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Anyone else not really suprised. It's like they were actively in search of sharks to jump over for years. The question we should be asking is, what's next or wh

• seibelj 5y ago
  HN will never understand crypto / blockchain. Bitcoin and NFTs are amazing tools with huge potential for monetization of all sorts of digital goods. It has never been a better time to be a digital artist and earn a living. The lack of imagination and "get off my lawn" around here is absurd.
  • akgoel 5y ago
    The Diablo 3 real-money auction house was better implemented than most NFT schemes. At least that involved an actual transfer of virtual goods.
    • JCVI-syn10 5y ago
      What's an "actual" transfer of a "virtual" good? When an NFT is sold a unit of data stored on a digital ledger is transferred. When a D3 item was sold a unit of data stored on in the database was transferred. Why are those meaningfully different?
      • frazbin 5y ago
        Thanks for asking! The difference is that Diablo 3 represents 10E6~ dev hours invested into making a fun game, and items make it more fun. The items are a kind of 'share' in the total fun of the game. Now if we imagine NFTing the Diablo 3 item system, that's interesting. Mostly what's interesting about it is why it hasn't happened. I've noticed that actors in public blockchain ecosystems VERY strongly seek 'incentive wells' i.e. locally maximized extraction mechanisms. This might be a property of certain general public-ledger economic systems, because it sure comes up a lot. Basically the law is: as long as a blockchain/Dapp/pattern makes money, the people writing it won't improvements to it outside the core extractive mechanic; at least not without some rare external inputs, which inputs are surprisingly rare in practice. So if your application is on an incentive hill from this perspective, you know it will never get written. The Diablo 3 Dapp won't get written by Blizzard because it lies on an incentive hill from blizzard's perspective, simply because: assets would (1) increase item prices due to fees and (2) Blizzard would be cut out as a middleman for at least some transactions. Only once you find public-ledger tech that fixes those incentives (and probably other incentives I've missed) will you start to see interesting and complex distributed applications
      • almostkorean 5y ago
        I don't understand OPs point, but the meaningful difference is that the digital ledger is decentralized. If Blizzard shuts down D3, your virtual goods are gone forever. NFTs and ownership of NFTs live as long as the blockchain lives
  • clpm4j 5y ago
    It's a spectrum of course. Some people thoroughly understand it and still think it's rather boring or dumb. Some people thoroughly understand it and, like yourself, think it's a revolutionary game changer. And most people don't understand it and either (a) think it's dumb and downvote it, or (b) think it's awesome and are fanatical about it. (edit: spelling)
  • jimbob45 5y ago
    NFTs solve the problem of digital theft. It's just...that's not really an issue with the sort of digital goods that can use NFTs. Nor do most people want to download a whole blockchain for every marketplace they want to participate in (and then continue participating in to facilitate transactions).
  • corobo 5y ago
    How's the eco status on NFTs these days? I know Bitcoin is still trying to cook the Earth but have they fixed NFTs yet? My only "get off my lawn" take on it Also it all seems to be digitally drawn portrait templates with different accessories on (eg robot heads). I have no idea if they sell but someone's giving Twitter a bunch of money to shove those in my face haha. I'll put that one down to not getting it, I never got into pokemon cards etc either
    • DennisP 5y ago
      Most NFTs are on Ethereum. That has pretty high energy usage for now, but is on track to eliminate it almost entirely in Q1 next year.
      • corobo 5y ago
        Oh nice I didn't know it had a timeline rather than just "we want to.. one day"! That's good to hear thank you :)
        • DennisP 5y ago
          The production proof-of-stake system has actually been running in parallel since last December, staking real ETH, with over 200K full nodes. What's left is just to repoint the main clients, so instead of choosing blocks by the most work, they let the staking network choose blocks.
  • BTBurke 5y ago
    Here's my question - NYT could charge me $5 and then deduct from my balance on a per-article basis. Do we need crypto to enable those transactions? If micropayments made sense, why haven't they caught on already with the payment infrastructure 99% of people already have? Micropayments via crypto are just payment with extra steps. I'm not for/against either one. I'd just like to see a coherent argument against the idea that crypto is a solution looking for a problem.
    • wskinner 5y ago
      Most of the world does not have access to cheap and easy dollar-denominated payments. Using Bitcoin for this simplifies the implementation for Twitter, and reduces fees.
      • mdoms 5y ago
        Most of the world has credit and debit cards. Or, at least, most of the world where people have enough disposable income to shell out for NYT articles. I don't live in a country that deals in USD but I have a debit card and very often buy services denominated in USD.
