7 ms·

The Most Important Scarce Resource Is Legitimacy

121 points by ve55 6y ago

zuhayeer 6y ago
Legitimacy sounds very much like consensus
- vbuterin 6y ago
  It is.
  - ampdepolymerase 6y ago
    The software engineer finally understands political science. I would ask you for your opinions on certain issues but unfortunately they are but unsolvable with technical solutions.
    - noofen 6y ago
      Technology got us into most of these political messes. The only way out, is through.
capableweb 6y ago
A curious observation about NFTs that many on HN seems to have missed in other threads: > Why is it that Elon Musk can sell an NFT of Elon Musk's tweet, but Jeff Bezos would have a much harder time doing the same? Elon and Jeff have the same level of ability to screenshot Elon's tweet and stick it into an NFT dapp, so what's the difference? To anyone who has even a basic intuitive understanding of human social psychology (or the fake art scene), the answer is obvious: Elon selling Elon's tweet is the real thing, and Jeff doing the same is not. Once again, millions of dollars of value are being controlled and allocated, not by individuals or cryptographic keys, but by social conceptions of legitimacy.
- sporkologist 6y ago
  Do NFT's really only have value upon their first sale? Wouldn't that be basically a donation to Elon with no expectation of value on the secondary market?
  - Swizec 6y ago
    Otherwise known as the reason large art sales exist: Money laundering et al. It is very convenient when you get to call your money transfer "A Sale". If the thing you're buying has a publicly verifiable (albeit dubious/preposterous) market value, you aren't even committing fraud!
  - Jarwain 6y ago
    Resale of an NFT is different; since you can look up previous owners of the NFT there's a way to validate "yes this NFT is the one originally sold by Elon". The NFT has value Because it was the one Elon sold and signified as legit, versus the NFT some random person sold
    - sporkologist 6y ago
      Yeah but it's still "Elon's 2nd hand NFT"
- Jarwain 6y ago
  I think if Jeff Bezos decided to sell an NFT of Elon's first tweet, there would be more value there compared to if some random person sold an NFT representing the same thing
  - capableweb 6y ago
    Correct, but maybe you're missing the point if that's your first thought. It now becomes "The NFT that Jeff Bezos made of Elon's first tweet", not the "Elon Musk NFT of Elon Musk", both obviously much more "interesting" (for human reasons? I don't know, don't care) than the "John Smith NFT of Elon Musk"
- 6y ago
magwa101 6y ago
Even though he promotes NFTs as a way for artists to capture value...he also proposes that there is a charity component? Um, what?
akyu 6y ago
It seems that nearly every "public good" in the Ethereum ecosystem got gobbled up by VCs and pivoted to for-profit endeavors. I don't mind VCs and I don't mind people seeking profit, but this moral high ground that Ethereum has been trying to build for itself is delusional. In practice it is just a marketing gimmick. An astute observer may have noticed that Vitalik has a habit of coming up with definitions that only himself and the Ethereum foundation can meet the standards of. The reality is everyone is just trying to make money. I think we are better off coming to terms with that instead of living in a collective fantasy.
- capableweb 6y ago
  > The reality is everyone is just trying to make money. I think we are better off coming to terms with that instead of living in a collective fantasy. The reality is that not everyone does the same thing for the same reasons. No, not everyone working in the Ethereum ecosystem does so just to make quick money, just like not everyone is working in the military just to kill people, some try to help make the world better.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - akyu 6y ago
    Don't worry, what I'm telling you is actually good for your bags. You should be happy about this.
    - solveit 6y ago
      This comment is none of informative, kind, necessary. I would rather see less content-free sneering on HN.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    Ethereum has promise. At least they are willing to fix the flaws even if they fail at this task. Bitcoin is basically frozen in time. It has nothing going for it other than first move advantage and that first mover advantage is just a bunch of "bag holders" trying to get rid of their MLM product.
jasode 6y ago
>Why is it that Elon Musk can sell an NFT of Elon Musk's tweet, but Jeff Bezos would have a much harder time doing the same? Elon and Jeff have the same level of ability to screenshot Elon's tweet and stick it into an NFT dapp, so what's the difference? To anyone who has even a basic intuitive understanding of human social psychology (or the fake art scene), the answer is obvious: Elon selling Elon's tweet is the real thing, and Jeff doing the same is not. Once again, millions of dollars of value are being controlled and allocated, not by individuals or cryptographic keys, but by social conceptions of legitimacy. It seems like Vitalik has stumbled into another restatement of the famous essay "What Colour are your bits?"[1] ... which is basically a poetic way of saying "What _Provenance_ are your bits?" Provenance matters. (But I'm not claiming that NFTs will have enduring value. I can't tell if they will be a fad or not.) [1] https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23#:~:text=Having%20identical%20bits%20means%20by,computers%2C%20are%20Colour%2Dblind https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23#:~:text=Having%20identica....
