alanfalcon

Scarcity meaning that if person A owns it, person B/C/D etc. cannot, because (in this example) there is only one. Most digital files are infinitely copyable, and there aren't good DRM solutions for managing this conundrum that actually give real ownership rights to the owner... until blockchain.

Why is this a problem? Ask a creative content creator.

How is blockchain solving this in practice? One example: https://www.niftygateway.com/

In this whole thread, there's not one mention of the word "scarcity". Blockchain allows for digital scarcity. For me, the problems that blockchain solves, it solves through the creation and enforcement of real digital scarcity.

I find that it's not hard to imagine some problems that exist due to the lack of digital scarcity (pre-blockchain). I invite you to open your mind and imagine some for yourself.

What is GEB?

Very cool site/presentation of a mildly amusing and thought provoking topic. The quiz was just the right length to leave me wanting more rather than bouncing. And it all works great on mobile.

You can blacklist certain addresses with certain law abiding exchanges, which is more like marked bills than a seizure. What happened here was obviously not a seizure, you’d need the private key(s) AND to have actually moved the bitcoin to a new secure wallet under your control before you could consider them seized.

Background: DeFi (decentralized finance) is the movement on the Ethereum Network to build and use finance building blocks to allow for any kind of financial instrument needed, in a trust-less, decentralized way.

Using these building blocks, this weekend someone borrowed $2.7M USD to make $350,000 in a single transaction (that is, atomically - the loan was repaid as part of the same transaction) by exploiting some weaknesses in at least one of those building blocks. This is one of the better explanations of how that "attack" worked, plus some cheerleading about why it's actually a good thing.

The rules for Go are also actually pretty specific. Would you consider any territory capturing game played with simple tokens on a board to be Go? Is Reversi/Othello also Go?

Really great related read: https://m3-org.github.io/research/sweeney.html

Yes, they care.

You both speak of the day AlphaGo won 4/5 matches, yet the matches were played over a series of days. Which of those days was the switch flipped, then? For me there was a significance in day three, but it was mitigated somewhat by the (to me) surprise of day/match four.

We're going to get the Metaverse from there, eventually! And it will be glorious. A great definition of the Metaverse and what role blockchain may play in it: https://soundcloud.com/siggraph-spotlight/30-tim-sweeney-and...

I can confirm that the blockchain is way more convenient than centralized solutions for buying and selling digital assets once you get over the initial friction (which is still way too much). The keys here are open standards, composability, and trustless atomic transactions. As a user, I basically look at ethereum as an in-game currency—and the game is the whole of the ethereum gaming space (still nascent, yes, and polluted by a great many scammy speculative shell games) rather than a single game.

As for working outside of digital asset use cases, there are certainly a large number of people trying to get it to work though I agree the use case is much less clear cut. Without exactly agreeing with Vinay here, I at least appreciated the perspective he shared in detail on this episode of the NonFunGerbils podcast: https://nonfungerbils.com/podcast/3-vinay-gupta-indexing-the...

The blockchain is indeed fraught with peril. Code review, audits, and bug bounties are an absolute necessity when it comes to smart contracts! Learning in a high stakes situation seems pretty good as long as you have a robust support structure.

Our CTO likens developing a smart contract to civil engineering. Our CTO also remembers what it was like to ship your software in its final form on a floppy disk!

I think it’s great that more and more people are jumping in and learning what it’s like to develop in such an unforgiving domain (no point here, I just think it’s great!)

The best smart contracts don't need to be reverse engineered, they've got shared, verified source code. The bugginess is a real problem as you've pointed out. The "impossible to sell anything" couldn't actually be farther than the truth from all my experience buying and selling NFTs. Over $150,000 USD worth of digital collectable game cards have been traded this week alone over at https://opensea.io/recent - everything is based on cryptographic signing and verified ownership on smart contracts, and it works great.

I sometimes pay YouTube $11.99 a month for premium. It replaces the need for an alternative music streaming service, for one thing.

The tools exist for people to experiment as if they had infinite copies of every card ever printed, and the people who most enjoy that sort of thing definitely make use of those tools!

There’s just enough luck involved that the risk-reward ratio was probably mostly right in those early days, especially as the game wasn’t designed with the expectation players would ever have perfect information about scarcity and relative power level of individual cards.

Even so, it wasn’t fun to play with ante, so most people didn’t do it; Magic smartly went with the flow rather than fight against it, and that’s a huge reason why the game persists successfully to this day.

(Details gleaned primarily from episodes of Mark Rosewater’s “Drive to Work” podcast, at least the best episodes of which are mandatory listening imo for any designer of any stripe, especially one who is also at all a fan of MtG. Yes, Garfield is the game’s creator, but Maro is the game’s central nervous system and has been for more than 15 years!)

Similarly, my CPAP changed my life for the better. I went from constantly tired to being a productive member of society again.

Good ol' Greg Egan. Thanks for sharing.

I noticed a political robocall taking advantage of this just yesterday, and there went any possibility that I would vote for this person. Your robocall did not constitute an emergency _you asshole_.

It is perhaps more appropriate to say the button frequently does nothing because you frequently lack the proper permissions... https://youtu.be/ZUvGfuLlZus

Missiles have a lot of value. Crashing them expends that value. Governments still crash missiles into their enemies.

What makes you say this? Are you confusing vanity-eth with a brain wallet?

The lore goes that Airbnb was started because the founders couldn’t pay rent.

“To be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody but yourself – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight – and never stop fighting.”

–EE Cummings

With an assist from Brené Brown and _The Gifts of Imperfection_

The same activity can be "numbing" (used to escape real problems and responsibilities) for one person, and energizing and truly comforting to someone else. World of Warcraft absolutely had (and has) people who fall on both sides of that divide, and I'm sure the same is true for Fortnite. It can also start as constructive/energizing and become numbing/escapism if you make someone feel ashamed of it, as you say.

This is what the new Apple TV channels thing is trying to solve for while also contributing to the problem :-)

“Humans are bad at understanding probability, so lets make it impossible for them to get better by lying to them and reinforcing their poor internal model.”

(I know games are ostensibly about fun rather than betterment, but they originate from the opportunities for betterment that they provide and breaking that connection does a disservice to ... mankind. Not to put too fine a point on it. If you want your game to be fun and the numbers aren’t fun, don’t lie about the numbers, change how you present them.)

Not the OP, and I don’t disagree re: the nightmare Medium has (predictably) become. But I’d love to know what platform would you suggest?