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Comment by neilk | Hacker News Reader

I wanted to see what "crossed swords" meant, so I searched for what leashless might have meant.

Some examples of threads that I felt were representative.

https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1513184187498569729

https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1516610542588284931

I think the most generous summary of these interactions would be that leashless is solidly convinced of two things: blockchains are the answer to pressing world problems, and skeptics are simply not on his intellectual and moral level.

The home page of Mattereum appears to be a pitch to create one NFT per physical item and then make transactions about it on the blockchain. I confess I am also unsure of how this technology adds value to e-commerce. Nor does this scheme seem to be sufficient to bring about such levels of transparency that it could meaningfully combat slavery, or address issues of climate justice. I hope that leashless is correct about all of that.

View on HN

On the modern slavery front have a read of the transcript of the podcast from our modern slavery expert discussing how all this fits together.

Serious policy people who are worthy of respect are doing this thing. Molly can snark all the likes but all that she’s demonstrated is arrogance, poor judgement, an unwillingness to admit when she is out of her depth on real world issues like modern slavery, and a willingness to use lynch mobs to defend her point of view rather than to discuss the actual topic. The world is filled with people who point and laugh for a hobby, but once it becomes a living all intellectual honesty goes straight out the window.

If you want to understand what we really do, read on.

https://podcast.mattereum.com/episodes/ending-slavery-with-t...

No, I will not.

“You just have to do more research to understand” is the crypto founder’s refuge from all criticism.

You have not demonstrated that your claim is worthy of investigation.

While I am not the most intelligent person you have met, I am a very smart person. Someone who claims that the CAP theorem proves the inevitability of blockchains has understood neither, or is perhaps deliberately using words to bamboozle mildly technical people. But perhaps you are ahead of your time and merely look like a scammer. Nevertheless, if you are unable to explain the idea to others who are not as smart as you, at minimum you are incompetent as a visionary or founder. Educating is your job, not mine.

If you don’t want to understand there’s no point trying to justify it.

Move on.

On the CAP theorem specifically, I refer you to:

https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/why-global-tra...

I think you will find that if you think carefully the blockchain presents an opinionated solution to building useful globally distributed databases.

This breaks it down more explicitly. https://ancapalex.medium.com/a-cursory-introduction-to-byzan...

You actually have to think about this to understand it. From first principles.

...but we already have useful, globally distributed databases that are vastly more efficient than blockchains, and have for a decade or so: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

Bitcoin is 14 years old at this point. We are _not_ early. Surely if blockchains are as great as their proponents claim, at least one clever company would have done something unquestionably impressive with them? But maybe I'm the crazy one here.

(For context the time between the launch of Sputnik and the first commercial communications satellite, Intelsat I, was 8 years)

https://mattereum.com/sustainability/

You can find a ton of material here about exactly why tagging one NFT per object is worth doing. It’s a possible pretty decent fix for many of the problems continuing to run consumer capitalism in the current mode. Basically it gives a place for wear and use data to accumulate.

The wear and use data is accurate and trustworthy because it’s presented in a legal framework which provides real accountability for the people involved in the transaction.

We don’t know if consumers will accept it or not, but we do know that it works legally and technically. Early stage research.

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