The Merge
avc.com
avc.com
I don't think so. At best, we can say that the attack surface will have changed. How it has changed will unfold. But to claim that POS is "more resistant to attack" is complete rubbish and a sign the author is clueless about the technological ramifications.
It's kind of like saying that traveling 2 miles below the ocean's surface by submarine is safer than traveling by car because you can't get hit by a drunk driver.
PoW and PoS both allow a single party to unilaterally control the network when they're working exactly as intended — just under conditions that are impractical in major networks. That impracticality can be measured in economic terms — as a dollars-and-cents cost to acquire the assets necessary to take control.
It's harder to buy out 51% of validation stake of a network of size N, than it is to buy the GPUs and the electricity to power them to do 51% of the mining for a network of size N. GPUs are technically unbounded — you can just build your own fabs, if you really care — and so the marginal cost of acquiring another GPU+electricity is constant. But stake is a pie; the marginal cost of acquiring more of it increases as less of it remains available on the market. (And many people will just never give theirs up, for ideological reasons.) Thus, it's harder to Sybil attack PoS than PoW.
It's also not really a scenario worth considering.
In order to cooperate, the miners/validators need to have full alignment on their goals. Which is very unlikely for Sybil attacks, which almost always destroy systemic economic value — including the value held by the attackers. You might be able to find e.g. a government who wants to do a Sybil attack to accomplish goal X, and are willing to burn down $N billion dollars of their own staked assets to do so; but can you find a bunch of other governments or large corporations who also want to accomplish that same goal X more than they want their own stake-value? And who can be trusted to coordinate and not leak the plan?
A Sybil attack is basically like a bank heist where the attacker(s) have to pull up to the bank in their own personal aircraft carriers (destroying said aircraft carriers in the process, from the hull damage of sliding along several city streets), without anyone realizing they're coming. You can maybe theoretically do it as one entity with full internal goal-alignment. It's much harder to do it as multiple entities.
> 1.4. Governance and Voting. For certain Digital Assets, the underlying protocols offer stakers the ability to vote on matters related to the governance of protocol-level issues. Coinbase may or may not support voting for such assets, and may cease supporting voting at any time in its discretion. Coinbase will comply with your instruction to vote your Supported Digital Assets to the extent Coinbase or its affiliate supports voting for such Supported Digital Assets. In certain cases, Coinbase may vote on your behalf where Coinbase or the applicable protocol does not support delegated voting; in those instances, Coinbase will vote with the protocol’s recommendation.
But what about jurisdictions that compel them to vote in certain ways?
From the Coinbase page on Eth2 staking (https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/trading-and-funding/co...):
> To be eligible to stake ETH, you must: [...] Live in a jurisdiction eligible for ETH staking.
> Which regions are eligible for ETH staking? [...] United States (excluding Hawaii & New York)
In other words: they're just not going to offer the service in any place that compels them to vote a certain way.
I presume most delegatable validators have chosen a similar option: avoiding the problem entirely by not taking anyone's money if they're from those jurisdictions. Just as most ICOs in 2017, when the US didn't have regulatory clarity on crypto being a security or not, just avoided the problem entirely by preventing (direct) sales to US-market investors.
You see "hardness of Sybil attack", I see "rule of unelected comittee".
The very fact that GPUs are not pie, that GPUs are minted, gives an opportunity for a change if things do not go well for actual majority of users-as-persons.
And PoW, more GPUs is a quality bound to physical mechanics. In order to build more GPUs, you need more fabs capable of doing so. You need a more educated populace capable of building and improving GPUs. You also need better energy generation to not destroy the planet and provide energy for an increasingly more energy hungry society. This leads to improvements via physical conditions of survival, resulting in better macrosocial outcomes.
PoS says “you have money so you make money for no reason and you get resource allocation privileges absent binding to physical properties”. In other words, one receives all benefit without any effort. Yet effort is implicit. Which means it become abstracted and convoluted, allowing one to offset effort to no-stakers.
In other words, decision making rights lacking any consequence. Also known as a caste system. Also freezing the castes making advancement highly improbable, and deeply / forever embedding dynasty algorithmically.
There then exists no forces within the body of the mechanism to improve compute capacity nor energy gen efficiency. This, taken to the limit, is a highly undesirable outcome for advancement to the next stage of existence. In fact, it sets us back by a potentially significant margin.
The result is nothing short of digital aristocracy.
Sure, in the short term it will be a secure global compute that can operate more “efficiently” for some time. But look around you. Look at what happens when you let people make decisions without earning it / understanding the full impact of their decisions.
> Disclosure: My family and USV have large holdings in ETH and other crypto assets and may continue to add to them in the coming weeks, months, and years.
Update: My point is simply that if “most knowledgeable people in the space probably have large holdings” as was claimed, this is arguably an indictment of the technology under discussion here. Useful technologies tend to have enthusiasts with no direct financial stake in their success. The fact that people happen to invest in tech companies and do well, or that many have indirect financial incentives to embrace tech, is orthogonal to my point. It is weird if a given tech is entirely or largely carried by people directly invested in it. It raises questions of whether it is generally useful. People who want Fred to front load his disclaimer are probably thinking by along these lines.
