Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT dropped 99% in value
artnews.com
artnews.com
> Man who paid $2.9m for NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet set to lose almost $2.9m
> ‘This is the Mona Lisa of the digital world’, says crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi who bought the NFT in March 2021
This is a good example of why so many people don't take cryptocurrency seriously. It full of hype men who spout transparent BS like the above quote, though most don't have millions to blow to get into the news like this.
People will say that crypto is important because it's decentralized and non-fiat or whatever, with the implication being that it's not controlled by a government. But we have seen time and time again that that isn't true, and if a government wants to freeze your crypto assets, they can do so easily.
So in all seriousness, what is the point of crypto, other than a "new stock market"?
I would say no. It's a technology that serves no practical purpose, since the problems it addresses are ones purely created by certain peculiar ideologies. If you're not indulging in one of those ideologies, there's no point. And, like you mentioned, it doesn't even succeed at addressing those problems. A virtual technology can't free you from real-world power, because it's dependent on the real world and can be attacked there, where it's weak.
From outside those peculiar ideologies, something like Bitcoin is like an application written so badly that it's like 486 PC that requires as much energy as Argentina to run. Why should anyone want something like that?
How do you get your assets converted to crypto in the first place, if an authoritarian regime prevent you from having something akin to a bank account?
> comparatively cheap remittances for people sending money back to their families in another country
According to cryptofees.net, BTC transaction fees average 4% and ETH 1.6%. Even the median fees are pretty high when compared for example to Wise.com and there you only have fees when converting currencies.
> bringing a form of storing assets to the 2 billion or so unbanked individuals of the world
This is a fair point, but I would argue that people who are unbanked are not the kind of people who will find it easy to securely manage crypto keys and wallets.
That site hasn't been updated in almost a year. (Check the prices and recent transactions it links to.)
Here's a more accurate way to estimate bitcoin's fees. Go to mempool.space and look at the current estimated Low/Medium/High priority fees. That is based on current pending transactions and most of the time, unless you are in a hurry, "Low" is enough to get a transaction confirmed in the next hour.
At current writing, and for most of the past year, those fees are a few cents.
And this is the expensive way to transact bitcoin -- on-chain! Nowadays most commerce is moving to the layer-2 Lightning Network, where transactions are instant and typically nearly free via payment channels that are settled on-chain in the future.
Each channel sets their own rates so the cost of transacting this way varies but it usually comes out to a very tiny amount, much less than 0.1%.
This is a pretty good overview with more detail: https://cointelegraph.com/bitcoin-for-beginners/what-is-the-...
The network has grown a ton in the past year and apps like CashApp and Strike now support it.
Turns out that when you purposefully build a system without any guardrails or oversight, then bad actors will find exploits and there will be no way to stop them. Regulation and oversight might be good things, actually.
The "exploits" you're describing were possible 20 years ago through various other methods (unregulated banking, cash in briefcases, etc). The new thing is government and police having a much greater degree of control over monetary systems.
I think crypto is failing at most of its promises and it's still unclear whether it will ever live up to any of them. But rah-rah celebration of government being able to monitor and halt anything it wants to is not the way to go, either; it's actually a literal doomsday scenario (Vernor Vinge has written about this, among others).
I'm not disputing you can still do work on a 486 PC that requires as much power as Argentina; the question is why would you want to when a regular PC works just as well or even better?
Also, most of those use-cases break down in practice at the intersection with the real world. Sure if you've got some Bitcoin and an internet connection (and a big HD to store the blockchain), you can transfer it around to your heart's content. But how (for instance) are you supposed to get Bitcoin for your authoritarian-regime fiat? Wire it to Binance? That defeats the point. Why would you use Bitcoin as a store of value, when there are better, less volatile alternatives like the dollar, the euro, or even gold? When you work through the particulars, there's not that many cases where Bitcoin actually makes sense to use, from a practical perspective.
“Unbanked” is an imaginary word. If a person is “unbanked”, it’s likely that they are also “uninternetted” and/or “uncomputered.”
But probably not good enough for the crypto-bros, it's a centralized system!!1!!
I've heard this for a decade now but no one ever gives any evidence. Where are all these people with changed lives who aren't affluent white guys?
Y: here are the use cases
X&Z: let's downvote and be negative anyway.
Welcome the usual crypto discussions on HN. Why do people still bother?
> Y: here are the use cases
You misunderstand. My gist was there were no practical use cases, and the response was to enumerate some impractical ones. I think the thing that confuses some people is that (like cryptography) some of the biggest problems are on the onramps and offramps, not in the core technology itself.
> X&Z: let's downvote and be negative anyway.
It's right an proper to be negative about something that doesn't really work (when compared against alternatives), especially when that thing is as overhyped as cryptocurrency is.
If it actually worked, the value would be obvious, and wouldn't need to be constantly justified by the kind of contrived use cases that are usually offered.
Did you not read the comment where outlined some of the holes in those use cases?
Here's a gist of how these coversations usually go:
>>>> We should use literal bricks as currency.
>>> That sounds dumb and pointless.
>> No it isn't. Here's an obvious use case: if you want to buy something from me, you can push over a wheelbarrow of bricks to make the exchange. This is superior to fiat because it's hard currency, and far more difficult to steal than banknotes or even precious metal coins. No way the government can confiscate it, it's too heavy. IT'S THE FUTURE OF MONEY!!1!
> That doesn't make any sense. It's a PITA to cart around bricks, banknotes and coins are way more convenient. Also the government has trucks.
But like I said before, these kinds of discussions are totally useless.
You don't get the usecase, fine, no problem, move on already, there is no point of discussing this any longer.
Market cap doesn't mean squat here. The one use case that cryptocurrency has satisfied is being a speculative investment.
If some true-believer dude claims he's actually carting around brick-bux in a wheelbarrow and that it's great for buying things (and maybe occasionally actually making a transaction), that doesn't actually mean it's a good choice for that use case. It just means that guy isn't making very good decisions (or is dishonest).