    • DylanBohlender 5y ago
      Fees and chargebacks are the ones that usually come to mind. Oftentimes major credit card provider networks set a "minimum" interchange fee to disincentivize small transactions (a chargeback on a ten-cent transaction is often not worth the squeeze from a support/processing perspective). Basically all major payment networks are facilitated by a middleman of some sort, and that middleman entity usually has operational costs that disincentivize them from offering micropayments. Your point about a "balance" lands though - nothing stops NYT from making one "big" charge and then deducting from it other than consumer psychology (paying $10 up front can feel different than paying $0.05 at a time, for example).
    • orf 5y ago
      Imagine a world where not everyone used the dollar. Then imagine having to support different currencies and ensuring that your price per article stayed in line with currency fluctuations.
  • markkat 5y ago
    It's really consistent and strange considering the ostensive nature of the site.
  • astoor 5y ago
    The problem is that HN actually does understand crypto and blockchain. The layperson might believe the myth that NFTs, for example, are "amazing tools with huge potential for monetization of all sorts of digital goods", but most of HN will know the reality - you are "buying" nothing more than a URL in a JSON file (i.e. no legal ownership of anything), almost all artists will lose money (there are over 20M listings on OpenSea and almost every one of those will not sell or sell at a loss to the artist given all the costs in making a listing), and most "investors" will too (unless they are one of the rings of anonymous bidders who collaborate to artificially inflate the price of their selected "artists").
    • PretzelPirate 5y ago
      Art is one application of NFTs, but NFTs are not specifically made to represent digital art. Gods Unchained cards are a much better use case since there is built-in utility. Artists can also mint on ImmutableX without paying any fee at all.
    • lottin 5y ago
      Indeed, the mainstream media talks about NFTs as if they were property titles, completely misleading the public into thinking NFTs are something they are not. A lot of people also think Bitcoin spends a lot of electricity because it needs to do super complicated calculations. When you explain them how bitcoin actually works they usually can't believe it. The misinformation floating around with regards to cryptocurrencies is staggering.
    • rjknight 5y ago
      > you are "buying" nothing more than a URL in a JSON file (i.e. no legal ownership of anything), This is wrong. I can see why you think it, but it is wrong. The URL in the JSON file is free, as is the artwork that it points to. It's very hard to restrict the copying of digital artworks anyway, so why bother trying to? The person buying the NFT is not "buying a URL". This phrase doesn't even mean anything! What they are buying is control of a record on the blockchain, which (with some slight hand-waving) contains a list of the signatures of the previous owners, including the original creator or their agent. While it is trivial to copy a JPEG, it is not at all trivial to copy the list of signatures from one part of a blockchain to another, unless you happen to have the private keys of all of the previous owners. As such, the JPEG is abundant but the record is scarce. This mirrors the physical world, in which Picasso prints are abundant but signed originals are rare and hard to copy. What you're paying for is the uniqueness of the signature, not the ability to look at the content of the artwork, which you can probably already do for free on the internet. "No legal ownership of anything" is not really true. You do legally own the blockchain record! You can decide whether to sell it or keep it, and you can generally dispose of it as you would with any other property. You don't legally own the copyright of the artwork, but as we've already established, that copyright probably isn't worth very much. Your other statements may be perfectly accurate - I can't imagine 20M artists on OpenSea all turning a profit, and I imagine that a lot of the investors are likely to lose some money too. I just don't think that this has anything to do with faulty assumptions about how NFTs work.
  • joelbondurant 5y ago
    HN is for communist betacuck soy bois.
  • dang 5y ago
    Please don't post unsubstantive defensive stuff about the community. I realize it's frustrating to hold a minority view (believe me, I understand) but all a comment like this does is add bile, which helps nothing. Two productive choices are: (1) take up the cross of patiently and respectfully explaining what you believe to be the better information; or (2) chalk it up to people being wrong on the internet and just don't post. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • seibelj 5y ago
      Sorry dang I have patiently defended crypto / blockchain for years and taken all the downvotes. Twitter announces full integration and it’s still all negativity. Not sure what success would be anymore to convince the HN community.
      • dang 5y ago
        In that case you could always go with option 2. I know it's frustrating, but the internet is to a first approximation wrong about everything, so it's a frustration we all have to live with.
• pcbro141 5y ago
  Plenty of people tip creators on YouTube (SuperChats) and Patreon for things that have nothing to do with porn or sex at all.
• cblconfederate 5y ago
  onlyfans for SFW stuff actually sounds a much better way to monetize twitter. There's a reason why onlyfans looks like a twitter feed. Might even possibly help them to change their perception of being politically onesided