In your case one could argue that if you saw so much future value in the Mac/Apple ecosystem you missed out significantly by not purchasing Apple stock. Depending on when you made your observation, even a modest investment would have had a significant return over the past 20 years.
I actually use the Amazon example when people tell me how worried they are about Amazon becoming all almighty and taking over all commerce - that if they actually believe that then they should probably buy Amazon stock and use the profits to do something to counter whatever negative effect they perceive.
As a former software engineer and founder now VC what I personally realized is I could have the greatest impact on the industry from leveraging capital around my own industry thesis rather than continue to build it myself. It's all a layer cake.
For me, the incentive was to learn about the tech for the sake of the tech. I actually wasn’t a believer in cryptocurrency as a long term useful concept. I was building into spaces that would benefit from immutability and transparency where accountability was low (high risk businesses and government transparency)
Really, it is something independent of the tech that allowed me to turn a corner on cryptocurrency. I accepted that large groups of believers can “create” value based on nothing but their shared willingness to continue to believe.
Bitcoin and Ethereum have such a critical mass of believers IMO. I wasn’t sure that the tech stack would live up to the hype but I was no longer worried that the price would drop to zero.
And what does 'large holdings' even mean anyway? Large to Fred what's large to Fred?
When the mining rewards peter out, big ASIC farm miners leave the network, the mining difficulty goes down, and so does the energy and hardware investment required to mine a single block. But at the same time, smaller time miner can enter the network and mine with less powerful hardware.
If all miners were to quit tomorrow, the difficulty would go down so much that you could mine a block, in 10 minutes, with a Raspberry Pi Zero.
edit: Blacklisting UTXOs is entirely possible as I mentioned, and as I said, it should be achievable by soft fork. This would be the proof of work equivalent of slashing. I have a hard time believing Vitalik doesn’t know this. Is he being dishonest? I don’t know.
You can target the UXTO so that their value in crypto starts back at zero. But because they still have the mining hardware, they still control 51% of the hash power that secures the network. They can just mine from a different address and it won’t be clear who to target until they once again begin to produce majority blocks on the chain. This way they can continually attack the chain and render it useless.
When you burn a PoW miner’s crypto addresses, you aren’t burning their capital and stake, because it’s in the form of mining hardware, not tokens. When you burn a PoS staker’s crypto, you are burning their capital and stake which is in the form of tokens.
Many meanings of "attack". A year ago China attacked the miners and they mostly left China. A nation attacking the btc network is real, and the miners physically moved.
It is easier to move a PoS validator, and harder to locate the validator in the first place.
The argument that it is easier to move a validator than a miner is a very surface level argument, honestly. The incentives of mining ensure that miners will spread to every corner of the world, in every jurisdiction, in search of cheap electricity.
Meanwhile, proof of stake validation has no such incentive. It is financialized and it even has a guaranteed yield component. Since validators are financial and not industrial like miners, they will be incentivized to locate near other financial centers, like New York and London, and they will certainly comply with sanctions and other financial practices.
I'd say it's much easier to single out PoS validators. Especially when they are congregating under unified capital and they are US based. Also, argument could be made that they are responsible for the transactions that they are making. The same can be hard to argue for Bitcoin, since anyone with a bit of a hashrate could generate a block and it's permission-less to contribute to the hashrate (and also anonymous)
Presumably the author believes a smaller proportion of Ether will be regularly traded than on the PoW system, but will the total staked (i.e. held) amount be sufficient to impact prices significantly? Also, why would we expect stakers to not take their profits on a regular basis?
What’s the meaning (and reasoning behind) the following statement:
> Ethereum will move from a system that has roughly $20mm a day of structural outflows to a system that has roughly a half a million dollars a day of structural inflows.
Currently it's impossible to unstake so the existing stakers are self-selected hodlers. Longer term some stakers will hodl and some will take profits.
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2022/08/20/proof-of-sta...
It created quite a bit of drama when exchanges refused to give customers the respective forked coins.
You can't realistically expect exchanges to trade all possible fork coins.
To be clear, that's the theory, reality is a little more complicated. This happened earlier with ETH and ETC, as well as BTC and a whole bunch of forks, and in practice there was always a bit of "value" created from thin air, at least temporarily, with original + fork > original before fork.
It's estimated that ~50% of staked value is held by US companies. These companies are going to have to make an impossible choice. Either:
1. Sign transactions coming from the sanctioned addresses, inviting the wrath of OFAC.
or:
2. Refuse to sign these transactions.
2a. If between 33% and 66% of the network refuses, the network will penalize dissenters by slashing their staked coins, until they no longer have a 33% stake. Billions of dollars of customer funds could be lost.
2b. If > 67% of the network refuses, transactions can be successfully censored. Now we no longer have decentralized ETH, we have "USA coin", where the government can censor anyone with a quick email to Brian Armstrong.
I don't see a way out. It doesn't look like the network is actually decentralized enough to handle a nation-state attack. This was not an issue with the old proof of work scheme. I'll be amazed if the merge is not delayed while they work on a solution to this.
EDIT: If Coinbase does lose that money, you could say the network is operating as designed in the presence of a hostile validator. But a LOT of people are not going to be happy with the result.