> But like I said before, these kinds of discussions are totally useless.
No. There's quite a lot of utility in disputing BS, because that has a chance of eventually making it go away.
> You don't get the usecase, fine, no problem, move on already, there is no point of discussing this any longer.
I do understand the use case, I just think the application of cryptocurrency to it is BS. If you think there's no point discussing it, you're welcome to stop.
Another possibility is that they get the use-case and consider it worthless. As we have seen repeatedly in this space, popularity seems to have no correlation with technical viability, so this "$2 trillion can't be wrong" argument lacks solidity.
Edit: if you are not willing to admit that crypto allows you to store or move value outside of governments reach, then there is 0 reason to discuss further. And it doesn't even matter at that point who is wrong or not.
We have seen no such thing. The claim is not that the government can't put your wallet on a blacklist in an attempt to ban local companies from serving you. Nor is the claim that the government can't come to your home and arrest you, nor that they can't have your server taken down where you store your private keys.
These things happen, but it is unreasonable to ask cryptocurrencies to protect you from real world violence, anymore than encryption is useless because someone can use a hammer.
It's not the stock market at all. Not even close.
The stock market is a system that enables the buying and selling of shares in productive business - businesses that provide goods and services, that generate revenue and (ideally) profit. As a shareholder you own a fraction of that production, the assets, the profit. That's ultimately what determines the value of a stock over the long-term, its ability to generate sales and profit (and of course the bounds on valuations can swing widely over that time, multiples can contract and expand).
You maybe see crypto markets and think: gambling; and so that's where you're making an incorrect connection to stock markets. The stock market, if you're doing it right, is absolutely not gambling. Stocks are supported by the productive capacity of the business in question, ultimately; crypto doesn't work that way (at least not at present, maybe one will in the future). This is why Bitcoin has dramatically more in common with gold than eg stocks (gold isn't a producing asset, it's not going to spit off a dividend from profit every year).
The reason an entity like Berkshire Hathaway or Microsoft can so astoundingly trounce gold in generating returns over the long-term, is precisely because they're generative entities and gold is not. There's no compounding action to gold from the consequence of production growth (a lot more production is generally bad for the holders of eg gold or Bitcoin, as their value is based in part on scarcity), it's a hedging device primarily. Whereas if it's 1981 and Microsoft generates $3m in profit, they can plausibly reinvest profit and maybe get $5m the next year by hiring more engineers, launching new products, more advertising, etc. Rolling that expansion process forward is how you end up with $50m in profit instead of $3m. Gold, as with Bitcoin, does not work like that at all, there's no compounding mechanism. It's why gold sucks as an investment compared to eg the S&P index over time; although it's perfectly reasonable as an inflation hedge for a fraction of your assets, if one so desires to diversify.
Ostensibly, yes. But in practice stocks are often pretty disconnected from business realities by algorithmic trading and high-frequency trading. Even manual trades made on a snap basis like a mass sales on a company posting a slightly less than stellar quarter on the back of a proven long-term, solid, growing business: is that company really "worth" 10% less today? Especially since that "value" is then often recouped even before the next quarterly report.
Most companies can't even explain many of their own stock price moves.
If you are an HFT and you are noticeably impacting the price of a stock, you are losing a ton of money very quickly
> mass sales on a company posting a slightly less than stellar quarter on the back of a proven long-term, solid, growing business: is that company really "worth" 10% less today?
This is a very easy theory to test. If you think it’s true, just buy every stock that’s down 10% on earnings (it’s obviously not true as such a strategy would have been exploited by hedge funds decades ago)
No they're not. Only short-term to a limited extent and only to an extreme in very rare cases.
High frequency trading is a laughable triviality to a long-term investor, entirely meaningless. It only matters if you're trading a lot of volume and they're swiping some of your profit by moving faster. I don't care if they take 0.1% of the present value of my trade if I'm buying a stock to hold for years (or if I'm buying at a steep discount to what I value the company at).
I buy Teladoc at $61.22 and I plan to hold for years - do I care if HFT swipes $0.02 of that trade? No. I don't care if it swipes $0.20 of that trade in fact. If you're doing it right, if you're calculating the margin for error in the purchase correctly in terms of the value you're buying, you can very easily disregard the margin that that $0.20 represents. That is to say, if a stock isn't a good buy at $61.22, it's not a good buy at $61 either. There's no scenario where I'm going to care about HFT.
I also don't base my purchases on what the market (other investors, whether algorithmic or not) thinks a stock is worth. I make my own determination of the worth of the business, its potential, and from there I decide if the current price matches up with the value I think the business represents. As such algorithmic manipulation largely doesn't matter to me, I don't care if they run a stock up or down 5% tomorrow or next week, it doesn't alter my evaluation of what the business is worth; although if they want to crash a good stock by 70% in a few weeks because some people panic and hit the sell button, prompting a cascade of selling, due to something like Covid, then I'm a buyer, I'll happily take advantage of their mistake.
> Most companies can't even explain many of their own stock price moves.
Again, you're talking about shorter-term volatility, spikes, blips, temporary emotional swings up or down.
As a long-term value investor, I don't care much about short-term volatility and will never have to (other than if it happens to provide a rare, freakishly outsized, emotion-based buying or selling opportunity to take advantage of; as with the Covid crash). As an owner, shorter-term concerns, swings, are largely meaningless to me. As they should be to most investors.
Why do I care if a company can explain stray volatile stock price movements? That's not the business I want them to be specializing in. I have no need of their explanations unless it's a critical legal matter. Read their quarterly reports, figure out their business and its long-term trajectory - that's what you're properly buying, not the explanation by public relations on the daily movement of the stock.
There is a possibility that we eventually achieve a bitcoin circular economy. In such a scenario, Bitcoin does not go up or down against fiat because there will be no demand for fiat.
Governments are not going to give up the critical aspects of economic control and self-determination that come from national currencies, generally. They could already do that with gold, and they overwhelmingly have had absolutely no desire to do it (for obvious reasons). If Bitcoin gets a lot larger and a lot more stable you may see an occasional small nation, in the midst of economic crisis, peg itself to Bitcoin; whenever the confidence crisis wanes, they'll promptly unpeg to regain flexibility and control.
