scyclow

Am I the only one who thinks that reading all the "highest rated" NFT books on Amazon in an attempt to write a good-faith critique is hilarious?

What exactly is precluding someone from building this today, regardless of the tumor?

Easy solution: sell the CryptoPunks and give those proceeds to charity instead.

Re 2b: While the scenario you're outlining certainly isn't ideal, I don't think it's fair to say that the transactions are "censored". All they can do is not validate blocks with this transactions in them. It's only a matter of time though before a block is validated by someone not under the purview by OFAC.

The Heaven's Gate website is pretty cool https://heavensgate.com/

Maybe we're just talking past each other, but this is the entire point of a smart contract platform. I deploy code to it, and you now have a guarantee forever on the interface of that code, as well as its implementation logic. If I'm running the same code on my server and you're hitting my API, then I can change the interface, change the logic, or mutate the data in ways not specified by that code.

So really when I say "applications" I'm referring specifically to other smart contracts.

Art

I'm not trying to swindle you. I'm trying to have an intelligent conversation. You don't need to call all my points bullshit :)

It depends on the level of guarantees you want for that data. If we're communicating, and you're okay with me changing my APIs, or even changing the data itself in ways we didn't previously agree upon, then you 100% don't need a blockchain. And if you don't have a lot of entities that need to coordinate on the data, then there might be an easier solution.

I think it really depends on what you want to do. If you want build a comment system for your website, then web3 is totally the wrong tool for the job. If you want to write an application that coordinates data across multiple websites, and you're worried about servers going down or APIs changing, then it's a little trickier to think of a simpler way.

I think they solve different problems. I love independent websites, and the web is an amazing medium for serving stateless content. But I think web3 compliments it really well when you want to do something that hooks into a larger, stateful ecosystem.

I think the main class of problems it solves is it lets multiple applications, which may be developed by completely different entities at different times, share data with very strong guarantees.

So in the context of the Web Revivalist movement, how do you build stateful applications? It's great when individuals host their own DIY servers, but that doesn't really give you much stability. And in aggregate, it's even more difficult to build rich, stateful ecosystems of applications. How do you handle servers going down and APIs changing? Link rot for stateless websites is a hard enough as it is.

You do. Although, the guy with the chip in his hand paid the gas for that transaction.

I'm looking forward to the NFT bear market where Ethereum moves to Proof of Stake, and people realize that unique digital assets are fun to create, collect, and trade without having to make money on them.

The Worm is a really fun one. The idea is that you transfer the worm NFT from wallet to wallet (it's "trying to visit every wallet on the Ethereum blockchain"), and it leaves a non-transferrable token wherever it's been. To my knowledge, it's been transferred about 750 times without anyone selling it. https://theworm.wtf/

Another cool one is minting amulets. You write a poem, and if the hash of that poem has an amulet in it (four or more consecutive 8s), then you can mint it as a token for your collection. But you can't mint the same hashed poem twice https://text.bargains/collection/

I also met someone once who gave me (and everyone he meets) an NFT from an RFID chip implanted in his hand. That was pretty whacky.

> So "web3" can only exist where there's some financial incentive to run miners.

I can say the same about anything else on the internet. Keeping the servers running costs money

> Users can't spend real money to access this system so they need to convert their money to Geoffrey dollars to even access "web3" content.

You can actually access most web3 content without spending Geoffrey dollars, or US Dollars. If we're talking about public blockchains like Ethereum, it's all out in the open. By definition, it's a public ledger. IPFS data (which has nothing to do with crypto) is also very public.

> End users needed no more investment than their computer and Internet connection.

I guess some web3 websites require you to connect with a wallet, but downloading a browser extension doesn't seem very prohibitive.

It makes me very happy to know that all of these websites exist.

It also makes me sad to see unnecessary hostility towards crypto. I get it: most NFTs are hyper commercialized trash, and they're in direct opposition to the values outlined in this article. But there's also so much weird, non-commercialized crypto stuff out there that shares a lot of the ethos of early web tinkerers.

I always wonder if the people writing these articles understand that a very small fraction of the NFT ecosystem lives on BTC. BTC is the only cryptocurrency it mentions by name, and it then goes on to state "oh yeah, all those NFTs are also worthless, as are the other unnamed cryptocurrencies, which I'm sure are the same thing as Bitcoin"

As I said, I'm not trying to convince you that they aren't stupid and worthless here -- just that there's a flourishing and highly functioning ecosystem built around them, which couldn't really exist in any other context.

Also, there are plenty of smart display companies popping up. Check out Infinite Objects or Atomic Forms.

That's a needlessly rigid, and depressingly simple definition. Art is just the thing that people refer to when they use the word "art".

Whether or not you think NFTs are stupid and totally worthless, there's a fairly extensive economy based around fine art NFTs where collectors (who view them more as consumption goods than investments) buy and sell in ETH. And despite wild fluctuations in ETH<>USD, people's mental accounting is generally denominated in ETH.

Took 17 responses, but I think your second point answers my question. Thank you.

I really don't understand why anyone wants algorithmic stable coins. It really just seems like the worst of both worlds. If you want a crypto asset that correlates with USD, why not buy something like USDC that's actually... you know, backed by USD?

True. I'm curious what this sort of hit replacement would look like in practice. But, you can't add it in after the fact, so you at least have the option of writing contracts that give you the formal guarantee.

Nothing really. It's just one kind of immutable ledger. If you have a use case where decentralization of the infrastructure is important, you don't care as much about network effects, and you know all your counterparties, then a private chain might be suitable.

Don't get me wrong, the decentralization is important. I'd rather the network infrastructure of an expansive, public, general purpose computing network be decentralized. But to be useful in the first place you need important, interoperable applications running on it.

If I write some dip shit application and host it on my server, and you want to write an application that interops with mine, I can change my API (or the data itself) under your nose. You have no formal guarantees. Smart contracts make guarantees about what can change and what can't change.

I feel like this article, among others, kind of misses the point on why blockchains are useful. Decentralization, IMO, is incredibly overrated. What makes blockchains useful is that you can build highly interoperable applications that won't break due to changing interfaces. If AWS or the US government built a similar general purpose, open smart contract platform, I think we'd see similar levels of activity there. But they didn't, so we're using blockchains instead.

When I read the title of this post, Jon Bois was the first thing that came to mind. 17776 is one of my all time favorite websites, and my goto example of amazing hypertext fiction.

https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football

I've found that all the smart crypto people congregate on twitter and discord, which is sort of a shame because it results in a lot of the conversation being ephemeral.

As someone who sells and genuinely enjoys collecting NFTs, it always boggles my mind when I find people who genuinely believe that they're good "investments".