Yannis Varoufakis, London, circa 2017
Either crypto follows the law or it gets banned. IMO this was inevitable.
I personally believe in apolitical decentralized money winning against fiat which is governed on the whims of central bankers and crony capitalism. Every system where technology brings fairness, power to all, and hard rules wins. This will not be an exception. It is the separation of money and state, not very dissimilar from church and state, monarchy and nationhood etc.
The people's interest imo is in fairness to all not asset owners who aren't as affected by money printing etc
The law isn't sacrosanct, but of course it needs to be followed. It is malleable and comes from lawmakers who may or may not represent the interest of the people, unwittingly or otherwise
From the perspective of world history, this is a BFD. The monetary system of the past 80 years has been controlled by the ruling class of a ~150-300M person nation. The crypto economy imposes uniform rules on ~3B people, which is an order of magnitude greater complexity, and should see further specialization and gains from trade for those that participate in it.
The endings of proper monarchies weren't always simple and nice events - if that is the magnitude of change you have in mind.
Non Fiat money has been the norm pre unpegged Fiat. It's been around for 2-3k years at least, whereas unpegged Fiat is 50 years old. I'm surprised we find the fall of Fiat as hard to imagine:)
I know from the US perspective often legal tender concepts are brought into the definition of fiat but the legal tender concept doesn't quite exist in the same way in a lot of other countries.
1) impossible to confiscate
2) fixed supply and issuance rate - can't just print it away when the fed wants
3) instant permissionless transfer so the government can't interject. If you think they can be trusted, might want to read about executive order 6102
4) not backed by another asset eg gold (say). This is great because gold is extremely hard to transfer physically and easy to confiscate. Read about how Nixon refused to allow dollar convertibility for gold for foreign nations which was the condition for Bretton woods agreement ie where all nations agreed to use dollar as a global reserve freely exchangeable for gold. Also read about how FDR outlawed private ownership of gold when the US had printed more money than their gold reserves and needed to fix their books.
Decentralized community decree is awesome. You don't have a central actor making rules that support themselves. Christine Lagarde has no way to get the euro out of the deficit hole. See this snippet from an interview: https://youtu.be/p-X-mIuDYFw. In a balanced system, the debt would be loaned from and owed to a market participant who cares about their money being returned, not this bizarre broken system where central banks print and then owe to themselves
This is true and always and trumps whatever your software says is meaningless if there is any conflict ("you and what army" is a very valid question.
Now, the law (a court) can of course allow your software and might even enforce a contract bases on your software
In good systems the governed people have a say in how those laws are created. In Bad ones it's literally whatever one person mutters with a mouth full of breakfast cereals and headaches.
Censorship of transactions because of OFAC is already happening in PoW mining.
https://twitter.com/takenstheorem/status/1560690035955011585...
In PoS majority of validators has to actively approve a block containing "illegal" transactions, leading to permanent censorship.
The exact interpretation of validation vs mining responsibility in face of law and passive vs active is fuzzy , but it leaves miners is better legal position.
I do agree this is probably the most concerning thing that Tornado Cash sanctions have shown us. Still don’t think the energy cost of PoW is worth it, and would rather see PBS and crList solve this problem.
PoS is tyranny of the majority: You cannot take your business elsewhere.
It's an extremely nuanced topic, and it was extensively discussed in the last core-developer call on Thursday. Every single operator has been warned that going against the fork-choice rules could, and ultimately will, result in social mitigations against spec-deviating behavior.
This could be set of socially executed slashings of validators that don't respect the fork-choice rules, or an honest-minority executed hard-fork that effectively causes misbehaving validators to bleed until they start respecting the protocol's rules.
I could be wrong on multiple counts, especially regarding re-orgs, but this is how I've understood the issue.
In POW there are only block producers, and producing a block requires actively choosing transactions and transaction ordering.
Ethereum POS includes an additional attestation step where validators confirm that they have seen blocks without exercising any control over the contents of those blocks.
But this is exactly what PoW miners do when they extend the chain: every block is a vote for all previous blocks in the chain.
For example, if a US-based CEX that operates in New York has a slashing event, that brings regulatory consequences from NYDFS, regardless of the reason for the slashing.
Similar with PoW. For both PoW and PoS, the proper response is to socially coordinate forking out the censoring block producer majority (like with the Bitcoin UASF that was threatened over much less egregious miner misbehavior). PoS improves on PoW here in two ways:
1. Non-censoring PoS block producers can have a tiny meatspace presence compared to PoW mining operations, which makes it easier to physically evade pro-censorship forces
2. It's more effective to coordinate a direct confiscation of the censoring PoS block producers' on-chain capital investment, compared to making miners' equipment partially obsolete by coordinating an ad-hoc redesign of the PoW algorithm
https://nitter.net/dystopiabreaker/status/156071598642414796...
It's only when the majority is colluding to reorg the chain that the transaction can be censored.
I'm assuming (like in the last tweets of the linked thread) that pro-censorship forces who can arrange for the supermajority in PoS to censor transactions can also arrange for the majority in PoW to not build on any uncensored head of the chain, i.e. they can mandate "always reorg."
Or how wearing a UASF baseball cap worked as part of a social coordination movement against power-tripping miners.
