scyclow

Even if it is an oversimplified story to explain a more difficult concept, it's often used as a moral justification. And really, I'd say Debt is more about the moral justifications of capitalism than it is an economic argument one way or the other.

Aave's documentation [1] is pretty good if you're interested in doing a deeper dive. But yeah, it's a collateralized loan where the borrower stakes some ETH.

So the idea is that I can take $100 worth of ETH and put that up as collateral for a $75 loan. And if the value of my collateral drops due to the ETH<>USD exchange rate I have to stake more collateral. If I don't (or if the exchange rate moves below a certain point) then my collateral is automatically liquidated at a discount. So in this case, if the value of my collateral falls to $80 the contract will put it up for sale at $75 -- this creates an arbitrage opportunity, so the liquidation will likely happen very quickly.

There are other lending protocols where you can stake other assets (NFTs, other tokens, etc.), but this is my understanding of how Aave works.

[1] https://docs.aave.com/faq/

They're basically receipts for putting money into a lending pool. In this case he's lending about $130 million, on which he's earning interest, and can get his money back by redeeming those tokens.

He had $130 million wrapped up in an ERC20 token called Aave wETH (aWETH). ERC20 tokens let you approve another address to spend those tokens on your behalf. Basically, the scammers tried to trick him into approving all of his Aave wETH by creating a fake website designed to make him think that he's approving a different token with the same aWETH symbol.

Again, I think the act of "owning" it creates a much different relationship between the collector and that art than simply looking at it. They have skin in the game because they either spent money on the piece, or were able to mint it by being in the right place at the right time.

To be sure, a lot of the "advocacy" is exactly what you describe, where people are just trying to push their bags. But the advocacy I'm talking about is more about the social element of discussing the art with other people in the community.

The website is certainly a valid way to display a limited generative art collection, but it's a different experience. It means that the artist _can_ curate the collection and hide some of the rough edges of the algorithm... but then it loses some of its magic. NFTs have sort of enabled a new sub genre of generative art [1].

[1] https://tylerxhobbs.com/essays/2021/the-rise-of-long-form-ge...

With respect to point 1, I'm sympathetic to your response, but I don't see things quite as bleakly for a few reasons:

- NFTs create a scarcity of ownership, but they don't create a scarcity of enjoyment or experience. In fact, the entire NFT generative art community is based around the idea of viewing and enjoying pieces that you don't personally own.

- I don't think scarcity of ownership is necessarily a bad thing. Having put some skin in the game for that specific piece, the owner sort of becomes that piece's biggest advocate. And this allows many collectors to form a much stronger relationship to the piece than they would have if they saved a copy of an image they found on instagram.

- A generative algorithm can theoretically produce an infinite number of outputs, and I think there are valid artistic reasons to want to limit the set to a specific size. For example, maybe the algorithm no longer produces unique results after 500 or so iterations, and the artist wants to cap the collection at that size to allow people to become familiar with that amount of outputs. Managing this with NFTs allows the artist to create a canonical collection limited to the desired size along with the proof that they all derive from the same algorithm.

- Blockchains are still fairly new as an artistic medium, and I think many artists will find ways to create interesting projects without leaning as much on scarcity. Some projects do open editions, which we may see more of in the future. Scarcity is simply a tool at the artist's disposal.

(Disclaimer: I'm an artist who makes a lot of generative NFTs, so I'm heavily biased)

I wouldn't think so. BTC uses an unspent transaction output model, which is like breaking up a plot of land into smaller pieces, and treating each square inch as fungible. ERC20 tokens are based on an accounting model, so you're just incrementing and decrementing balances -- nothing to trace there.

Amazing website! I think it also (inadvertently) paints a very clear value proposition as to why NFTs make more sense on a blockchain than on a central service.

Oh my god, this video is incredible. Truly a work of art.

This is a really good and well=researched article. I think it highlights a lot of current problems with the existing web3 ecosystem. A few thoughts after reading it:

- For NFTs in particular, I agree that the ecosystem is way too centered around OpenSea. But things also seem to be generally moving in the right direction here too. I've seen a lot of new exchanges pop up recently, some of which put more of an emphasis on decentralization (such as zora [1]). There are also some new standards on the royalty front [2]. Exchanges may or may not pay attention to it, but it's at least a start.

- The ecosystem's current centralization around Infura and Alchemy is also concerning. But as with the other issues, I think there's a definite path towards improvement. In the meantime, choosing an Ethereum node service feels kind of like choosing an ISP. But at least I'm not bound to a single service by physical architecture.

- In the absence of any improvements to Ethereum's scalability, I don't think it has much of a future. Sure, you can do some interesting things on it today, but high gas prices and low tx throughput make it impractical for many applications and most internet users. That said, there seems to be a lot of resources being thrown at various scalability solutions. Whether or not we see them in the near future is one story, but there's at least a viable roadmap, which makes me optimistic. And I think a lot of the centralization issues are a direct result of the scalability issues. So as the latter improves, I'd expect the former to improve as well.