- timoth3y 6y ago
  > ... but Jeff Bezos would have a much harder time doing the same? I question that assumption. Let's keep in mind that we have already accepted that URLs pointing to a video or jpeg become valuable once they are put on a blockchain. So let's keep an open mind here. NFTs have value because people believe they have value, and people currently believe they have value because a lot of people are telling good stories about why the should. So, while Jeff could not sell Elon's tweet while claiming to the Elon, he could easily sell it by telling a different story. The more attention-getting the better. He could easily sell it is part of his limited collection of "!00 stupidest tweets of all time" or something like that. The hype-machine would kick in and everyone would want to "own a part of it."
  - thefourthchime 6y ago
    Oh I bet Jeff could sell a tweet from Elon, it just won't got for as much.
    - tehlike 6y ago
xiphias2 6y ago
> Clearly, this expenditure pattern is a massive misallocation of resources. The last 20% of network hashpower provides vastly less value to the ecosystem than those same resources would if they had gone into research and core protocol development. So why not just.... cut the PoW budget by 20% and redirect the funds to those other things instead? I would prefer probably the other way for Bitcoin: keeping at least 1% inflation for securing via proof of work would be great, but as it's immutable (unlike Ethereum), the two networks will be even more different over time. I view this as a great thing, we don't need the same system twice. I love how boring Bitcoin is just like I love to see the new UniSwap version with its great improvements.
luxuryballs 6y ago
Are we forgetting to account for the lack of centralized banking and everything that comes along with it when factoring in the cost of Bitcoin? No need for tellers and bank branches, no fiat, all of these things should be included in the comparison, along with tons of stuff I can’t even think of that it takes to run a centralized banking system. Heck just the absence of a federal reserve with the ability to do stupid things to the currency might pay for itself.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
csomar 6y ago
Is it me or Vitalik seems to be going a bit far... > The powerful social force that is creating this effect is worth understanding. As we are going to see, it's also the same social force behind why the Ethereum ecosystem is capable of summoning up these resources in the first place (and the technologically near-identical Ethereum Classic is not) The dude is turning megalomaniac, and is not realizing that a portion of miners are not happy with the protocol changes. His answer to that seems to be that he is the "legitimate" source of truth? I guess it's time to short Ethereum or run from your long. *: Not trading advice.
- noofen 6y ago
  Honestly, who cares about the miners? As far as I can tell, Proof of Stake is better in every way, for ETH users and developers. I will enjoy the schadenfreude knowing you're shorting ETH.
  - raedah 6y ago
    The largest downfall in PoS is how the new coins go to existing coin holders, causing the rich to get richer .. centralizing the ownership of the network. PoW miners have hard cost to pay in the competitive market and the profit margins tend towards zero. This real cost means that miners have to sell coins if they need to recover production costs. The selling creates downward pressure until the market settles at a natural price floor. Gold buyers have understood the market price floor in relation to production costs for a long time. This lack of production costs with pure PoS systems leads to centralized ownership and a manipulated market, and this is why we see pure PoS coins with manipulated sky high market caps. I will never buy a pure PoS coin because a manipulated price doesn't satisfy legitimacy by fairness.
- samatman 6y ago
  The term "Proof of Vitalik" was coined to explain the difference in market value between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic after the split. The value of having a Vitalik is clearly considerable, but it isn't infinite. He fundamentally must persuade, because he has no ability to command. That's his legitimacy: people mostly do what he wants, even though they don't have to. If he loses the legitimacy, that's what he loses.
schaefer 6y ago
I’d gladly trade away some of my legitimacy for more hours in the day. Honestly, who cares what other people think.
rektide 6y ago
> they were successfully stopped ish. at best. Hive achieved it's own legitimacy, substantiated itself. but there's no way i'd make a grandiose claim about legitemizability in general, that this phoenix act is repeatable or cost free. this article feels.lile it argues too strongly for forces of cohesion that i don't think exist. right now blocks all have the ability to do whatever precisely because there is low cohesion, that they could just redefine & begin using the the alt system, but that freedom to redefine eeks out of systems, they solidify & set. as an engineer I find that (the ever setting nature of social systems) horrific & wish very much for social rehcohesionability, re-structyring. vitalik's example is good to see. but it feels rare. very undependable. too often legacy & history have too strong a claim on legitemacy.