> It should only be a bootstrapping mechanism towards trustless behaviors, not the mechanism to cancel each other on-chain.
Yes
What you call a "self-hosted bitcoin wallet" is just knowing some combination of bits that happens to be the private key that gives you the ability to sign transactions for some Bitcoin. How do you make it illegal to know something? What if I tell you my private key, does that mean you are then suddenly violating payments laws? What if you stumble upon it by accident?
Technically any string of 32 bytes is a valid private key that can hold Bitcoin. There just might not be any Bitcoin in the address associated with it at this time. What if I "know" a random string of 32 bytes, am I then suddenly in violation of laws when someone randomly deposits Bitcoin to the corresponding address?
The legal difficulty is that the action of having or holding Bitcoin (or mostly any cryptocurrency) is something that has no physical representation and is purely information based.
Mining or making transactions is a different story altogether. These require, amongst other things, that you send specific digital information across the internet which is certainly something that can be made illegal.
Databases encourage centralisation of power to developer/owners, with aggressive bent towards monopoly. Blockchain encouraged opennesss and portability. It’s simply a better social contract.
- make money off digital art in a global permissionless market (didn’t exist before) - easily charge royalties in perpetuity for resale of their art
Some aspects of DeFi - the ones that were properly audited and whose function is not a ponzi derivative - work absolutely fine. Compound, AAVE, Uniswap, Curve Finance.
Can they really? The art itself is not recorded on any blockchain. Just the link and/or hash can be stored there because of costs. Both can change without noticeably modifying the art. Thus a working legal system is still required and blockchain does not provide any meaningful benefit over a standard contract.
The art being recorded on a blockchain or not doesn’t matter - what you’re selling in an NFT is a signature not the art. An NFT is a decoupling of the art and the signature, because digital art is infinitely reproducible. The NFT introduces scarcity - but only for an authentic signature (which can’t be faked) not the digital art itself.
And want you’re saying is not necessarily true - my understanding is that some markets do place the art on IPFS, but I’d have to look into it’s exact working to know for sure.
But I believe for the old Hic et Nunc that was the case.
In this particular case - it is better than a standard contract because the previous method of authenticating work is hugely expensive for the artist and has immense gatekeeping. Minting an NFT takes 30 seconds. Getting you work into an art gallery takes months if not years of battling and requires other people to make the decision whether they want your art in their sales space or not. In crypto you can just do it yourself and figure out your own personal authentication method (usually twitter).
There’s a reason NFTs are easy and gallery placements are hard: one has value
As you said NFT is just a signature so how do the NFTs solve the problems of authenticating art?
https://fnftf.io/?results=982ce32629ebcbd7dce30baf2f84adafb5...
So there you have it - dozens of copies of the same art across the same chain and other chains plus dozens of other low-quality "remixes" that don't qualify as an original work. Nothing in the space (other than solutions like mine) do anything to authenticate the content in any form or fashion.
In fact, on FNFTF we make a pretty big deal of searches that only return one result (original and unique content) because it doesn't happen very often:
https://fnftf.io/?results=81cd744ab237b0eb68fbe1702c82db9cdf...
Shameless plug I suppose but there isn't anything else publicly available that shows just how bad and widespread this issue is.
The problem of authenticating art before this, for a digital artist, was that you HAD to have a gallery do it with you in order for it to work. No one trusted anyone, not even the artist, to say that there would only be "10 copies" of that digital artwork, since they couldn't do any follow through if the artist decided to say there were ten copies but sold 10 000. This was an issue with digital art that was previously only solved by the reputation of X art gallery - the art gallery would say - "we certified only 10 copies, and our reputation as a gallery protects this artwork from being certified again".
With NFTs you just do it. The problem was gatekeeping, the need for an "authority" to certify your signatures on digital art, and the process involved. NFTs are a click of a button and a few dollars to mint.
Does that answer your question?
> With NFTs you just do it.
No, you can't. Anybody can go right now and mint their own series of BAYC or any artwork they want. The blockchain will allow it. It won't even care if you mint it against the exact same data, because as far as I know nothing in the blockchain cares that there's more than one NFT pointing to the same URL, or pointing to an URL that resolves to content bit-by-bit identical to something somebody else already minted.
The only guarantee you can have is an extremely weak one, in the form of "this precise collection, with this precise unique ID is set in stone". That's not going to stop anybody from creating another one 5 minutes later.
You can create your own BAYC, scammers do it all the time but they aren’t too successful because it’s trivial to see it came from an unknown wallet.
Sure, you could infringe on the copyright of a non-crypto artist and pretend to be the artist in an NFT marketplace, but then it becomes a normal copyright claim
NFTs don’t replace the legal system, they simply remove the need for the artist to be trusted by a third party (an art gallery, etc) before they can authenticate their own work to a buyer.
Note that the parent seems to be arguing something in the system removes the need to trust in the artist, that it stops the artist from creating more items than they promised. But how? Nothing stops the artist from creating a second wallet, or a second collection.
> NFTs don’t replace the legal system, they simply remove the need for the artist to be trusted by a third party (an art gallery, etc) before they can authenticate their own work to a buyer.
I don't see how. How do I know that a given wallet ID is connected to the right person? OpenSea or whoever just takes the place of the gallery, and is effectively in charge of answering takedown requests.