The extreme majority of nations will strongly prefer to control their own destiny in terms of currency and retain the vast flexibility and power that comes with that control.
One might as well expect nations to give up militaries in the name of peace. That's a similar fantasy outcome that no doubt many millions of people believe could possibly happen (it can't).
Maybe not in your lifetime. But you’re not practicing long-term thinking here. Global, trustless, decentralized networks allow humanity to fundamentally reorganize. Physical, nation-state borders are ignored by such networks. Cooperation for physical resources still does matter but that may also be lessened by technological leaps in sectors like energy and food production. Humanity, if lucky enough to not be oppressed by ultra powerful governments, will likely render federal/central governments much less important and thus much less powerful. Simply put, the value proposition of central governments is now on the decline.
Ethereum's revenue is the transaction fees it collects for people to use the network. Its expenses are the rewards it pays out to miners and stakers. Its profit is the difference between the collected fees and rewarded fees.
This difference between collected fees and rewarded fees is "burned", or ceases to exist. The process shares some similarities with stock buybacks.
They can, but only if they get physical hold of you and like, threaten you with a $5 wrench. This is not limited to governments, if whoever gets hold of you and threatens you, they will mostly be able to get your assets, and there's nothing anyone can do about that.
> So in all seriousness, what is the point of crypto, other than a "new stock market"?
The second time you mention the stock market. From my pov, (most?) crypto is very dissimilar to stock market. Stock market includes mostly somewhat productive assets. Crypto usually isn't productive, it's just predictably scarce. Esp Bitcoin and similar are much closer to digital gold than to stocks. See eg https://www.lynalden.com/what-is-money/
The society needs to start hanging banksters. This is a way there.
It is a market where the scum fat cats who entrenched themselves in political class by buying politicians do not have a monopoly on swindling gullible public.
cryptocurrency democratized behavior of scum. It is a good thing. When JPM Chase f!cks grandma out of her house there's some hand waving goes on as Chase does good hence maybe it was grandma fault and the CEO of JPM does not go to prison where he belongs. When grandma gets screwed by Jose the Neighborhood slickster, society will get the incentives to throw everyone who behaves like Jose the Nieghborhood slickster into prison, ensuring that the CEO of JPM and wall st bros go there as well.
And that's a good thing.
Cryptos now have a lot more control in China, and the European Union is going to force the identification of those who interchange Euros or other currency to/from cryptos, so I don't know how much is going to last the bubble of earning money with that.
"Analyzing the Very Bizarre Sale of Melania Trump’s $170,000 NFT"
"The crypto used to purchase the former first lady’s NFT came from the NFT creator themselves, blockchain records reveal."
https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vpx8/analyzing-the-very-bi...
You joke, but that is exactly correct. The only real use case for NFTs is money laundering. Create silly NFT, purchase it from yourself with millions of dollars from some other illegal activity (using shell entities to hide your identity), money is now "laundered" having been legitimately earned by selling an NFT.
Lol source?
> 1. If you hold your coins at a regulated exchange, sure yeah the authorities can probably get a warrant and seize your Bitcoins.
> 2. If you hold your coins in your own wallet but you write down your private key in, like, your phone’s notes app, and it backs up to the cloud, then the authorities can probably get your cloud provider to give them access to your notes and read the key and use that to seize all your Bitcoins. (This happened to the alleged Bitfinex hack launderers.)
> 3. If you write your private key on a scrap of paper, the authorities can search your house until they find it and seize all your Bitcoins.
> 4. If you memorize your private key, or just write it down somewhere really safe, then they can arrest you and throw you in jail until you tell them what it is, and then seize all your Bitcoins.
This argument is similar to me saying there is no point to encrypted communications because the government can hack it, plant back doors, throw you in jail, etc. That is all true, but making the government’s job harder, even if not theoretically impossible for a nation state, is still something that is worthwhile.
Understandable, but a wide variety of things exist for the sole purpose of making money. That fact doesn't invalidate cryptocurrency. Without launching into the tried and true "what is money" pontification that crypto advocates usually bring up, it does have use cases for many people and even if those use cases are only valid when they interact with other crypto true-believers, it still has utility for those folks nonetheless.
https://venturebeat.com/2014/10/09/how-peter-thiel-teaches-s...
> Thiel is also not a fan of defining yourself in relation to something else, like the ‘Uber of dog sitters.’ Claiming to be the Stanford of North Dakota doesn’t mean that the school is good. “The something of somewhere is mostly just the nothing of nowhere.”
As an aside, if vapid quotespiration is your thing, here's the first google result for "The something of somewhere is often the nothing of nowhere": https://quotefancy.com/quote/1583769/Peter-Thiel-The-somethi... (proof: https://web.archive.org/web/20220418155400/https://www.googl...).
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/You can say it’s yours if you upvote one random blog post from Paul Graham.
It's called Y3J5cHRvc3Vja2Vycw==
NFTs that are linked to real-world assets (through intermediaries that you have to trust, yes — unlike everybody else on the blockchain) like stock, real estate or anything else are not.
That makes the NFT redundant.
I'm pretty sure you didn't pay that for the transfer of the house title. Most of that was for other stuff that happened around the same time, like getting a mortgage and having your lender make sure they're not going to be left holding the bag.
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/mortgages/closing-costs-m...
That kind of makes sense, though. Isn't that insurance against the possibility that you bought the property from someone who did not actually own it, so basically insuring against a total loss?
IIRC, a Torrens title would deal with that possibility, but my understanding is it as a consequence introduces other issues.
I think a better use-case for NFTs for now is as as keys, i.e. early investors to a project are granted a limited number of NFTs, which then allow them preferential access to later high-APR investments or whatever. This is a somewhat niche use case, but at least it's all on-chain and trustless.
Do those actually exist, or are they just a fairy tale to hype NFTs?
