with smart contracts in general?

ens.domains just sounds like selling plots on the Moon, or names of distant stars. It only matters to those who buy in. Current system domains are cheap and work fine for most people. If your local government is oppressive and won't let you own a domain, you can't really solve that political problem technologically.

My understanding of smart contracts is that it's like a distributed virtual machine of consensus. A single program that runs on all the networked computers, all executing the same set of functions on the same set of data producing the same result. But it's slow and expensive, because it's "trustless", and it turns out that trust is very valuable and embedded in our traditional methods, and people get scammed left and right because they think trustless means they don't need to trust, but that's a lie.

I own one. All the blockchain domains are a dream come true for squatters and scammers. I'll take the oversight, stability, accountability, and mutability of ICANN and the current registry/registrar system every single time given the choice.

Come on, there is realistically nothing stopping you from hosting a scam on a normal ICANN domain. What accountability are you talking about?

The registrars are obligated to prevent fraud and abuse. If they fail to do that job you can appeal directly to the registry. If the registry doesn't do anything you can appeal to ICANN.

All of them are within the scope of the legal system, so if you send a police report demonstrating fraud to a registrar or registry and they fail to act you have some recourse. If their inaction results in increased damages they've opened themselves to liability and you could sue them. The possibility alone is enough that everyone has published polices detailing how they deal with those situations. As long as you follow the rules you can get a domain taken away from a bad actor. It's not easy, but it's possible if someone is doing enough harm.

So yeah, you can host a scam on a normal ICANN domain. It's what happens afterwards that matters. In ICANN land you get one chance to run your scam because the victim can make an appeal to authority to have you shut down. In blockchain land it's tough luck for you.

As an example, this [1] looks like PayPal's wallet. What do they do about this [2] wallet which owns paypals.eth (alongside sqaree.eth, chasebanks.eth, etc.)? They have two choices AFAIK. The first is to pay whatever the owner demands for those domains. The second is to take the risk of the owner selling those domains to someone that wants to use them for phishing.

There are exactly two winners in the blockchain version; the domain squatter and a would be scammer. In the existing system a high value domain owner like PayPal will have an established procedure for dealing with bad actors that infringe on their trademark and dealing with typo squatting like that is probably as simple as sending a template they have to the corresponding registry.

1. https://app.ens.domains/address/0x527FC48f1CA8b41DF3E870F5DE...

2. https://app.ens.domains/address/0x7731652a9F7F48F77E94a8675F...

I think parent commenter might feel the same way I do, which is that when I read him say "eh, a scam but she's helping us, no harm in me voicing support" my sympathy for him diminished significantly.

If you don't know much about NFTs but think they're kinda scammy, maybe you shouldn't default to "support / lend your reputation to them."

That sounds a bit harsh. Did OP break their moral compass, or did they just give the wrong person the benefit of the doubt?

To restate what the twitter user was saying: "It seemed like this was a get-rick-quick scheme, but this person could be useful to my goals, so I decided to overlook that"

I guess you can argue that get-rick-quick does not necessarily imply scam, but it certainly reflects poorly on a person to ignore their doubts because the source of the doubts is useful. Its not a unique problem to NFTs, its a similar problem that a founder might face when, say, entertaining an acquisition by Meta.

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