However, it also makes detecting counterfeits trivial. So trivial that the consumer can detect it using their own devices and freely available wallet software. No need for special skills or trust anchors like appraisers (other than the public blockchain and public standards).
This isn’t a complete solution for scams because most people don’t realize how trivial it is to check before they buy. I believe the remaining problems are in usability and education problem. The tech does lower the barrier to achieving a safer ecosystem.
We could have a healthy debate over whether the tech solved the hard side or the easy side of the problem.
Only so long that the authentic source is present. You can detect the authentic BAYC because BAYC has a large presence and everyone knows their wallet ID.
Now let's say I take a photo, and you find a NFT for it on OpenSea. How do you know if it's authentic?
If you do, then I can trivially verify that you are the minter.
Crucially, the person that has the incentive to mint (the artist) also has all they need to establish the provenance of the photo.
No 3rd parties, no specialized tools/skills.
As a buyer I have to have some compulsion to buy. If that is not “I want to buy an authentic piece tied to an artist” NFTs probably aren’t for you.
With NFTs I can start at either the artist or the piece and trivially connect to the other.
NFTs don’t solve for discovery.
Nor do they provide a root of trust for artist identity. At best they can provide information to some sort of identity system but NFTs by themselves are not a complete solution for that.
As an artist who wants to sell an NFT, the onus is on you to broadcast your presence/address so that your buyers can check provenance. Post it on your Instagram maybe. It doesn’t have to be magical.
I don't mean that in a dismissive way, I actually mean why is authenticity important or even desirable when using a medium that allows for infinite copies at near-zero marginal cost?
It's just not the right medium for it. It would be like expecting to be able to digitally transfer a statue.
In short, people care about provenance. NFTs guarantee provenance for data, even if the process of "attaching" it to a jpg or whatever is a bit clunky. I don't understand why people care so much about provenance, but they do, and NFTs provide a partial solution.
No it doesn't. Your claim was that NFTs make authenticating art easier. What you wrote has nothing to do with art authentication.
Basically I can take some digital art made by somebody else and be the first to release an NFT of it. What now? How does an NFT help us here?
Doing that previously required an art gallery to certify the signature. That’s easier in NFTs.
curl https://match.tovera.com/api/v0/stats/nft/storageMethods
[ { "storage": "https", "ratio": "0.39163250000000000000", "counted_at": "2022-08-20T05:55:01.164Z" }, { "storage": "ipfs", "ratio": "0.58654950000000000000", "counted_at": "2022-08-20T05:55:01.164Z" }, { "storage": "unknown", "ratio": "0.00090250000000000000", "counted_at": "2022-08-20T05:55:01.164Z" }, { "storage": "chain", "ratio": "0.01584000000000000000", "counted_at": "2022-08-20T05:55:01.164Z" }, { "storage": "http", "ratio": "0.00507550000000000000", "counted_at": "2022-08-20T05:55:01.164Z" } ]
2% on chain (almost all SVGs), 60% on IPFS, and 40% on HTTPS (total above 100% because I rounded).
Maybe there's some legitimate business happening in the art NFT space, but if so, it's a drop in an ocean of fraud.
I'm hoping a technical solution appears soon for fraud. NFT fraud is no different from a person on the street doing a high quality print of someone else's artwork, and unlike that situation, a technical solution for NFT fraud is conceivable.
An argument that Beeple's huge sale was somehow not legitimate: https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beepl...
Hi. Artist here. I have yet to actually see any example of this occurring with a piece of NFT art. Do you have an example of an NFT that is actively collecting royalties for the artist via resale?
My company is one of the largest NFT companies. This is one of our projects. Millions of dollars in secondaries on OpenSea and our hosted marketplace at https://Nickelodeon.xyz/
We collect all royalties and remit payment to the rights holders which include all artists and creators with residuals on Rugrats, of which there are many. They get their check quarterly along with all the other payments (movies, tshirts, video games, etc.)
This isn’t exactly rocket science
So tell me, please, exactly how "blockchain" is bringing "decentralization" to the art field. I am all ears.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how all of this works and have a sneering, dismissive affect because this is something you don’t understand embraced by people who don’t care what you think.
FYI I am an author of this standard. It is widely supported across the ecosystem https://royaltyregistry.xyz/
My company doesn’t care where our NFTs travel or trade on. We get our royalty regardless.
So how is this an improvement over what we have right now? If the buyer and the seller may wish to do so, out of the goodness of their hearts, they can always send part of their sale price to the artist. So why are NFTs necessary in any way, if you cannot programmatically enforce it? (And you never can, the reason of which you already know: if I wish to do so I can make a transfer between my two wallets and a sale look exactly the same.)
At which point do these selective, and potentially intentional misleading claims about NFTs go from ignorant to fraudulent? Especially when you may stand to earn a lot by making people believe in your misleading claims?
https://hackernoon.com/enabling-nft-royalties-with-eip-2981
ERC721, 1155 & 2981 together act as a toolkit for the encoding of royalty administration.
For example, if an NFT collection owner only implemented one of Rarible’s royalty distribution schemes mentioned above, another marketplace that’s not aware of that interface can simply call the common registry’s getRoyaltyView function. It tries to query all known royalty interfaces on the token contract and translates any response to a commonly useable result.