skybrian 6y ago
If you take something rather silly (lotteries) and donate some of the proceeds to a good cause (state lotteries supporting education) then that makes it more acceptable and respectable, and perhaps more likely to stick around, because people are less likely to turn against it. So, perhaps the same could be done with NFT’s? But Vitalik says this more diplomatically than me.
biren34 6y ago
The idea of NFTs is odd to me. I get the idea of a digitally validated consumable (concert tickets, for example). I get the idea of owning a piece of digital art. But as far as I understand, a lot of NFT transactions are for digital "ownership" without many of the rights normally associated with ownership. They seem more like baseball cards than Picassos. Maybe I just don't get the current frenzy, and that's that--but a lot of the buzz around NFTs make me think there are likely a ton of wash sales that fake run up the price to unload lower priced ones on speculators. It just has my spider sense tingling that something shady is going on. Think of all the farmland or Bitcoin or stock in copper miners you could buy with these sums. How could the joy of ownership over a collectible compete? Or do these people really believe that these things will appreciate from these prices?
Animats 6y ago
In this context, "legitimacy" is mostly "value from popularity". This becomes clear in the collectables market. Beanie Babies are not particularly good dolls, but through marketing, they became "collectable". Collectable plates used to be a thing, back when people had large cabinets with glass-fronted doors for displaying dinnerware. You can still get them on eBay. "Lot of 3 Vintage Lena Liu Country Accents Numbered Bradford Exchange 1995 Plates Pre-Owned $24.99"[1] Zero bids. There's a vast amount of stuff like that. Nobody makes much money off of it other than the manufacturers. Even they don't do that well. Warner Bros. once bought the Franklin Mint, around the time they bought AOL and Time. That didn't work out well. That's what the NFT proponents are trying to replicate - mass-market collectables. With an additional "fear of missing out" component. The high-dollar one-offs are promotional items for a projected flood of bulk collectables. (If they're even real. Those hyped multi-million dollar items, if they sell at all, do not seem to be closing as legitimate arms-length transactions where real money changes hands. See the Beeple fiasco.) As a store of value, NFTs are terrible. None of this stuff is very liquid. Too many different items, and no market price. You have to put the thing up for sale and wait. Wait too long, and nobody cares. This Three Stooges collectable plate [2] can be yours very cheaply. The shipping and handling is more than the price, so the transaction cost is more than it's worth. At least NFTs don't have high storage costs. [1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/Lot-of-3-Vintage-Lena-Liu-Country-Accents-Numbered-Bradford-Exchange-1995-Plates/114738731393 https://www.ebay.com/itm/Lot-of-3-Vintage-Lena-Liu-Country-A... [2] https://www.ebay.com/itm/Three-Stooges-Pop-Art-The-Franklin-Mint-Heirloom-Collector-Plate-1994-Rt-0030/313263518547 https://www.ebay.com/itm/Three-Stooges-Pop-Art-The-Franklin-...
raedah 6y ago
"Clearly, this expenditure pattern is a massive misallocation of resources. The last 20% of network hashpower provides vastly less value to the ecosystem than those same resources would if they had gone into research and core protocol development. So why not just.... cut the PoW budget by 20% and redirect the funds to those other things instead?" "even though we could easily identify some valuable public goods to redirect some funding to as a one-off, making a regular institutionalized pattern of such decisions carries risks of political chaos and capture that are in the long run not worth it." He gets the premise entirely wrong here. The chaos in these blockchain protocols is due to there not being a clear and well defined process for doing consensus rule upgrades. PoW miners control these chains. The power over the chain by PoW miners has become centralized into increasingly smaller number of participants with their own selfish interests. No upgrade will happen without their embracing it. Overriding the miners then becomes a vague and undefined matter of 'economic consensus' which means different things to different people and is not measurable. Decred has consensus rules for upgrading its consensus rules. The hybrid PoW/PoS system allows for the security and fair distribution provided by PoW while allowing PoS... the economic stakeholders with the the most to lose, to make the decisions about the future of the chain. Lead Developer for Decred, Dave Collins, outlines this concept nicely. (4 min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJs4T0WGe7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJs4T0WGe7k
SergeAx 6y ago
NFT minted by Elon Musk is exactly equivalent to NFT by Jeff Bezos in their primary mean: real value of them is exactly zero and it is universally stupid to exchange any viable resource (being money or anything else) for them. The only sane exchange for NFT is another NFT.

