260 karma · joined November 9, 2016
Today Facebook steals your time by locking your attention to their web page or mobile app. Tomorrow they do it by locking your attention to their VR headset or AR glasses.
And each time, the whole Facebook ecosystem comes with you.
This is exactly what they do and Meta is a natural extension that is betting in a cultural change as much as it is a continuation of everything Facebook is.
Exactly this. Mastodon on its own is clearly not enough. And cryptoeconomic systems still have to navigate financial regulations successfully before they ever become legitimate contenders.
Not sure I see another macrotrend out there to help counter this. Except crypto. And despite all my faith, I remain skeptical.
I think the Zuck use case was buying a t-shirt for a virtual avatar and I want to use that t-shirt in other applications. There is a matter of interoperability required at the level of the data that sits behind both applications as it pertains to the user that sits on the other side of those applications. (meaning just sharing data isn't enough, there is user level context as well).
And if you reduce interoperability to a single entity owned platform (like Steam), well other platforms will exist and the interoperability problem will be recreated.
I was (and reluctantly remain) so excited for cryptocurrency and blockchain networks because of this aspect. Broad open networks interoperable at a data level seemed like exactly what is needed to create more dynamic interconnected digital systems. To some extent this is what is happening in the background.
But the obsession with individual experiences, in crypto it is thr scam coins or ridiculous yield products, dominates the conversation. I think this has greatly derailed the other conversations.
Now I worry that we're left with the only other reasonable answer. Facebook builds this infrastructure as their platform and the market ignores all the problems and flocks to it.
Doesn't seem like there are many entities in between these two places that are working on a more robust, and healthy, "metaverse".
The harder part is executing on the above strategy. You will need new institutions or see an expansion or extension of existing institutions. Imagining the FCC trying to do this seems both a likely approach and an incredibly ineffective one.
I would add too that improved regulation of consumer and private data would help significantly. This is probably more likely than the above.
This lawsuit seems like the perfect timing and impetus to get serious about regulation in the digital ecosystem. Just hope we don't fuck it up.
> Every single one of our customers is looking for a path back to something that looks like the mainframe in terms of vertical integration of the business stack.
I think this is always going to be true as a desire, but it's also true that it's likely an impossible state to achieve completely. There will always be consolidation efforts, but with the rate of M&A and growth of new markets and alternative products, I don't think anyone can afford only consolidation as a strategy today. So in the end, it's a losing battle to try and avoid system sprawl at the moment.
> The only financial services companies that are seeing positive uplift from these sorts of initiatives are those with enough resources to try this path
My view has been the exact opposite, only the resource heavy FS companies are the ones who can afford to pursue consolidation!
> Many of our clients are stuck in some contorted stance with half their stack in AS400-land and the other half scattered to the various "cloud" services which are mostly just random websites/services with shitty SOAP APIs (or no APIs at all).
My take, and what I think this article is poorly commenting on, is that everyone is betting on and trying to pursue open banking. Rather than move internal systems into a more simplified format, pushing the market to use common standards and unify behavior across the industry. We're in a phase that is not quite there yet, but bits and pieces are starting to move, so it's very messy. And that's why it seems that strategies for vertical integration and open-source both can coexist in the zeitgeist today.
Caveat, I do work on tech innovation from a regulator and FMI side, so I'm certainly missing the nitty gritty of your perspective.
For starters, lets pretend like you don't want to be a black hat, because thats a pretty poor way to make money. Not even sure if its lucrative.
For more serious work, either as a contractor or direct hire, there are only a few shops really worth working with/for right now. But they definitely exist. The challenge is their funding streams arent as steady as the market would make it seem. Although they may be doing swell right now they will definitely be hurting when the market turns again. Its a classic world of startups made complicated by even more volatility than the traditional market place for startups.
Despite what HackerNews may believe, this is definitely a space of innovation and future promise. Simply look the numbers, play with some of the major applications, compare it to its traditional variants, and make a judgment yourself. Its hard not to see the potential if you can look deeper than superficial comparisons.
If you really want to go through this route: Read the Bitcoin white paper, research some of the arguments for and against central banking, sound money theories versus lender of last resort and credit elasticity, and money as a memory theory. Then read the Ethereum white paper, play with Metamask and some Dapps, compare the pros and cons with your regular banking or finance experiences, and then start looking at some of the more complex systems and Dapps in the space like Uniswap, MakerDAO, AAVE, and others. At that point, you should have more than enough ammo to see the forest and the trees as you'd like.
Seems like they either, 1) sell periodically or as the assets value appreciates, but this is generally unreliable and tough or 2) create a liquidity pool or yield farming opportunities
For 1, this isn't necessarily reliable but it seems like the most plausible popular case. For 2, given the previously mentioned challenge of the illiquid asset, how does it work to provide incentive in liquidity pooling and yield farming?
Note, that I'm less well aware of the mechanics of 2 so perhaps its also a fundamental ignorance issue.
Taxation is a necessary form of funding to the entities that are responsible for managing negative externalities.The fact that they have a monopoly on violence is also a boon to society.