Collection owners who haven’t put any royalty signaling scheme into their contract can deploy an extended “override” contract and register it with the common registry. This registration method will ensure that only collection owners (identified by the owner public member) can call it
The Rarible exchange contract supports all kinds of external royalty interfaces, among them two that Rarible defined themselves, being an early player in the NFT space:
For example, if an NFT collection owner only implemented one of Rarible’s royalty distribution schemes mentioned above, another marketplace that’s not aware of that interface can simply call the common registry’s getRoyaltyView function. It tries to query all known royalty interfaces on the token contract and translates any response to a commonly useable result.
Collection owners who haven’t put any royalty signaling scheme into their contract can deploy an extended “override” contract and register it with the common registry. This registration method will ensure that only collection owners (identified by the owner public member) can call it
```function royaltyInfo(uint256 _tokenId, uint256 _salePrice) external view returns (address receiver, uint256 royaltyAmount);```
The interface also completely works off-chain, so marketplaces that trade assets on alternative infrastructure can still query the creator fee without knowing anything else besides the interface signature of the EIP-2981 method.
PaymentSplitters: Sending NFT Royalties To More Than One Receiver.
Open Zeppelin's PaymentSplitter primitive allows setting up individual split contracts that keep funds safe until their payees claim them, and their receive function requires the bare minimum of gas to run. NFT collection builders can create an inline PaymentSplitter containing the wanted list of beneficiaries and their respective share amounts and let their EIP-2981 implementation yield the address of that split contract.
The artist got 0.21 ETH in the transaction despite not actually having a direct role in the sale.
Here is that sale transaction https://etherscan.io/tx/0xcd157ff73439e20903a8573ef2a280571a...
Here is the artist’s wallet https://etherscan.io/address/0x4de5ae339b406a8cd5037e9138a62...
I just picked a random entry, I don’t know this piece or artist. There are a lot of examples easily found on the major markets (opensea is one such market)
if ur a coder go check out the openzeppelin nft contract and find the function used for transfer of ownership. and look up the "payable" and payment functionality in solidity. if not then youll never understand what im saying anyways hahahaha. base concept though is correct. royalties are contractual, settable, and enforced by the contract. no way around them when theyre there
What I mean by “less terrible” is socially, not technically.
Centralised datacenter based development leads to digital feudalism, where the owners of the datacenters take control of the “digital land” and build moats around them (often fake, imaginary - see how text messaging has no interoperability anymore when 10 years ago it did)
In blokchain / decentralised databases development this is not possible - people can always access the data that’s on chain, and they can extend your code, see it, change it (depending on the license even copy it and just make a slightly different product, a la Uniswap V2 and Sushi Swap). This leads to a real free market for applications, instead of the digital feudalism that naturally results from centralised data centers.
Doesn't that have heavy privacy implications? Or is this a solved problem the solution to which doesn't get much publicized?
The potential dystopia is that crypto can lead to something like a digital society that’s completely naked to the nation state and everyone knows what everyone else has done, forever, always. Every transaction, movement and digital app usage would be in a transparent public ledger with everyone’s IDs attached to it.
It’s not a good scenario and which is why I feel like any idea that CBDCs are a good idea seem delusional.
Note that I'm not referring to the "morals" of doing this, my question is pragmatic.
- Why will say, a Facebook do this with "decentralized data"? - How do they pay their bills, what monetization structure do you envision? - Will people pay for something they have always had for free? It won't be a nominal amount since they have to bear the costs of running the service, there's no subsidization.
On monetisation structures - no idea, the only thing blockchain does is build a permissionless system where people will be able to experiment wildly with different models. Like Jobs said when he launched the iPhone “I’m excited about the stuff we don’t know about” more than what’s out there now (Ethereum being at best now a rough Beta project).
Certainly the monetisation of digital art has changed a lot of what some of my favourite 3D artists have been doing - they no longer compete for likes on Instagram (worthless) but actively promote their NFTs from which they can make good money out of. They are producing the exact same kind of output - digital art - but NFTs are quietly taking over the whole space and changing the whole economic structure.
People pay for inherently worthless NFTs with inherently worthless tokens, so they're not making good actual money unless they happen to cash out on an upswing.
How do you figure? Skilled developers have struggled to efficiently scale an application from one to two rack servers connected with Infiniband, never mind a hodgepodge of heterogeneous hardware and WAN interconnects running a distributed VM. There is nothing in blockchain (nor immutability generally) that actually addresses the underlying issues here, and if anything I would expect the requirement to cryptographically validate all data committed to the chain to make inefficiencies related to synchronization orders of magnitude worse, not better.
I agree of course it makes order of magnitude slower. The point is - how long until this slow is good enough to perform immensely useful things, with a better distribution of wealth generation than the current datacenter model?
I would say in the next 5 years we’ll start seeing breakthrough apps.
Like I said above I don’t expect everything ever to go on chain in the near future, you can have very useful apps that only touch on chain for the truly necessary. Even doing the “truly necessary” was painful until very recently, but now with Ethereum Layer 2 solutions, Algorand, Polkadot and Solana, it’s becoming more and more accessible over time.