Also, even if they do exist, they probably demonstrate a particular kind of confusion that's often used to hype cryptocurrency-type things: there may be a link to the crypto-space, but it's entirely superfluous and all the real work is being done by a traditional non-crypto mechanisms.
If I bought your house and in addition to all the legal paperwork you also gave me a handwritten note saying "house is yours now, promise!" do you think I'll care about the handwritten note? If you only gave me the note and not all the normally required paperwork do you think I'd pay you?
How would any state authority be able to handle any case where the person supposed to hold the keys either is unwilling or unable to authorize a transaction that should legally go through?
If I lost the keys (as in the keys to my blockchain wallet) to the NFT for my house should that plot of land just be abandoned forever? If a company gets hacked and their keys for all their assets (or stock) gets deleted should that company just close down forever even though nothing tangible actually changed?
You cannot impose the rules of the blockchain on tangible assets. If your counter argument is to give some institutions the power to rewrite or add unauthorized transactions to the blockchain then you have simply reinvented the state, and lost all of the properties of a blockchain that make them interesting/valuable.
> you have simply reinvented the state
If you could reinvent the state so that it is predictable, testable, and not subject to human corruption then I’d say it’s a good thing! And also quite the experiment haha
I think you misunderstand my points. All the things you stated are simply not things we can achieve as absolutes in society or the physical world. The current rules of blockchains and smart contracts deal in absolutes, and when they can't they defer to oracles (which interface with the real world, so they have all the problems you stated). The real world is full of nuances, judgment calls and edge-cases which is why we have people who can adjudicate them. The points I listed in the parent comment are just a small fraction of the real world problems that would creep up in the first day of implementing this sort of system.
From here on this is more opinion/political:
If the discussion was about making laws more aligned with those points then the last place to start would be with crypto-tokens that have no real world impact (besides using a bunch of compute/resources). The place to start IMO would be to start removing exceptions from laws/taxes that don't make sense anymore, get the legal code down to a manageable size, introduce better accountability to our democracy and so many other steps. Starting with the tokens is destructive because it focuses energy at the wrong end of the problem and has clearly just led to most destructive parts of society (thieves, criminals, grifters, scammers, MLMs, etc.) to profit. It also makes people who see the obvious problems with it (I count myself among them) unwilling to participate so there is less force behind it even if it (against all odds) was a good idea.
I think it's also clear that a proper system to solve these issues would not be based on the current technical platforms being built since those are incapable on a fundamental level to answer questions like the ones I asked.
BAYC/MAYC is the biggest, milady seems to be getting traction (not sure why).
These specific ones are also easy to liquidate for now because of opensea bots willing to sell ~10% below “floor” so they can flip later.
I made this bet with a MAYC a while back to play with and understand what was going on (bet was MAYC price would climb because of BAYC community and future ape token). It worked out, but it can be a bit stressful for sure.
The interesting bit is gated community access/easily verifiable ownership of membership. The art is a meme-ish way to signal this status, but the ability to verify easily is the new capability (urbit uses it well imo - costs can be low, but verification and non-zero cost make spam no longer economical)
The Jack tweet style nft and ones like that seemed like a dumb bet to me. The value is in the community, access, or (maybe) in IP rights for a certain sports clip or something. NFTs of stuff like Jack’s tweet or a meme without IP rights have no real value beyond hype imo.
This topic is also squarely in the class of things the median HN comment is dumb about so it’s rare to find info here, usually just sneering dismissals.
There's literally nothing new or interesting about memberships.
That is a new capability and allows for new things.
2. Literally no new thing has come out of this
3. Not to mention use cases where you wouldn't want to advertise your membership in a "gated community"
If you’re right you can look back smugly. If you’re wrong you’ll eventually figure it out (or not), won’t matter to me. I think you’re probably wrong.
Ah. The inevitable ad hominem argument.
> I think you’re probably wrong.
See, the difference between you and me lies in this "probably". You believe, with nothing to back your beliefs.
I look at reality (including the reality that I worked at a company that worked with memberships, ticketing, "gated community access" etc.). And I evaluate it for what it is, not for what I believe it is.
You’re right the difference is in the “probably”, but you’re wrong about what it means. I’m not so certain, but I at least recognize a new capability when it exists. Perhaps unfair for me to dismiss you as early as I did, but I just suspected your reply wasn’t in good faith.
Because reality doesn't care about your "probably"s.
Note how you immediately started calling this discussion "this type of discourse" and "you made up your mind" immediately after I simply listed facts.
> but I at least recognize a new capability when it exists
There's a difference between "recognizing new capabilities" and "wishful thinking". Unsurprisingly, when faced with facts crypto proponents immediately fall back to "you just don't understand", "you're not curious", "future will show you're wrong" etc.
Facts are:
- the absolute vast majority of memberships imply "a central/centralized authority that verifies membership". That's what "gated community" is
- Blockchains make even the simplest act of membership unnecessarily complicated, and makes more complex interactions nearly impossible.
- It's on the crypto shills to show that this tech offers anything new or interesting beyond "oh, this is new tech with wonderful new capabilities". So far, at closer inspection, the people claiming that have precisely zero knowledge on the topic and haven't thought about anything beyond the simplest use cases. Without fail, in 100% of cases this is the case.
- There's a very minor very fleeting possibility that globally verifiable membership in a group is useful, for large enough groups. However, looking at every single global group (largest being football fans, for example), there's literally zero indication that blockchains and NFTs can offer even a sliver of value, no matter how many "probably"s you throw in there. Masons managed to create a global secret society without blockchain, or computers. But do tell me how "I'm not curious" or "probably wrong".
If only wide-eyed crypto enthusiasts were curious themselves.
"Literally no new thing", "I look at reality" (implying I only make stuff up), "wishful thinking", "precisely zero knowledge", "Without fail in 100% of cases this is the case", etc. etc.
There are interesting conversations to have on this topic, but it's hard to have them with someone only willing to engage in this way. It requires some amount of willingness to be uncertain of what you currently believe and you're not. The more you reply, the more you confirm my initial suspicion of bad faith.
