I want to wake up one day and cryptocurrency and anything related to it just doesn’t exist. Man that’d be a great day.
Remove grifters, acquire actual progress.
Remove grifters, acquire actual progress.
I also am largely okay with people using it for personal quantities of controlled substances, even though I do not use it for that personally. Sometimes these are for legitimate medicinal purposes as well (for example, schedule 2 TRT and HRT drugs)
Crypto can keep them, it's nice to not have to deal with the noise
I reserve judgement as to whether or not this will be a net benefit for society. I suspect not, but our present ignorance is far too great to make such a prediction - I just think it's gonna happen whether we want it to or not, so get used to the idea of crypto-everything.
As for how this scales? I have no idea. I'm just speculating that it's gonna happen somehow. I mean, hell, look at this post - a nation adopted Bitcoin. You think that's the last time a government will experiment with crypto? China is already developing their own fiat cryptocurrency. You think it's just gonna stop?
I don't necessarily want this to happen, nor am I advocating for it. It's just a prediction, so I'm now sure how to answer your questions.
Smart contracts backing more real world assets has a slightly higher chance of becoming a thing, but even with those the value isn't super clear. The whole idea of tracking ownership is that it's backed by authority to enforce it, and the whole idea of cryptocurrency is that it works without authority.
If you think NFT you think about that vague thing that has no bearing on the real world. Bitcoin is the magic technology that manages to be scarce and be manifest in the real world despite being fully digital and networked. Ethereum managed to one-up Bitcoin with the smart contracts of which the DAI stablecoin which anchors itself to the real world currency without relying on authority.
NFT's basically are the exact opposite of the sort of thing cryptocurrency offers as value to the real world.
Just where exactly the title itself is stored? I would assume it's a at least moderately long plaintext file, describing property and conditions. Maybe some authenticity attributes, like digital signatures of multiple parties. Where do you think is this artifact located? Inside the NFT?
Also, there's no reason why the property and conditions have to be stored together; they could readily exist as separate artifacts sharing some ID or reference.
Second - do you realise that title contains private information which will be forever exposed on-chain?
Third - ok, even you admit that not everything will fit on-chain. Then who will store the rest of the data? Centralised entity? Which will have its internal security, bookkeeping, staff and so on?
Why do we need NFTs then, if all the work will be done by a centralised entity anyway?
Fourth - in the hypothetical case when we have titles and NFTs linked to them, there are several interesting questions - what happens when owner of the NFT forgets his private keys? What happen if the owner dies? What happens when the court judges declare that the ownership is incorrect? How are marriages handled, where today multiple people can own the same property?
That ain't an "if" at all. The actual identifying information on, say, a vehicle title or land deed takes up maybe a couple hundred bytes at most (if not far less), whereas most NFT-capable blockchains allow transaction metadata on the scale of multiple kilobytes.
> Second - do you realise that title contains private information which will be forever exposed on-chain?
Nearly (if not entirely) all of the actually-private data (namely: the owner's PII) is redundant under a title-as-NFT system, since ownership is asserted by wallet/token custody rather than being baked into the document.
Besides, encryption is a thing that exists.
> Third - ok, even you admit that not everything will fit on-chain.
I admit no such thing. What I actually said is that you can break up large data into smaller chunks such that it can fit on-chain even if it somehow blows out the chain's transaction metadata ceiling.
Regardless:
> Then who will store the rest of the data?
Have you heard of IPFS?
> Fourth - in the hypothetical case when we have titles and NFTs linked to them, there are several interesting questions - what happens when owner of the NFT forgets his private keys? What happen if the owner dies? What happens when the court judges declare that the ownership is incorrect? How are marriages handled, where today multiple people can own the same property?
All of these things can be (and, in the case of lost keys, have been) addressed with smart contracts; the blockchain can programmatically define conditions under which the NFT can be transferred, e.g. with consent from multiple parties. Such programs can also represent multi-person ownership; in a world where blockchain computation can handle the governance of large organizations, something like a marriage or an estate is a readily solvable problem.
You can't have "smart contracts" applied to the real world without centralised entities controlling them. Therefore they are mostly redundant and unnecessary.
Regarding the size of the title - I admit I don't know much about that area, but I know enough to doubt your claim that majority or even any titles can be reduced under the kilobyte. Splitting info into multiple tokens will only make things even worse.
Also this doesn't address the issue that UX of centralised entity working with such system will be atrocious. You postulate that there will be no centralised entity, but imho that's pure fiction.
And lastly - IPFS will never be adopted for anything important because it doesn't have safety guarantees. Not even with those services promising guarantees for some regular payment. Because subscription can run out, that service may close or anything else can happen, IPFS still can't guarantee file safety. That's a nice toy, but nothing more in the current implementation.
Think of all the poor slobs in Russia who've been steam-rolled by these sanctions, and can no longer sell their software or get paid for their little Apps. Whatever you might think about Russia -- "group punishment" is not cool; these are people like you and me who cannot now feed their families. To them, Bitcoin (and other even more capable cryptocurrencies now in development) is the difference between life and death.
So, it might be worthwhile to ... reflect, if we find ourself agreeing with the obese head banker at BIS or weird Klaus Schwab, when they say they want to control all aspects of personal commerce. They can pound sand -- I'm going to continue to work to move cryptocurrency technology forward.
Remove grifters, acquire actual progress.
I wonder if there were people in the 80s that said that.
Humanistically, I gotta say, perceptions matter. I left crypto because it just started "tasting gross", regardless of the technological interest I had. Clearly, I wasn't in a minority with that.
As penance for this, I will cite Martin Fowler's excellent essay on why privacy is necessary for at least some: https://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html
There are (and always will be) people who see no good in the Internet. I played a small part in its growth in the early 90s and even I have pangs of regret over what it has become. AND there was a lot of grift and lawlessness in the early Internet -- that is what paid the bills at first.
However, at the time I was able to articulate all the ways moving X, Y and Z to the Internet would make things better -- for hours on end -- and I would 'win' those arguments. OTOH, all my crypto crazed associates have trouble doing that same thing today. For years, the argument ended up being "I got in early and now my 'investment' is worth X amount." It has been an end justifies the means proposition.
In the end, the Internet was judged by its exponential growth and adoption. There was a mad rush of, arguably, useful activity going on... for years. Everything I wished for and pushed for back in the day has come true -- monkey paw curse and all. Bitcoin's use has actually gone down afaict, the market value of it is the only metric people care about.
I find that most crypto-crazed enthusiasts don't have the foggiest idea about how it works, beyond some broad vague ideas. People who can articulate its benefits exist, but they tend to get drowned out. Many of them are building companies instead of bothering to prosthelytize or argue on forums.
Very very well put. Bitcoin’s use as measured by total transactions has gone down. However, the total amount of cryptocurrency transactions across all chains is still growing exponentially.