Taxation and the state as the primary power are fundamental components to the modern social contract. The onus is on naysayers to rovide proof that a system that lacks these components is better.
Management of people requires a very empathetic, highly personalized approach. It's really all about motivation and the levers you can use are not always in line with the company objectives. High performance companies and teams are usually the ones that can find a way to sync up the people objectives with the company objectives for a long enough time to deliver products and services into a marketplace.
Meanwhile, organizational management is much more of a systems thinking approach that requires classical engineering skills. It requires technical and domain expertise plus intimate knowledge of the existing practices, processes, and environments.
Which makes sense as to why most managers in the software development field fail. They know the organizational side of things well but the people side is overlooked. And now the spectrum is swinging towards people managers without the requisite organizational skills and we're left with a new set of problems.
Ideally it seems as if you'd want someone with administrative capabilities and focus but with enough understanding of the tech and business side that they're able to understand context and conversation.
Problem is, although its easy to find administratively capable resources who you can pay a decent salary to retain, the minute you require them to understand broader context the incentive structure changes as this is inherently more work.
To me that is why Product Managers who's focus is a single product should also take over administrative tasks on that project. It gives them an opportunity for "field time" as stated by another poster as well.
Would the GFC count? Technically it wasn't a system shattering event (more like system shuddering), but boom and bust cycles certainly do seem to be growing.
Those things are systemic issues related to other aspects of the machinery, particularly the incentives or mechanism of wealth distribution outside of money markets.
I feel a lot of this from the other side of the table. Part of what works against me in engineering is my lack of fluency in focusing deeply on very insulated challenges for a long enough period of time. I've always said this works against me but makes me great at the product side of the house because I can leverage my natural inclinations better.
At the moment, there isn't a single alternative product for a state-free currency as a store of value that has reached the valuation of Bitcoin.
I'm not even a Bitcoiner, but if this isn't proof to you at this point, nothing will satisfy you. The proof doesn't have to convince you it's the future of currency, but it should certainly statisfy the question of "how has blockchain enabled anything new and interesting?".
The truth is, blockchain is less of a technological innovation than it is an organizational one. It is technology that attempts to digitize human organizational patterns as opposed to simply analog processes.
Those selling crypto to the moon and profiting off of the hype certainly ruin it for everyone. The promises, the lies, the failure to deliver is certainly an issue to take up. At the same time, there is quite a bit behind the lies that is worth looking at.
There's quite a bit of spirited discussion regarding these points elsewhere.
Music that requires you to present a private key in order to play it would meet that configuration, for example.
I like this description quite a bit. Im obviously a believer already, but this is a good way to describe the value potential of blockchain based NFTs.
Slight digression, but personally I hate the way scarcity always makes its way into the conversation due to the obsessive discussion of deflation, but I think in the case of NFTs it fits well.
I'd rephrase your statement as saying that NFTs using blockchain protocols preserve the scarcity of owning an asset. Then extending that, digitally verifiable proof of the scarce resource (i.e. ownership) is the aspect that can create an economic incentive for ownership.
Well said!
This is precisely the idea to a certain extent. The ledger serves as proof of ownership which then allows access to entitlements dictated by that ownership. This being done in a digital first way is another aspect as well (although not really conceptually mind blowing to me personally).
> how the hell is that different from the same thing with no crypto involved?
This goes back to what I said earlier about the characteristics of the underlying network driving the value. The differences can be in things like the peer-to-peer nature or the decentralized infrastructure which provides a degree of censorship resistance or improved accessibility.
We're at the point where credible evidence of the value added by these characteristics is still being explored. You can certainly make some level of argument as to why the decentralized nature of these protocols is better than the traditional alternative, but even I'll admit its difficult to parse through the noise of speculation and hype for the arguments that may be worth a damn.
The idea of distributing control, responsibility, costs, and other aspects of operating a system away from singular points of failure is an idea that seems worth investigating and to me this is what blockchain is doing. NFTs are a different flavor of exploration then that of cryptocurrencies.
> So, not even the value proposed by blockchain but the hypothesis of the value?
Of course. This is a nascent and emerging market. To act as if this is anything but a hypothesis on what may be valuable is a lie. This is true of every emergent market ever.
> What would those values and hypotheses be?
See my other comments in this same thread if you'd genuinely like to engage in discussion. The value is derived from the characteristics of the network protocols and the hypothesis is these values are difficult to achieve without the protocol and that they will come to be highly desired.
As a simple example, take the oft common hate for Google accounts being deserviced. A globally accessible, immutable ledger representation of a user account could be a theroetic start in the direction of mitigating the problems of thirs-party owned account data.
This is a more difficult question for NFTs as the market is even smaller than the financial use cases which has been driving blockchain applications. It'll take some time for seemingly legitimate and long-lasting value in areas for NFT to emerge as they are still being explored and developed.
However, no matter how you frame it, rhe value proposition for applications comes down to the value add characteristics of the networks they are built on top of.
> The tokens you acquire are worth nothing.
The tokens worth is determined by the market place that emerges around the tokens characteristics.