We're nearing the limits of physics already. I do expect hardware to get much faster still, but not forever and not as fast as now.
> I agree of course it makes order of magnitude slower. The point is - how long until this slow is good enough to perform immensely useful things, with a better distribution of wealth generation than the current datacenter model?
I think really never. Because the rest of the world doesn't sit idle, and most anything can be done the traditional way.
You could pay huge $$$ to create a smart contract on ETH, or you could get more power than any normal person could afford on the Ethereum blockchain on the AWS EC2 free tier. If you think paying amounts with a few zeroes in them is a sensible thing, then you have far more computing power available.
I think the only reason to use the blockchain is if you really need the blockchain. And the vast majority of computing doesn't. And as we're seeing, the blockchain is very much vulnerable if the world wants to push it around badly enough.
I agree with you we will use blockchain where it’s necessary, but I suspect that’s a decent percentage of our future digital world.
That's highly arguable. It's a superior social solution if you buy into a very, very specific kind of "social", and are happy with systems that operate within a very limited realm.
Eg, if you like the existence of things like chargebacks, then the blockchain isn't the kind of solution you want.
And you also need for the entire problem to reside inside the blockchain ideally. Blockchains lose any power if they have to interact with the outside world. You can make guarantees around how ETH moves from A to B, but if say, a physical product is involved then the blockchain can't do anything about it.
Right now BendDAO is in trouble because nobody really cares about NFTs anymore, they can't sell the ones they got as a collateral, and already ran out of funds.
Artists on FXhash are selling out editions of 200 in 15 minutes. It’s an incredibly vibrant market and the whole concept of FXhash is a revolution in generative art.
NFTs are not dead.
Here are 3 real artists selling NFTs right now.
Deeway Kwon
https://twitter.com/deekaymotion?s=21&t=ipDuaTxacsrVG2ZqS5Nb...
Kato https://objkt.com/profile/tz1LA28RxLyzg4iV9jxDLrmzgC6WwCHT2f...
Jose Gasparian https://objkt.com/profile/gasparian/created
Most of “web3” is scams, ponzis and foolishness. But NFTs are changing the lives of digital artists everywhere.
Bizarrely this seems to be something that most people at HN are completely alienated from. But NFTs work.
The fact that not everyone is making millions anymore is irrelevant - as a working artist in a cheaper country you can make a decent living if you develop a community. It can also be a very healthy second income.
kato is being followed by 43 people, Jose Gasparian by 24. That's "nobody cares" territory. I've seen not particularly amazing furry artists sign up for a new site and gather 200 watchers in a single day by just posting a couple decent pictures. Both of those people seem to have been around for about a year.
If you look at the lists you posted, nobody's offering anything. kato has a single picture with "offer = 0.30". Gasparian has a single picture with "offer = 5.0".
Okay, let's see what fancy stuff those people own instead:
https://objkt.com/profile/gasparian/owned?sort=lowest_ask:de...
https://objkt.com/asset/hicetnunc/768355
Oh look, in the history they all sold for 3, and now somebody is trying to sell their copy for 500.
Now for kato:
https://objkt.com/asset/KT1C6ikdV1dCEdzfqG1wevsfMtZbP5zr1Tuh...
Same shit, bought a thing for 1.5 trying to resell for 1000.
Look at activity: https://objkt.com/asset/fxhash/1110428
In a single day, a NFT goes from creator through half a dozen owners. Yeah, I don't think those people even look at what they buy, and lots of people own lots of random crap, like barely distinct pictures from the same series.
I don't know what this is, but it's not an art market, because it certainly never occurred to me to buy a picture and then put it for sale again on the same day for a couple dollars more. That's more like using NFTs as money. It could be money laundering, or payments for services, or wash trading, but whatever it is, it doesn't much like an art market to me.
Kato has 4000 followers on twitter https://twitter.com/TrofimovaKato
Jose has 2300 on twitter https://twitter.com/josegasparian
The place where people meet and follow each other on the NFT space is twitter, not OBJKT. OBJKT is just where the art is sold.
Jose has just recently sold out his first piece on FXhash - 200 editions at 2xtz - 400$ - in 15 min.
It's a art market, even if you don't want to see it. I just took two random artists out of a hat that I like.
You're also of course conveniently ignoring DeeKay because he doesn't fit your pattern - he just had a piece recently sell for 1$ million.
Still very, very small potatoes
> It's a art market, even if you don't want to see it. I just took two random artists out of a hat that I like.
No, it's not. It's an art market used as a proxy for something else. I like art. I get reselling it. But when you buy a bunch of stuff and immediately put it back for sale for a few bucks more, that's not art appreciation. In the best case it's arbitrage, in the worst case it's something more sinister.
> You're also of course conveniently ignoring DeeKay because he doesn't fit your pattern - he just had a piece recently sell for 1$ million.
It's very much an outlier yes, so probably something very different.
I don't really buy that this piece makes somebody feel anything worth paying $1M for. Come on, we've been doing this theme for ages. Here's an ad based on that concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brsI6z13Su8 -- it's from 2002.
If somebody has $1M to spend on a single picture, why would they? They could hire a dozen artists for a year. Have them safely work on some sort of masterpieces, or have them at the patron's beck and call to make any random ideas the patron has.