121 points by ve55 6y ago

zuhayeer 6y ago

Legitimacy sounds very much like consensus

vbuterin 6y ago
It is.
- ampdepolymerase 6y ago
  The software engineer finally understands political science. I would ask you for your opinions on certain issues but unfortunately they are but unsolvable with technical solutions.
  - noofen 6y ago
    Technology got us into most of these political messes. The only way out, is through.

capableweb 6y ago

A curious observation about NFTs that many on HN seems to have missed in other threads: > Why is it that Elon Musk can sell an NFT of Elon Musk's tweet, but Jeff Bezos would have a much harder time doing the same? Elon and Jeff have the same level of ability to screenshot Elon's tweet and stick it into an NFT dapp, so what's the difference? To anyone who has even a basic intuitive understanding of human social psychology (or the fake art scene), the answer is obvious: Elon selling Elon's tweet is the real thing, and Jeff doing the same is not. Once again, millions of dollars of value are being controlled and allocated, not by individuals or cryptographic keys, but by social conceptions of legitimacy.

sporkologist 6y ago
Do NFT's really only have value upon their first sale? Wouldn't that be basically a donation to Elon with no expectation of value on the secondary market?
- Swizec 6y ago
  Otherwise known as the reason large art sales exist: Money laundering et al. It is very convenient when you get to call your money transfer "A Sale". If the thing you're buying has a publicly verifiable (albeit dubious/preposterous) market value, you aren't even committing fraud!
- Jarwain 6y ago
  Resale of an NFT is different; since you can look up previous owners of the NFT there's a way to validate "yes this NFT is the one originally sold by Elon". The NFT has value Because it was the one Elon sold and signified as legit, versus the NFT some random person sold
  - sporkologist 6y ago
    Yeah but it's still "Elon's 2nd hand NFT"
Jarwain 6y ago
I think if Jeff Bezos decided to sell an NFT of Elon's first tweet, there would be more value there compared to if some random person sold an NFT representing the same thing
- capableweb 6y ago
  Correct, but maybe you're missing the point if that's your first thought. It now becomes "The NFT that Jeff Bezos made of Elon's first tweet", not the "Elon Musk NFT of Elon Musk", both obviously much more "interesting" (for human reasons? I don't know, don't care) than the "John Smith NFT of Elon Musk"
6y ago

magwa101 6y ago

Even though he promotes NFTs as a way for artists to capture value...he also proposes that there is a charity component? Um, what?

akyu 6y ago

It seems that nearly every "public good" in the Ethereum ecosystem got gobbled up by VCs and pivoted to for-profit endeavors. I don't mind VCs and I don't mind people seeking profit, but this moral high ground that Ethereum has been trying to build for itself is delusional. In practice it is just a marketing gimmick. An astute observer may have noticed that Vitalik has a habit of coming up with definitions that only himself and the Ethereum foundation can meet the standards of. The reality is everyone is just trying to make money. I think we are better off coming to terms with that instead of living in a collective fantasy.

capableweb 6y ago
> The reality is everyone is just trying to make money. I think we are better off coming to terms with that instead of living in a collective fantasy. The reality is that not everyone does the same thing for the same reasons. No, not everyone working in the Ethereum ecosystem does so just to make quick money, just like not everyone is working in the military just to kill people, some try to help make the world better.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- akyu 6y ago
  Don't worry, what I'm telling you is actually good for your bags. You should be happy about this.
  - solveit 6y ago
    This comment is none of informative, kind, necessary. I would rather see less content-free sneering on HN.
- imtringued 6y ago
  Ethereum has promise. At least they are willing to fix the flaws even if they fail at this task. Bitcoin is basically frozen in time. It has nothing going for it other than first move advantage and that first mover advantage is just a bunch of "bag holders" trying to get rid of their MLM product.

jasode 6y ago

>Why is it that Elon Musk can sell an NFT of Elon Musk's tweet, but Jeff Bezos would have a much harder time doing the same? Elon and Jeff have the same level of ability to screenshot Elon's tweet and stick it into an NFT dapp, so what's the difference? To anyone who has even a basic intuitive understanding of human social psychology (or the fake art scene), the answer is obvious: Elon selling Elon's tweet is the real thing, and Jeff doing the same is not. Once again, millions of dollars of value are being controlled and allocated, not by individuals or cryptographic keys, but by social conceptions of legitimacy. It seems like Vitalik has stumbled into another restatement of the famous essay "What Colour are your bits?"[1] ... which is basically a poetic way of saying "What _Provenance_ are your bits?" Provenance matters. (But I'm not claiming that NFTs will have enduring value. I can't tell if they will be a fad or not.) [1] https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23#:~:text=Having%20identical%20bits%20means%20by,computers%2C%20are%20Colour%2Dblind https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23#:~:text=Having%20identica....

