The only issue with this is:
> I like crypto but think 99.999% of NFTs are scams
It is more like 100% are scams, there is no NFT use case, it's all just jpgs.
> I like crypto but think 99.999% of NFTs are scams
It is more like 100% are scams, there is no NFT use case, it's all just jpgs.
Does a domain name need a token attached to the service in order to operate?
I would say it is still a scam as it is airdropping ENS tokens that were minted out of thin air and insiders pump and dumping the token to make a profit.
You can't do that illegal stuff with traditional domain names.
Ethereum is essentially a database, so certainly centralized databases can do similar things. The point is to do them with decentralization, openness, censorship resistance, and an economic model where users pay the expenses as they go. You may or may not think those things are valuable, but some people do; Ethereum and similar projects fill that niche.
IMO the token might be an illegal security indeed; and if that's the case I hope the SEC crushes them. But in the meantime I'll be using ENS names happily as a user and watch the events with popcorn.
> but I don't see how crypto domain names are any different or changes anything.
It will prevent that a big corp with the court on their side redirect your domain-bought-in-a-complete-legit way to them.
No, it will absolutely not. It does not matter what method of accounting or voting you use, you will be made to comply with a court order. If you don't comply, you're going to prison.
there are other financials using that technology
I find high utility in the financials.
I’ve seen them used sensibly for shipment tracking, and such like. They’re great for that.
It’s just a cryptographic enhancement of existing systems, but a nice use of the tech (standardized rather than proprietary too).
One company also used smart contracts to update other systems & such automatically. It was quite a nice system, crypto-based or not.
Personally, as a huge crypto skeptic (and I have worked in the space), I think this kind of use has much more long term utility than the gold rush value stores.
The ticket thing you mention could be useful, but I’ve never seen an implementation that was worth any company (let alone Ticketmaster) bothering with. It “solves” a mostly solved problem.
The marketplace decides what the purpose is. The use case people wanted was an easy way to launder real money into jpegs of arbitrarily set ETH values. Now that the PPP loan and ZIRP era is over, the bottom has fallen out of NFTs entirely. NBA Top Shot was one of the few non-jpeg early succes stories but that's flamed out as well.
Why do this when the current system already handles this? This is no unique usecase.
Once again, crypto is trying to solve problems that don't actually exist while completely failing to address the ones that do.
No, the chain-of-provenance use-case is to prevent people from being able to sell grey-market products while claiming that they're official products. E.g. selling iPhones built out of reconstituted parts from iPhones that were pickpocketed from their owners and then scrapped for parts. (Yes, this is a big issue — Google "my stolen phone ended up in shenzhen" and you'll get a ton of news stories.)
If you (or a retailer) forces the retailer (wholesaler) to provide a chain of digital signatures demonstrating each hand-off of the parts all the way back to the factory that produced them, then you implicitly reject any assemblage of parts where some of the parts were black-market-sourced. Which allows for legitimate refurbishing using legitimately acquired parts (i.e. it doesn't put the Shenzhen phone-repair stores themselves out of business); but destroys the demand for the electronics "chop shops" these stores currently sometimes order parts from.
In this case, a "blockchain" here is an open-public-participation multiparty ledger that tracks ownership of physical goods; with a digital signature inherent to each transfer of the digital asset representing the physical good, which should be done at time of transfer of physical goods. Unlike other use-cases, you really can't simplify the solution — to enable this use-case, you need a system with pretty much all the properties of a blockchain.
This whole signing a physical product to prove it's official kind of sounds like PGP but I only have a 10000 foot view and don't know much about PGP other than you sign stuff and people can cryptographically verify that you actually signed it.
Optional follow-up because I'm curious: how do you actually track that the physical thing wasn't modified or tampered with in practice? Couldn't a bad actor repair a broken RAM chip with their own parts and it would still be officially signed? Or does it rely on the owner invalidating their device, saying their phone is broken, and then all the parts in the phone get flagged as broken?
So you could have a ledger that was only accessible to… say members/subscribers/users of a service. As long as everyone involved can see it, it serves the purpose.
But public is always nice
A blockchain is a public trust ledger that is uncensorable because everyone who wants to can get both a copy of a random sampling of the messages pushed to it (by p2p node gossip of the txpool) and then also a copy of the canonical state (by p2p gossip of the chain-head; the ability of nodes to fetch previous blocks by content-hash; and the ability of all nodes to independently compute block validity and canonicity.) But this uncensorability means that blockchains must solve for the problem of DoS spam attacks, that would seek to fill the chain with noise messages, to the point that it bloats to an impractical-to-store size.
That's why blockchains [that have distributed posting authority, rather than being de-facto centralized "Proof of Authority" systems] always "have" (but not "are") some form of digital money built into them. The digital money is there to be what the old proposals for eliminating email spam called an "eStamp" — a cost for posting your signed messages/transactions that regular users can afford to pay, but spammers cannot.
Without the "eStamps", you just have an unworkable, ever-growing pool of spam noise.
If you choose to eliminate the noise by only keeping the messages that nodes care about store-and-forwarding (such that you lose messages when their originator goes offline, unless at least one other node has accessed them), then rather than a blockchain, you get a system like Freenet.
If you choose to eliminate the noise by combining store-and-forward with TTLs, with push-based probabilistic gossip, then you get the original Usenet numbers groups and SMTP anonymous remailers that presaged blockchains, and were invented by roughly the same group of people (the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk s), being used to anonymously distribute PGP-signed and encrypted payloads in much the same way that blockchains are currently used to anonymously distribute transactions.
> Couldn't a bad actor repair a broken RAM chip with their own parts and it would still be officially signed?
No, because the point is that you get to know who sold them the RAM chips that went into the device, because the RAM chip vendor digitally signed the sale of those chips to them, and their repair job "consumes" that item in their own digital inventory to convert one manifest (representing all the parts in a phone with bad RAM) into another manifest (representing all the parts in a phone with good RAM.) The provenance of the replaced RAM chips "travels within" the provenance of the repaired phone. It's a tree of component sourcing, not just a log of repairs.
Thank you and apologies for all the questions! I'm very fascinated by this but not sure where to start. Is this part of the chain-of-provenance you spoke about?
Also wondering if you have anything helpful to share to learn more. I'm really curious about how the "consume" part works in practice. I was trying to get at a situation where someone fixes the RAM but doesn't update the inventory? Or if you lost your phone, do you have to report it lost to invalidate the manifest? I'm also struggling to imagine what happens when the RAM goes bad? Does that phone with bad RAM get a new signature? How does the phone turn from a phone that works into a phone with bad RAM digitally?
Which they only do if they are already trustworthy. I don't trust them. At any point in the chain, a vendor/manufacturer can put whatever garbage they want on the chain because the chain can't interact with the real world, and for that reason, blockchain solves absolutely nothing in the space of supply-chain management.
Hashing and hash stores are not unique, or particularly original, so really this is just applying common crypto tooling/standards to an existing problem.
It has benefits when you look at it like that.