There are reasons to spend $1M on a single art piece, but pretty much none of them have anything to do with the art.
People buying and selling something constitutes a market in general definition but you seem to make the effort to redefine it - in any way that makes it so NFTs will never count.
It's either wash trading, or a scam, or something. I don't understand why you're jumping through all these hoops to convince yourself that this isn't real when I am presenting you evidence that it is, but you seem impossible to convince so I won't try.
Suffice to say I buy and sell art in NFTs using my own money, I have my own NFT collection, and I don't scam people nor do I buy from scammers. That to me constitutes a market.
My views aren't particularly weird and complicated. Let's see, resuming:
* Crypto has very limited applications if any outside of the financial area, and limited even there. We won't be doing general computing on blockchains, we'll be doing extremely limited subset of financial problems, if anything.
* NFTs are a mostly stupid idea.
* NFTs are not about art. They're about money. Art is an excuse and the art attached to a NFT has very little importance.
* NFTs are falling in popularity.
* Crypto and NFT markets are chaotic, full of scams, money laundering and wash trading and in general not worth getting into.
* Pretty much nobody buys NFTs for the art value.
Yeah, there's going to be an exception here and there. But I don't for a second believe that paying a million to claim ownership of a quite banal animation is something that shows art appreciation. I think it's far more likely that account A wanted to transfer $1M to account B.
And geez, why do it on NFT sites if you're in for the art? Buy something from an artist on DeviantArt or FurAffinity or something. You can get amazing art for not very much money at all.
- I agree it will be used on a subset of problems, but I think the digital world will move in that direction. I don't agree that it will only be financial problems, NFTs proved that.
* NFTs are a mostly stupid idea.
Opinion.
* NFTs are not about art. They're about money. Art is an excuse and the art attached to a NFT has very little importance.
Opinion.
* NFTs are falling in popularity.
True, but only because a significant subset (perhaps the majority) of users are only in it for the money (I agree with you there). The ones who are in it to buy art have not left.
* Crypto and NFT markets are chaotic, full of scams, money laundering and wash trading and in general not worth getting into.
This is true.
* Pretty much nobody buys NFTs for the art value.
Not my experience.
That's about all I can say. I hope one day you change your mind. Perhaps when one of your favourite artists drops an NFT? Anyway, glad to have had a civil conversation.
Well, of course it's an opinion. But on the art part there are good reasons to believe I'm right. Do you really think Gasparian's blobs are worth paying for? Why would it even matter who owns which? They all look about the same. I think it's plausible that they're too simplistic to be copyrighted, even.
> That's about all I can say. I hope one day you change your mind.
Why? Why would my opinion matter at all? If the important bit is giving artists recognition and money, why would it matter how I do it?
Now if the important bit is propping up the crypto system, then that makes sense, but then it has nothing to do with the art.
> Perhaps when one of your favourite artists drops an NFT? Anyway, glad to have had a civil conversation.
Why would I buy a NFT from an artist? What does that get me?
If I simply want to view the work, it's already out there. What do I care who it supposedly belongs to?
If it's about giving the artist money, I'd much rather buy a commission, which is far more personal, or just contribute money directly.
If I want the rights to use their work, then I'm much better off doing it the old fashioned legal way. Because that way there's no doubt about what I bought, and I can't lose it if somebody scams or hacks me.
On the topic of Gasparian’s “blobs” the whole point of FXhash is that it’s a generative market - the actual artwork is code, and it generates the blobs according to some rules + some randomness function that’s part of the code - some “blobs” are rarer, some are more common. He’s made them into a limited edition of 200, so there are some rarer than others. But the artwork is not “blobs” but the result of generative code that outputs a result every time you mint an NFT. For generative artists, it’s sort of a way new avenue to explore. I find it really interesting.
This is Gasparian’s work but there are a lot of really interesting examples - generative cityscapes, canyons. I like Gasparian’s work so I bought as many “blobs” as I could. It didn’t cost me much, and yes I think he deserves the money and recognition. I find his work beautiful.
Outside of that I can’t say much!
That's what caused the monkey picture hubbub. Since apparently the monkey made its own picture, nobody has the copyright of that, and it's in the public domain. This was even though the artist tried to make the case that they engineered the situation itself by placing camera equipment such that a selfie was likely to happen.
It's also well established that collection of facts and works devoid of human creativity are not copyrightable. So for instance an alphabetical list of businesses in a given city, or feeding a classical painting through a scanner are not copyrightable.
So there's a very plausible argument to be made that unless a human is heavily involved in generating the specific artwork, it's just in the public domain. The actual code would be protected, but the randomly generated results are extremely likely to be in the public domain.
Now this is still an area in doubt and I think it's plausible that some of them are copyrightable. If you spent 3 hours trying to get Dalle2 to spit out the exact thing you want, and tweaked stuff a hundred times, that might be enough human input and you might own the copyright of that. But that's just a guess, and so far nobody knows how it will go, and what requirements a court dealing with this issue will devise.
So IMO for the time being artists shouldn't put rely too much on selling generative artwork, because it could well turn out that it'd be completely legal for me to use all the images on FXhash for any purpose I wish without paying a cent for it.