I'm not some blind crypto nut (at best I'm cautiously optimistic), but I find it hard to engage with the baseline anti-crypto hostility on HN which makes interesting conversation hard.
They are facts:
1. "Gated community is centralized by default" is a fact.
2. "Literally no new thing has come out of this" is a fact.
3. "Not to mention use cases where you wouldn't want to advertise your membership in a gated community" is a statment that has a fact in it: "use cases where you wouldn't want to advertise your membership in a gated community"
And in the comment you're replying to I've also stated some facts besides just opinion.
> There are interesting conversations to have on this topic, but it's hard to have them with someone only willing to engage in this way.
Please show me a single "interesting conversation" where anyone from the crypto community has anything to say beyond "there are new interesting new things you just have to believe in possibility that someday maybe this will happen".
> It requires some amount of willingness to be uncertain of what you currently believe and you're not.
I'm definitely uncertain about many things. Once again, there's a difference between being uncertain and blindly believing in snake oil. It's on the sellers of snake oil to prove their wild claims, not on me.
> The more you reply, the more you confirm my initial suspicion of bad faith.
Yup. More comments without zero substance on the "interesting new capabilites" and "interesting discussions".
> I'm not some blind crypto nut (at best I'm cautiously optimistic), but I find it hard to engage with the baseline anti-crypto hostility on HN which makes interesting conversation hard.
If there was any such interesting conversation, "not blind crypto nuts" would have already had it and had, for example, links to such discussions. In over a decade no such discussion has materialised for very obvious reasons.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30729538
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30630008
If I had to pick one general one, probably this: https://www.matthuang.com/bitcoin_for_the_open_minded_skepti...
This list is good: https://danromero.org/crypto-reading/
For your specifics:
1. I'm not sure I get this point - the ability to verify membership is decentralized and anyone can build things leveraging that. In the urbit case this works well for auth/ID. Ownership can also be transferred without a central authority (this is new).
2. This isn't true (Urbit IDs are another easy example), but decentralized state consensus is something you get from blockchain that didn't exist before. That's a new thing (and lots of other new things come from that idea).
3. Anonymity is a different feature sure, not a guarantee in any of this.
The reason I mostly avoided engaging on the specifics is because the rest of your comment and the way you engage suggests it won't be worthwhile.
> This list is good: https://danromero.org/crypto-reading/
This is not a good list.
Half of those are basically marketing links, including the ridiculous things like "NFTs make the internet ownable".
The other half is literally "why the hell anyone would want this?" like "Ethereum is a dark forest".
None of them address any of the issues in the crypto space. Literally none of them connect the dots between "it's a dark forest, and it will get worse" and the puppy-eyed "omg this is so good for creators and consumers".
But sure. This is what passes for "good discourse" in crypto circles.
The reason is simple: 99.9999999% of all discussions with crypto people follow the same pattern. After a decade of snake oil, you don't expect snake oil salesmen to engage in anything productive.
> Previous threads that go into details/have interesting conversation about specific capabilities so we don't have to rehash all of it here
These reiterate a few false dichotomies and false equivalences as in "Banks don't won’t protect you from wire fraud" === "same in crypto". Not the same.
There is some value in "having your money with you always", but fails to account for two things: the need for immediate and continuous internet access, and security (https://xkcd.com/538/)
> if I had to pick one general one, probably this:
which is void of any interesting discussion, doesn't address any problems, and reiterates that "bitcoin is a speculative asset"
> This list is good
I may skim through it, but I won't hold my breath.
> For your specifics
How it started: "The interesting bit is gated community access/easily verifiable ownership of membership"
How it's going: "we build this OS with blockchain built in, we verify identities there". Also: "nonymity is a different feature sure"
Authentication, authorisation and memberships have overlapping concerns but are not the same thing. And this is the thing I absolutely loathe in these "productive conversations":
- when faced with facts or reality, the narrative is always shifted. We were talking about memberships? "Well, let me talk about something else"
- complex issues are just brushed aside as being non-important, non-essential, trivial, or that they will be magically solved. Anonymity? "oh, it's a different feature set"
- literally no one is pausing to stop for even a second beyond the absolutely obvious use cases. Because the next set of use cases is merely immediately obvious.
In a world where everyone is tracking everyone anonymity is essential.
"Ownership can be transferred without central authority"? What recourse is there when that happens without the owner's consent (even people developing "smart contracts" currently fall prey to errors in their code logic)?
What happens when gated communities (which are centralised by default) ban you based on something completely unrelated because all of your membership info is easily available and verifiable (your church group outs you as gay, your teacher's union fires you because you're a furry, you can't find a job because of a felony offence)?
---
So, after more than a decade of snake oil, I will call snake oil for what it is until proven otherwise. No amount of "you just have to believe", erm, sorry, "you have to be curious" will convince me otherwise.
The nice thing about economic bets is it doesn't matter. You'll still be complaining about this no matter what happens in the future, just like people still argue EVs can't work. Your opinion on this just won't be important.
> "We were talking about memberships? "Well, let me talk about something else"
You made extreme claims about "nothing new, it's all snake oil" etc. - it's easier to point at stuff that more explicitly shows this is false before talking about more nuanced/uncertain cases. Everything else you write fails to compare stuff to the status quo, ignores the new capabilities, etc. This is what I meant about not being curious or arguing in-good-faith, you've made up your mind and you look at everything in pursuit of why you're already right - no surprise you always will find that you are.
The OS doesn't have blockchain built in btw - it only uses NFTs as IDs for access, nothing else in the OS is blockchain because blockchain is bad for stuff that doesn't require decentralized state. Farcaster uses a similar idea: https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2022/01/11/sufficient-decent... - naturally you didn't read any of this or think about it beyond how it proves your confirmation bias is correct.
There's a lot that would convince me, and you (andd all of crypto space) never tried.