- I disagree with the analysis that OpenSea would be much better as a centralized service. Part of what makes it valuable is that it can (fairly easily, but no seamlessly) integrate with other software (contracts) deployed to a global public network. I'd imagine it would be very difficult for OpenSea to get off the ground if they had to build their own general purpose contract VM that thousands of people would be willing to build on top of. On top of that, it would be a lot harder to tell a convincing story about what happens to peoples NFTs if they go out of business. However, if scalability doesn't improve, I agree that OpenSea and Coinbase will likely move in an increasingly centralized direction until most of the web3 components are stripped out.

- I definitely agree that people (myself included) don't want to run their own servers, but I wonder if Ethereum's Proof of Stake will change things. Supposedly I can run a validator on a raspberry pi. So if there's enough of a financial incentive to keep one running, I may do so.

[1] https://zora.co/ [2] https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-2981

In my opinion the best starter book is Generative Design, hands down. If there was a generative art 101 textbook, this would be it.

https://www.amazon.com/Generative-Design-Visualize-Program-J...

p5 is great! Very easy to learn and has an amazing online editor to get you started immediately. Such a good tool for prototyping ideas quickly.

https://editor.p5js.org/

It provides value to people who want to compute things on a public network that no single party controls. We can argue about whether or not that's a worthwhile thing for people to value until the cows come home, but I think it's beyond the scope of this conversation.

But point taken. I'll avoid using fancy technical lingo like "BFT" or "cryptographic" on hacker news any more.

What's gibberish about the implication? That's all a blockchain is. It takes cryptographic signatures (or more specifically, transactions that are cryptographically signed), and puts them in order.

As pointed out, the cryptography existed well before blockchain. My only point was that the fancy decentralized way it orders the transactions is the real innovation.

(edit: grammer)

I don't really care about upvotes, I just think that it's an important point to understand the technology. I'm not saying anything positive or negative about it. I'm just that blockchains are about more than logging cryptographic signatures -- they're also about ordering those cryptographic signatures.

I mean, if you don't know what byzantine fault tolerance [1] is, then that's fine. It's not gibberish to people who are into distributed systems. And I'm not claiming it's a silver bullet or trying to persuade anyone either. BFT is overkill for most use cases, but sometimes it's useful. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault

The critical innovation of blockchain is that it takes your digital signatures and orders them in a way that's byzantine fault tolerant.

I tried to sell pictures of discarded ketchup packets as NFTs [1]. They didn't sell very well. I guess the market for ketchup packets isn't as hot as I thought it was.

I learned that flashy websites can't quite sell everything.

[1] https://steviep.xyz/natural-flavors/

I think the valuation of most NFTs is insane, but underlying all that I think they just tap into the desire to collect things. Personally, I've collected much dumber things than NFTs in the past. I don't think collecting NFTs is any dumber than collecting bottle caps, baseball cards, conceptual art certificates of authenticity, or digital goods managed by centralized entities. The big difference is that NFTs are liquid and visible, so it's very easy for a culture to form around collecting weird shit.

I'm inclined to say that the Fed keeps interest rates low _and_ crypto undergoes a major correction, but I feel like these are almost mutually exclusive scenarios. This isn't to say that crypto is inherently a good inflation hedge, but it definitely seems like the recent crypto bull run is a direct result of asset price inflation.

This is true! But it's also hard to think of a situation in which you would need to store that encrypted data on chain. Why not store it on a central server? Or, encrypted on a p2p network? And if order of events is important, you could just store a hash of the data on chain.

I think we're on the same page. That's kind of what I was saying about how you're essentially open sourcing the "read" on data.

Also, I'm not trying to sell the write side short! Owning writes is the major value proposition of a blockchain. I just feel like people conflate the two when talking about on chain ownership

I think the best examples of Decentralized Woo Hoo is the phrase "ownership over your data". When most people hear this they think of facebook selling their data to third parties, using it for targeted advertising, etc. But in the context of blockchains, owning data only means that you own writes to the data. From a read standpoint, all data is essentially open source. I have sole discretion to send you an NFT, but facebook is still free to use that sale data to sell me things.

This distinction appears to be lost on a lot of people who are new to the space, and leads to a lot of marketing fluff around projects that make no sense.

They are all irreplaceable, but some are more irreplaceable than others . It's like how I can always buy a new car, but I can't buy a new family heirloom.

More of a eulogy, but what's the difference these days?

Believe me, I was as surprised as you were at how fast it happened.

This is a pretty bad take. If you want a 100% trust less system, then sure. Go for it. But you can incorporate whatever logic you want into your smart contract. This can include giving a specific party the ability to revoke ownership.

Curious how this will interact with the likes of CryptoVoxels, Decentraland, and The Sandbox.

Interesting! I've also been doing a bunch of generative art recently. That description almost reminds me of this artblocks project https://artblocks.io/project/31

I think it's a little silly to ask "but is it _really_ art?" To me, it feels like it's no less art than photography. Photographers don't create the world they're photographing, but they engage in an incredibly high level of curation to show the viewer something unique.

At the end of the day, anyone who looks at this and enjoys it doesn't really care if it's _really_ art. But they'll get bored with it eventually as they start to notice little similarities. That is, until they find a set of pieces generated by someone else's prompts which, for some reason, feel fundamentally different. At that point I think the "it's not art" argument starts breaking down.