cslarson

> Yet if we value these assets in terms of traditional valuation models we find they should be worth absolutely nothing.

This is the core tenet that these skeptics get lost with - the premise that there is no real central value to blockchain technology. It is a lost and shallow view made by people who have chosen not to engage or understand what they espouse on. Maybe this person just has too much to lose from change to the status quo, or they choose not to educate themselves (try it) - neither is really valid response if you want to write coherently about something.

> We have systems like BitTorrent and Tor which are decentralized networks and whose responsibility is to blindly distribute data according to a set of prescribed rules and algorithms.

This is a great line because they clearly appreciate some decentralized tech. It is not such a cognitive leap to see that blockchain based smart contracts (Ethereum) are vehicles to build more legitimate decentralized protocols. Perhaps it's just too much. Because the landscape is now too large it is too difficult for the writer to point out specific valuable aspects, they get confused, and out of laziness paint a broad brush of "woo" all over it all.

So yes there is an original keypair that establishes the data. But ones established it can be fixed in a verifiable way. A game client, community of art lovers, government agency, social consensus, then recognizes that nft as corresponding to some offchain asset. It cannot be later changed, duplicated, etc without some social consensus to do so. You don't need to trust a third party with control.

The game client reads only canonical game assets - you can't just add any nft willy nilly.

An nft can also include a hash of some offchain data. In this way it can make a verifiable claim about content.

The developers cannot make something trustlessly unique. If they control the database it is a simple query to up the count to 2!

it's up to the nft originator to assign ownership in just one jurisdiction. if they create and sell multiple nfts in different venues, but for the same item, then i imagine that would damage their reputation and the value of their prior and future items. the chain itself does not assign ownership independent of the nft originator. with art i think nfts do function very much like certificates of provenance. game items are different in that the community of players, or the company hosting/developing, indicates the proper database source (chain).

You cannot create duplicate NFTs. That is the whole point. The reason to have NFTs (and also fungible tokens) in games is that the gamers would know and be able to trust that the quantity of a given item was fixed. There may be more appeal to play a game where the economy was predictable and couldn't be later manipulated by the company or original game creators.

The blockchain is the database. It stores objects and, like postgres, can store code for manipulating the objects. Each NFT would have a particular storage location which you can query, either directly via a block explorer like etherscan.io or via javascript using any one of a number of apis like ethers.js

NFTs and Bitcoin are both forms of tokens, which represent digital property rights.

The parent comment almost certainly understands this and was talking more broadly about forms of digital ownership. So your blasting them was kind of cringe.

Property is social consensus. Blockchains offer a more convenient and useful way to record that social consensus.

> and claim they own it.

But that claim means nothing if the in-game asset is not recognized in the game, and that copied artwork is for some crazy reason not recognized by other interested parties as the actual original NFT. None of them are the original NFT, minted by the creator.

You can't sell a private key because you can't provably delete any potential remaining copies you might have. You could continue to sell the private key to others.

This is the value of blockchain in a nutshell. Programmable trust. All manner of tokens (represented things - both digital and not), can be moved, modified, leveraged, etc. It is a public ledger and api for trust. Probably people still under-appreciate the utility, liquidity, and overall productivity boon this will be.

It's more convenient to query a database than to ask everyone.

Crypto has added a lot to aggregate wealth over the past 12m.

in the US the transfers you describe are not capital gains (either short of long term). The first, payment for services, is just income of $1k. The second, swapping BUSD for USD, is not income, nor cap gains, so has no tax applied.

The only way to build wealth is by investing. The SEC gate-keeping this is outrageous.

If you receive it as income then it's taxable at that point at $ value. If you later sell or trade it you realize capital gains (or losses) and that is a further taxable event.

blockchains are databases.

transactions change the state of the database. they aren't limited to trading-related transactions.

Buying hardware to mine vs buying tokens to stake... really there is no difference in accessibility here.

> The multi-level marketing ponzi scheme things would still be present.

Yes, there are scams. But even in 2017 ICO days these were easy to spot - wailing and teeth nashing over ICO scams was dumb then and still is now.

> Yes, but "crypto" means something else.

I'm sorry but words mean what people who use them want them to mean in order to communicate ideas between them. Meanings evolve and words are co-opted and probably people should get over that.

> It's not. It's about greed and creating money for yourself. Currencies are just more direct.

I guess I can agree if what you mean by greed I replace with self-interest based mechanism design. I don't believe this needs to be zero sum, though. Maybe we'd differ on that.

This is really a complaint against Proof of Work based consensus protocols.

"Cryptocurrency" is also kind of a dumb term. Everyone seems to still think this is about creating new currencies. Really we are talking about tokens that represent some component of a system. Yes that is general because the base for experimentation with tokens is absurdly vast. God we need to move beyond thinking about Bitcoin! Really this article is saying "Fuck Bitcoin" and well, I'd agree with that at this point.

As someone quite involved in the Ethereum ecosystem - I totally agree. I also believe the Ethereum network will switch entirely to Proof of Stake this year.

Sovereign identity, DAOs, NFTs (not just the art stuff which atm is a little cringe but game items, land registries, deeds), stablecoins (usdc, dai, yes there is also wilder experimentation here).

I think people can quickly get dissuaded by some negatives like lack of scaling or environmental issues. These are real but are being solved. We really need communities like HN to engage because if proponents are right then the change will be vast and we are unprepared.

My personal favorite outcome is playing out right now. When a tech company is successful they capture near 100% of the value, despite leeching content off users. Ethereum based projects generally share rewards with the community of users that make the protocol/network successful. Applications are forkable, not just the code but the community, too. The community is in control.

How can you not see what the importance of this new infrastructure? I come here and read these comments and am just at a loss for words at this point. Forget Bitcoin and look at Ethereum. This tech is so powerful I am in some ways scared of it and you call it a fad. The gulf between our interpretations drops my jaw to the floor :)

Non-pegged stablecoins are now starting to be experimented with on Ethereum, Rai and Bank/Float, for example.

> why haven't we seen them be successfully implemented already

They require cutting edge cryptographic and blockchain research and development which has only recently been achieved. Many teams are racing to solve this because there is a fortune to be made for whoever does. So probably these developments will be delivered no later than possibly can be.

Might be tough to hear but it is money if people use it as money and they certainly are within the Ethereum ecosystem. Bitcoin's promise of only 21m is based on a wing and a prayer (very suspect whether fees can ensure security in place of mining rewards) whereas ETH is based on 1) primacy as money within Ethereum, 2) utility - required for paying Ethereum tx fees, 3) earning potential with PoS staking, 4) deflationary pressure from fee burning under EIP 1559.

Bitcoin is not sustainable even for providing for it's own security let alone from an environmental perspective. Bitcoin also gives the world very little in exchange for these massive externalized costs. It will eventually fail and the ethical loop-jumping that proponents espouse will become clear.

But other blockchain platforms are the mirror opposite. They can provide sustainable security, provided without environmental degradation, along with utility that will radically change most sectors of the economy in a similar if not even a greater degree than the internet did.

If you are dismissing crypto because you don't like bitcoin or proof of work (mining) then it may worth trying to look past that and reevaluate. Immutable ledgers, namely Ethereum, are transforming finance and that is just the low hanging fruit for this technology.

Could bottlerocket be the basis for desktop system where it would be easy to switch between isolated environments? It would be very handy to have a maximally secure environment, at least from software perspective, for certain operations.