> You're starting from a position of thinking you're unshakably correct, and constantly write wildly over-confident condescending things like "99.9999999% of all discussions with crypto people follow the same pattern"
Because they inveitably do, and this discussion is no different. There are nebulous claims, "just believe", shifting of discussions and "oh if only there was some discussion to be had".
You've had over a decade to have this discussion. Where is it?
> You'll still be complaining about this no matter what happens in the future, just like people still argue EVs can't work.
Ah yes. The inevtable comparison to something grandiose like EVs or the Internet. Try this for size: this is the next Juicero.
> it's easier to point at stuff that more explicitly shows this is false before talking about more nuanced/uncertain cases.
Once again, just because you dismiss these cases, doesn't mean they don't exist, that they are unimportant, or that they can be magically olved by your "new thing". To quote myself, "Blockchains make even the simplest act of membership unnecessarily complicated, and makes more complex interactions nearly impossible."
> Everything else you write fails to compare stuff to the status quo, ignores the new capabilities, etc.
I've literally written about status quo several times. From the fact that masons managed to create a global secret society before computers, and to requirements for anonymity, unnecessary tracking etc. Just because you don't recognize this, says much more about you than it says about me.
> This is what I meant about not being curious or arguing in-good-faith
Once again, I am curious, that's why I've come up with multiple examples off the top of my head. Let's see how your "curious" self responded to this: "a different feature", links to non-discussions and marketing materials, etc.
Goofd faith? You don't know the definition of the word.
> The OS doesn't have blockchain built in btw - it only uses NFTs as IDs for access
1. Semantics.
2. Requiring an always-on internet connection for user id verification... As I said, you didn't even stop to think for a single second whether this is good, or wanted, or even needed.
> naturally you didn't read any of this or think about it
Naturally I didn't read any random blog post on any random website. The list of things that you didn't read or think about is as long as the equator, and a lot of it is showing in this discussion.
"Decentralized social network"? Scuttlebutt is already doing that, doesn't require blockchain, and can work ithout the internet. Federation (e.g. XMPP) existed long before that. The rest is literally describing everything we've already had but since it has a magical word "blockchain" in it, I must be drooling over it, "be curious", believe etc. In that entire article blockchain literally only adds complexity while everything else like centralized servers stays the same.
Also funny how he mentions email in a world where running your own mail server is nearly impossible because GMail, which controls most of the email market, will just immediately mark your outgoing traffic as spam. See, I said world. Because this is reality and facts that you a) know nothing about, b) don't care about and c) wave away because "just believe in blockchain"
Literal pay to play: "Being an early user, token holder, or voter confers status on people. Social networks for blockchain users can make it easy for people to generate proofs of such activity." This is a good novel new thing now?
So, the entire article is vapid "social networks are bad, we're building something never before seen though we don't know yet, just believe, also it's pay to play" drivel on par with most of what comes out of crypto space.
So it’s not “gated” in the sense of excluding people - it’s more about the minimum cost required to eliminate spam. It solves the issue of ID at the OS level and works well for building networked apps on top of it.
I think Milady is seeing its current success for a few reasons, but I think one core reason why it’s doing so well is that Milady does not exist in a vacuum as some random abstract piece of animal art without being the nexus of several subcultures.
The Milady community in many ways existed prior to the existence of Milady: breakcore music, Serial Experiments Lain fans (and anime fans generally), technolibertarians and cryptoanarchists (Urbit people mainly), image edit artists, e-girls, occultists, internet catholics, fashion bugs, and more have all converged on Milady.
This is due in part to a mutual attraction to the projects supposed philosophical backing (primarily texts from Angelicism01's Substack, Hiroki Azuma’s Database Animals, Remillia Corporation’s members tweets/writings), but also I think its success can largely be attributed to the fact that putting on the mask of a Milady and posting insane shit on Twitter is just a lot of fun.
Having a Milady PFP is an instant ticket into a community of thousands of posters ranging from the schizo-hikikomori to family man VPs of industry. You don’t even need to own a Milady to participate, just change your PFP and you’re welcomed with open arms.
The project has lead to the coining/popularization of several neologisms: hypercitationalism, network spirituality, neo-orientalism, neo-chibi, auctioncore,et cetera. There is a hunger for an artistic/theoretical avant-garde, and Milady is delivering on the promise to innovate concepts and practices.
BAYC has a liquid market. It does not matter how many wash trades critics imagine there are - list your BAYC at the floor today, and it will sell within a couple of hours at most. Therefore, anyone not selling isn't doing so because they lack the liquidity. They are holding for other reasons.
How legitimate that trading is is not possible to know (e.g. people trading stuff back and forth to make it look like there is activity).
Person A gets NFT for 1 ETH. They sell it to person B for 1.2 ETH
Person B is able to spend 1.2 ETH because they traded 2 ETH worth of NFT to Persons C, D, E for 3.2 ETH total
Persons C, D, E are yesterdays Person A
etc.
People are "trading up" but only because the total number of trades are increasing. Some people are probably successful in hopping into this wave, converting a profit, and hopping out.. but they are only able to do that because the majority of activity is still running the engine. Eventually the engine will run out of fuel and a lot of people will be stuck with net negative accounts
I'm also 90% sure that most of the bigger players in the space are aware of this and are effectively competing to see who's left holding the bag
You can certainly see baseball cards (or stamps, Magics cards, whatever) as worthless. The difference being that when you buy a baseball card, (yes a reproducible good, so its value is anybody's guess), you're not buying a link to a baseball card powered by Ethereum, you're buying a tangible product at the very least.
To me the NFT is so intangible as a product that clearly its market is already set to die, the question is who will be holding the bag and who will make millions.
For stocks most people prefer owning an intangible version of it. Very few people want an actual certificate saying they own it.
The value of my baseball card might fluctuate but at least it's existence doesn't depend on the availability of servers outside my control.
and not a lot of other current uses for NFT*
NFT's themselves are actually a really neat piece of technology imo. I can imagine some uses for them. My imagination hasn't stumbled onto how those uses produce appreciating assets, though.