timoth3y 6y ago
> ... but Jeff Bezos would have a much harder time doing the same? I question that assumption. Let's keep in mind that we have already accepted that URLs pointing to a video or jpeg become valuable once they are put on a blockchain. So let's keep an open mind here. NFTs have value because people believe they have value, and people currently believe they have value because a lot of people are telling good stories about why the should. So, while Jeff could not sell Elon's tweet while claiming to the Elon, he could easily sell it by telling a different story. The more attention-getting the better. He could easily sell it is part of his limited collection of "!00 stupidest tweets of all time" or something like that. The hype-machine would kick in and everyone would want to "own a part of it."
- thefourthchime 6y ago
  Oh I bet Jeff could sell a tweet from Elon, it just won't got for as much.
  - tehlike 6y ago

xiphias2 6y ago

> Clearly, this expenditure pattern is a massive misallocation of resources. The last 20% of network hashpower provides vastly less value to the ecosystem than those same resources would if they had gone into research and core protocol development. So why not just.... cut the PoW budget by 20% and redirect the funds to those other things instead? I would prefer probably the other way for Bitcoin: keeping at least 1% inflation for securing via proof of work would be great, but as it's immutable (unlike Ethereum), the two networks will be even more different over time. I view this as a great thing, we don't need the same system twice. I love how boring Bitcoin is just like I love to see the new UniSwap version with its great improvements.

luxuryballs 6y ago

Are we forgetting to account for the lack of centralized banking and everything that comes along with it when factoring in the cost of Bitcoin? No need for tellers and bank branches, no fiat, all of these things should be included in the comparison, along with tons of stuff I can’t even think of that it takes to run a centralized banking system. Heck just the absence of a federal reserve with the ability to do stupid things to the currency might pay for itself.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

csomar 6y ago

Is it me or Vitalik seems to be going a bit far... > The powerful social force that is creating this effect is worth understanding. As we are going to see, it's also the same social force behind why the Ethereum ecosystem is capable of summoning up these resources in the first place (and the technologically near-identical Ethereum Classic is not) The dude is turning megalomaniac, and is not realizing that a portion of miners are not happy with the protocol changes. His answer to that seems to be that he is the "legitimate" source of truth? I guess it's time to short Ethereum or run from your long. *: Not trading advice.

noofen 6y ago
Honestly, who cares about the miners? As far as I can tell, Proof of Stake is better in every way, for ETH users and developers. I will enjoy the schadenfreude knowing you're shorting ETH.
- raedah 6y ago
  The largest downfall in PoS is how the new coins go to existing coin holders, causing the rich to get richer .. centralizing the ownership of the network. PoW miners have hard cost to pay in the competitive market and the profit margins tend towards zero. This real cost means that miners have to sell coins if they need to recover production costs. The selling creates downward pressure until the market settles at a natural price floor. Gold buyers have understood the market price floor in relation to production costs for a long time. This lack of production costs with pure PoS systems leads to centralized ownership and a manipulated market, and this is why we see pure PoS coins with manipulated sky high market caps. I will never buy a pure PoS coin because a manipulated price doesn't satisfy legitimacy by fairness.
samatman 6y ago
The term "Proof of Vitalik" was coined to explain the difference in market value between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic after the split. The value of having a Vitalik is clearly considerable, but it isn't infinite. He fundamentally must persuade, because he has no ability to command. That's his legitimacy: people mostly do what he wants, even though they don't have to. If he loses the legitimacy, that's what he loses.

schaefer 6y ago

I’d gladly trade away some of my legitimacy for more hours in the day. Honestly, who cares what other people think.

rektide 6y ago

> they were successfully stopped ish. at best. Hive achieved it's own legitimacy, substantiated itself. but there's no way i'd make a grandiose claim about legitemizability in general, that this phoenix act is repeatable or cost free. this article feels.lile it argues too strongly for forces of cohesion that i don't think exist. right now blocks all have the ability to do whatever precisely because there is low cohesion, that they could just redefine & begin using the the alt system, but that freedom to redefine eeks out of systems, they solidify & set. as an engineer I find that (the ever setting nature of social systems) horrific & wish very much for social rehcohesionability, re-structyring. vitalik's example is good to see. but it feels rare. very undependable. too often legacy & history have too strong a claim on legitemacy.