Some tokens are censorship resistant and run on globally accessible networks so that they are not easily erased, their ownership is easy to prove, and their history is reliably known. Some tokens are required to access other marketplaces or services because they have properties that make them more easy to use as traditional currencies. Some tokens allow for self-ownership paradigms.
Again, the tokens acquired carry the value of the characteristics of the networks in which they are issued. What these characteristics are valued as and actually "worth" in real economic terms is dependent on their demand.
> The “uniqueness” of the NFT is an illusion; it does not offer any strong guarantee of uniquely representing an actual asset.
This is only true if the NFT isn't accepted as value. If the characteristics I described earlier indeed do become valued, then the ledger which holds the claim i.e. the NFT will be taken as the source of truth for representing the ownership of the claimed asset. Its the theory of accounting applied to a different space.
If you're not willing to consider the hypothesis of value proposed by blockchain I can genuinely understand why and it makes sense. Lots of other areas to invest personal time and effort in.
The novelty comes from the underlying protocols that back the NFT. These protocols create marketplaces that are widely available and accessible and are reliably secure and robust.
Take copyright for example. Copyright laws vary across regions and marketplace. The encoding and repudiation of these copyright laws is based on analog processes. The data related to the assets in question are stored in databases with a widely varying degree of access. Verifiability across assets or even within a single asset class varies and to varying degrees of reliability. And I'm not saying this to point out that copyright laws and the assets relying on them have failed or are not value add in many ways. The fundamental point is that the technological infrastructure underlying the use of copyright laws today has a lot to be desired when it applies to ease of use for digital media.
Networks using blockchain protocols can offer a natively digital infrastructure solution that helps extend or replicate the value offered by something like copyright law. The natively digital aspect enables broader interaction which engenders more general purpose usage which ultimately leads to new consumer models (i.e. direct artist to consumer, peer to peer, etc.).
> Owning the NFT for something does nothing more than copyright already does. You can store the digital asset on your computer with or without the NFT. You can "consume" it either way as well.
The point is not to displace copyright law)(although others may argue this I do not). The value add here is in creating a widely accessible and reliable digital mechanism for creating, expressing, and modifying ownership rights. Different, or maybe even traditional, consumption models are then built on top of this to capture this value.
To your point about gaming creators choosing to do so or not; this question is really a question about what is the value of blockchain protocol networks in the first place and how would someone like a game creator benefit or capture this value? To this point, I can only point out the potential benefits as I'll be the first to agree the nature of blockchain and its value is still being explored. My arguments above are trying to express the value as I see it.
Would be curious to hear more thoughts and criticism.
There are numerous configurations, networks, and commercial structures that can be created for NFT offerings that can mitigate "problems" described in the OP and accommodate for different tradeoffs.
A simple retort would point to the many alternative NFT networks that don't use POW-based consensus algorithms or the NFT offerings that enable value add offerings very differently than purchasing art or baseball cards.
Evaluating the capabilities of NFTs against the value offerings of something like rare art is an apples to oranges comparison. Of course the market for digital assets offered via NFT is immature and speculative; this is a new market, based on an alternative technology paradigm, that has a long way to go before it settles into a more usable and valuable structure.
Ultimately, the idea of using key-pairs pegged to widely accessible peer-to-peer public networks as a mechanism for tracking ownership of digital (or near digital or at times even physical) assets is incredibly novel. It turns the conventional model of third-party hosted digital assets on its head and enables really interesting mechanisms of distribution, ownership, access, and value consumption and creation that does not compare well with traditional mechanisms. And in saying it doesn't compare well I mean to acknowledge its limitations and its potential at the same time. However, the critique in the OP is pretty bland and doesn't seem to acknowledge the full scope of the situation.
Are there tax implications in the US for doing this type of transfer monthly?
My only retort to your points would be that much of what you've described is still in nascent stages or at best, early go-live. I'm rooting hard for Ethereum to get ahead of some of these problems, but with all the noise in the community the last few years, it's difficult to determine what is actually legitimate and what is simply being oversold.
My hope is that the Defi boom will continue it drive attention and resources to the space that will help to realize some of this potential. Despite that, at the moment I still can't help but be a skeptic myself.
Outside of crypto, there are many areas within industries which require the sharing and use of data across multiple organizations, markets, and even intra-industry. Think of Healthcare and the multitude of data sources, processes, and interaction between parties. In areas like this, where multiple parties have many different roles and responsibilities in a shared business process, I think the opportunity for private blockchains is promising. I admit that these are niche use cases and the use of these type of applications has not taken off yet.
Do note that these types of applications are very different from the decentralized implementations seen in the crypto sphere. These are the private, permissioned models that people speak of.
They should be diligent in what capabilities they choose to support. And ruthless in continually developing and pivoting these capabilities.
This is true of any large organization or enterprise that operates in a software enabled domain, so yes, most industries. The idea that software development is too difficult and should only be contracted out to fleety consultants is one that needs to be properly put to rest.
And to be clear, I'm not saying that consultants have no place. But for the type of technology and delivery as required by the project in the OP - there's no excuse.
What would it mean to prep for this? What would a neo-feudal society actually look like?