I would be more inclined to call it a scam if the technology was a failure or the purported scarcity of the asset being sold was being misrepresented. Neither of those are true. Instead, what is being traded are extremely scarce assets for which the demand is unimaginably overestimated. In 10 years will anybody actually care that there's a signed entry in a particular blockchain saying that this asset belongs to you? Probably not. I think if technologies like video games hook into a blockchain and let the owners of an NFT artwork for example use it as a character skin or put it up in their virtual house as a painting, maybe they'll have some value amongst people...but the demand is still probably extremely overrated. I'm guessing the value of something like that would be more on the order of <$100.
TL;DR I don't think scam is the right word. I don't think Beanie Babies or IPOs are scams just because people severely overestimated the future demand for the thing that they're buying.
That's just stupidity on the part of the buyer IMO, not really a scam.
An NFT is more akin to a baseball card - it’s value might go up, but that would just be because someone wants to buy it. It’s not producing any income on its own and the owner is no right to recoup the money they paid for it.
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
I'm sure there are plenty of Beanie Babies (and other Collectibles) that are nearly worthless compared to what someone payed for them previously.
Note: I'm not for or against NFTs. I'm just trying to point out the dynamics of the Collectibles market.
A famous conceptual artist died. People going through his apartment found things in his closet that were maybe lost works, maybe junk he collected.
It's funny to think about but the difference of interpretation amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars. One of the things you learn from that book is that if a famous art collector pays a lot of money for something found in that closet it will continue to be valuable and maybe end up in museum. If they don't, it's trash and never meant to be a work of art.
Depends on whether or not you set the thing on fire. But in the case of a tweet, that's rather difficult. Of course the literal original tweet might long ago have hit the bit bucket, scrubbed off an old original server that was dumpstered long ago, and now even the "real" one that showed on twitter was still just a copy.
Not that an NFT with an abstract pointer to the dumpstered server would be any more meaningful.
Well, the Beanie Baby craze always struck me as ridiculous too. So I guess the story is that someone famous is related to an event that many people consider ridiculous.
At least you physically own and display them. NFTs usually don't even represent ownership of what they're attached to. People are trading baseball cars as though they're actually the player.
Thinking of it in the terms of a long term financial instrument you can always sell in the second hand market or purchase as an investment in the second hand market may work, but it is a gamble and seems more and more likely to leave you disappointed in the long term.
But neither would encompass any kind of "ownership".
Are any of them even original? It's possible that the first bits & bytes on a server that hosted that tweet are long gone, tossed out after twitter scaled beyond its humble beginnings. The original could be a slagged hard drive, a cooled molten lump of metal & silicon. Actually, that would be much more interesting to own than the NFT.
Also it would be funny if there was a (very highly unlikely) hash collision between two different valuable NFTs.
I mean, clearly hashing wouldn't seem to apply there. But it still leaves the question of whether there's a substantial difference between a traditional database entry. I may be overlooking something because I don't see the problem solved by NFTs. I see the use for them as part of an artistic statement, but not a general use function.
The tweet is publicly available so there is no exclusivity. Anyone can look far enough & find it. The second being ownership. The tweet was always time stamped & in Jack Dorsey's name. Buying it as NFT will not really change its attribute. Then again, the copyright law also is contradictory to NFT ownership. It was written by Jack Dorsey, so he automatically has its copyright - unless he signs it away as a legal document (just as academics do for their journal papers. Even then, it doesn't change authorship). AFAICT, Jack Dorsey hasn't & a blockchain purchase doesn't really legally transfer copyright.
I am still confused how this will be a NFT. If there is a better explanation, I am glad to learn more about it.
Edit: It seems my understanding was not only nascent but incomplete. It makes more sense with the extra details.
When you buy an NFT you purchase a receipt for an entry in a Blockchain that is validated by some distributed code. That receipt may reference a URL, or any other arbitrary text, within some limits. Anything beyond that isn't assured, you'll have to check the license that's conveyed.
NFTs aren’t contracts for the rights, so this is as real an NFT as any other. An NFT is essentially a text file, that only one person can prove they own via the blockchain, where the file has a URL written inside. Nothing more, nothing less.
This is the most succinct explanation I have across. Thank you. Now, this amazes me more that people are willing to invest & trade on text files with some URL in a Blockchain. The naive me now thinks this is bonkers. No wonder so many people are critical of its worth.
How does one view list(s) of NFTs?
A better question is "why" anyone would want to look at lists of URLs pointing to things that someone is pretending that they own by having an entry of their ownership in some arbitrary public ledger.
Note that for space reasons, NFTs do not generally "contain" their payload. The actual contents of the blockchain is just a URL of the screenshot. The URL points to a centralized server, and the screenshot is publicly accessible.
But yes, the Tweet itself remains under Twitter's purview, i.e. centralized. An NFT can only contain authority or ownership recognized in the context of the blockchain itself.
it is also possible to change the contents of what the URL points to without changing what the NFT is.
Almost all NFT's are an index. No one seems to understand that they are not owning a digital item, they are owning a reference address. Nothing about the NFT substantiates the contents of the address. that is OpenSea in a nutshell
However, some NFT's like the bored apes use a multi-variable reference and then those variables act as parameters on an open-source protocol for generating the NFT. In other words, the NFT is not a URL, but a key-value dictionary like {eyes:blue, hair:brown, hat:cap, hatcolor:blue} (i dont know off hand the actual attributes used for bored apes).
This second method is closer to what people think NFT's are in the first place, and is leagues better than the URL to a centralized server but it is still ultimately an index of some kind that relies on being substantiated by something not on the block chain.
I don’t think exclusivity applies to much art — art is often photographed or video recorded for others to see. It’s easy to find photos of the Mona Lisa, and it’s even feasible to get quite perfect recreations on a canvas. But there’s only one original.
That's all there is to it.
Someone set up a server which allowed people to upload images and "claim property", then they put some high-level fake purchases, and played on a lot of guys' gullygreedity. If the server is gone tomorrow, then the blockchain will "remember" that there was something there, but when you try to see it you will just get a 404.