skybrian 6y ago

If you take something rather silly (lotteries) and donate some of the proceeds to a good cause (state lotteries supporting education) then that makes it more acceptable and respectable, and perhaps more likely to stick around, because people are less likely to turn against it. So, perhaps the same could be done with NFT’s? But Vitalik says this more diplomatically than me.

biren34 6y ago

The idea of NFTs is odd to me. I get the idea of a digitally validated consumable (concert tickets, for example). I get the idea of owning a piece of digital art. But as far as I understand, a lot of NFT transactions are for digital "ownership" without many of the rights normally associated with ownership. They seem more like baseball cards than Picassos. Maybe I just don't get the current frenzy, and that's that--but a lot of the buzz around NFTs make me think there are likely a ton of wash sales that fake run up the price to unload lower priced ones on speculators. It just has my spider sense tingling that something shady is going on. Think of all the farmland or Bitcoin or stock in copper miners you could buy with these sums. How could the joy of ownership over a collectible compete? Or do these people really believe that these things will appreciate from these prices?

Animats 6y ago

In this context, "legitimacy" is mostly "value from popularity". This becomes clear in the collectables market. Beanie Babies are not particularly good dolls, but through marketing, they became "collectable". Collectable plates used to be a thing, back when people had large cabinets with glass-fronted doors for displaying dinnerware. You can still get them on eBay. "Lot of 3 Vintage Lena Liu Country Accents Numbered Bradford Exchange 1995 Plates Pre-Owned $24.99"[1] Zero bids. There's a vast amount of stuff like that. Nobody makes much money off of it other than the manufacturers. Even they don't do that well. Warner Bros. once bought the Franklin Mint, around the time they bought AOL and Time. That didn't work out well. That's what the NFT proponents are trying to replicate - mass-market collectables. With an additional "fear of missing out" component. The high-dollar one-offs are promotional items for a projected flood of bulk collectables. (If they're even real. Those hyped multi-million dollar items, if they sell at all, do not seem to be closing as legitimate arms-length transactions where real money changes hands. See the Beeple fiasco.) As a store of value, NFTs are terrible. None of this stuff is very liquid. Too many different items, and no market price. You have to put the thing up for sale and wait. Wait too long, and nobody cares. This Three Stooges collectable plate [2] can be yours very cheaply. The shipping and handling is more than the price, so the transaction cost is more than it's worth. At least NFTs don't have high storage costs. [1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/Lot-of-3-Vintage-Lena-Liu-Country-Accents-Numbered-Bradford-Exchange-1995-Plates/114738731393 https://www.ebay.com/itm/Lot-of-3-Vintage-Lena-Liu-Country-A... [2] https://www.ebay.com/itm/Three-Stooges-Pop-Art-The-Franklin-Mint-Heirloom-Collector-Plate-1994-Rt-0030/313263518547 https://www.ebay.com/itm/Three-Stooges-Pop-Art-The-Franklin-...

raedah 6y ago

"Clearly, this expenditure pattern is a massive misallocation of resources. The last 20% of network hashpower provides vastly less value to the ecosystem than those same resources would if they had gone into research and core protocol development. So why not just.... cut the PoW budget by 20% and redirect the funds to those other things instead?" "even though we could easily identify some valuable public goods to redirect some funding to as a one-off, making a regular institutionalized pattern of such decisions carries risks of political chaos and capture that are in the long run not worth it." He gets the premise entirely wrong here. The chaos in these blockchain protocols is due to there not being a clear and well defined process for doing consensus rule upgrades. PoW miners control these chains. The power over the chain by PoW miners has become centralized into increasingly smaller number of participants with their own selfish interests. No upgrade will happen without their embracing it. Overriding the miners then becomes a vague and undefined matter of 'economic consensus' which means different things to different people and is not measurable. Decred has consensus rules for upgrading its consensus rules. The hybrid PoW/PoS system allows for the security and fair distribution provided by PoW while allowing PoS... the economic stakeholders with the the most to lose, to make the decisions about the future of the chain. Lead Developer for Decred, Dave Collins, outlines this concept nicely. (4 min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJs4T0WGe7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJs4T0WGe7k

SergeAx 6y ago

NFT minted by Elon Musk is exactly equivalent to NFT by Jeff Bezos in their primary mean: real value of them is exactly zero and it is universally stupid to exchange any viable resource (being money or anything else) for them. The only sane exchange for NFT is another NFT.