This is true of all NFT's. The data is (should) be on the public blockchain.
Usually when you sell something, there are a bunch of legal rights that go along with the sale. What exactly did this guy buy? The right to look at the tweet? The right to restrict others from looking at it? The copyright? Any advertising dollars which flow because of that tweet? What?
He bought the bragging rights to say "that URL of that image of that tweet, if you look at this particular public ledger, you'll see that the ledger says that I own it!"
If the NFT craze has shown anything, it's that too many people don't have any understanding of the law. They don't seem to know what "own a thing" means - neither the "own" part or the "thing" part...
By the way, the token could contain any sort of short information, the address to a C++ pointer in the memory of my computer for instance.
So what? If Jack Dorsey took a dump, preserved in resin and sold it as an abstract representation of his first tweet, how would that be different, more genuine or less genuine than this NFT?
The reason blockchain works for cryptocurrencies and NFTs (that is the token itself, not the art that the token claims to represent) is because the entire source of truth is on the blockchain.
When it comes to physical objects, the source of truth is now split between the physical world and the blockchain. If your token must represent a physical object then you need some way for the real-world state and the blockchain state to always be kept in sync. That is impossible. The best approximation is to rely on a trusted authority for this, but then you don't need a blockchain anymore and can just have that trusted party maintain its own database.
I suspect we'll discover it was all wash trades and money laundering in short order.
Here's what I predict we'll find out:
* Some high-value traditional art sales are "wash trades and money laundering."
* Nearly all high-value NFT sales are "wash trades and money laundering."
There's an important different between some and nearly all, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader to work out.
I'm sure NFTs have a place in today's art market, but it won't totally replace everything, so no, don't invest all your money on somebody's auto-generated monkey.
At least it's a tax writeoff for the person selling it, I guess?
https://cointelegraph.com/news/chainalysis-report-finds-most...
Now this on the other hand, you won't really want to set it as your profile picture and hanging it up as digital art looks dumb. No one is buying it because they like the NFT, they buy it because they think it will go up in value.
Is it really, though? Maybe the word you're looking for is striking or distinctive. Possibly-- competent. But pleasant is not the first word that comes to mind.
BAYC had first-mover advantage, there isn't anything particular about them that wasn't done better by a project that came later. That they are uniquely fugly made them stand out as a novelty.
I think a more likely reason for their success is that they're an easily recognizable series that's known to be expensive; people buy them for the clout. NFTs are fundamentally about clout, and one-off NFTs just don't have the same clout value when used as a Twitter profile or whatever, regardless of the art quality.
Subjective of course, but couldn't disagree more. These things are hideous and frankly epitomize, to me, that hype and not artistic value is driving value here
Respectfully disagree.
> you can set it as your profile picture
You can do that even without buying the NFT.
Let's look at some facts.
The _first_ *Offer* made on this NFT was $280
The current top bid for this $29,000
It is not sold, so to say that its value has actually dropped is just silly.
If you imagine this in the context of a bid/offer market, this is like when market opens and a price hasn't been established because there wasn't a taker yet.
I think I found the Open Seas page (lots of scam looking clones of the page, so I'm not sure this is the real one), but unfortunately the interface doesn't give much information on what activities around the NFT have occurred. At least to a lay person like myself.
https://opensea.io/assets/matic/0x28009881f0ffe85c90725b8b02...
The difference is a 99% drop in value, or a 99.99% drop in value. I don't follow the NFT scene closely, so apologies if I'm wrong here.
Forbes article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ronshevlin/2022/04/14/jack-dors...
If you look at the bottom of that page [1], you'll see the events recorded by opensea. Also enable "Listing" in the filter. You'll see that there is a transfer 13 days ago and then it is listed. This is when the auction begins. Since then there was no sale, only bids. You can add the "Bids" filter as well to verify the timeline.
[1] https://opensea.io/assets/matic/0x28009881f0ffe85c90725b8b02...
at the very least it shows how illiquid the market is
If he was doing this to save on taxes, he would have taken a paper loss via depreciation -- meaning, not actually selling it, just changing the book value of it -- with the intent of paying capital gains tax at some future date (well, more likely, borrowing against its "true" value indefinitely).
Anyone buying an NFT for $2.9M is almost certainly doing so as a business.
I've seen a lot of people give actual death threats and are angry whenever NFTs are brought up. It find it kind of baffling how this sentiment came to be so quickly. What happened?
This never happens outside of crypto.
/s
That's still $280 too high.
I hope that eventually more people will look beyond that and a little deeper into the potentials here. Especially for anyone that is dissatisfied with the status quo of capitalism, which seems to be the majority of people I meet? It's frustrating to watch peers fall victim to knee-jerk outrage and miss the forest for the trees. If you wanted a way to fight back, you could start by not hitting yourself in the face. Monopolies do not benefit from decentralization.
Most forms of CC should only be used as a transactional currency to exchange value, never to store it, because of the inherent lack of stable or intrinsic value in CCs.
NFTs are basically the programming equivalent of pointers or references to things, not actual things. They're meaningless when no one else values them and there's no marketplace for them.
You can make money by selling shovels in a goldrush, but you have to know when to exit before peak hype.
[1] https://cryptobriefing.com/moonbirds-set-to-bring-in-66m-as-...
10,000 moonbirds * 2.5 ETH * $3,000
(EDIT: Saw the post; that's only PROOF and only half of them. There's 10,000 total and all will be minted for 2.5ETH)
That article is dated December 21, 2021, so this was about 4 months ago.
But up until today;
Ethereum (ico: $0.3, now: $2912)
Basic Attention Token (ico: ~$0.03, now: $0.74)
Avalanche (ico: $0.5, now: $74.28)
Fantom (ico: ~$0.04, now: $1.09)
Terra (ico: $0.8, now: $84.89)
Cosmos (ico: $0.10, now: $23.27)
Just because a lot of the ICOs were dogshit doesn't mean that all of them were