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I work in the crypto industry right now - my job is to keep bad guys from stealing XXX millions of dollars. I've also worked on a team that has done the tech si
by danielvf 5y ago
I work in the crypto industry right now - my job is to keep bad guys from stealing XXX millions of dollars. I've also worked on a team that has done the tech side of several record breaking NFT's sales. And I've sold my own NFTS for fun, and strangers have bought them (wat!).
I'm not a "believer". Crypto is indeed full of idiots - and scammers - and crazy people who will say anything to see the token they hold go up - and scammers - and crazy people chasing a 100x buck - and more scammers. And even ignoring the scams, it's like living in an alternate Alice-in-Wonderland world where the rules of normal physics, normal economics, and normal society no longer seem to apply. It is truly a frothing zoo of non-normality.
And yet I'm not a "skeptic" either. There are really, really hard technological problems out there, and there are really wonderful people working on them. In the middle of the economic silliness, there's a lot of new things around groups and economics being tried. And amidst the flurry of insanity in NFT world, there is some genuinely good art being created.
For example, take the stuff this person creates (https://tylerxhobbs.com/fidenza https://tylerxhobbs.com/fidenza). The process of making it is exactly the kind of stuff hackernews loves, and it is genuinely good art. It's stuff I put on the wall. The whole game around who gets to pay a stupid amount of money to say they own it (https://opensea.io/assets/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/78000313 https://opensea.io/assets/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aeba...) of them doesn't diminish the fact that art has been created, and the art can be enjoyed anyone.
It's easy, when you see lots of people making absurd claims, to go beyond just refuting those claims, and to slip into purely dismissing everything without ever checking to see if there's something of value there.
But there is good, interesting stuff going underneath the madness frothing on twitter around crypto. Deep behind the apparent wall of film-flam artists, there's work going on in super weird math, formal software proving with billions of dollars on the line, new programming languages, new ways of scaling consensus, and lots of art being created.
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoWell, I saved a bunch of that art and can view it any time.
- danielvf 5y agoOpen source funding hits art. Anyone can view it and get the benefit of doing so, the artist got paid to create, somebody gets bragging rights. Everybody wins.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoWe already had pateron, github sponsors, etc. for that with significantly less complication and barely any scams.
- paconbork 5y agoDo any of those allow you to resell purely digital art?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoYes, they just don't have any mechanism to assist you in doing so. Not that resale is of any use as regards funding the artist anyway.
- remote-dev 5y agoYes, it is a completely contrived marketplace based on bragging rights. It seems to work, but it is incredibly stupid and eventually people will move on.
- vineyardmike 5y agoWelcome to the art world.
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoSo you admit all NFTs are just bragging rights, That is FUCKING STUPID.
- 5y ago
- dbmikus 5y agoI really agree that it's good to go in with a level head. If you highlight the extremes of either "believers" or "non-believers", both sides seem like low effort takes. I bucketed crypto projects into two categories: (1) things that are only possible on crypto networks, and (2) things that people aren't motivated to do on other networks. For example, the US is woefully missing a banking API, especially for consumers. DeFi takes a stab at this. DeFi is still mostly closed circuit and too expensive, but if it continues to grow and integrate with non-crypto financials, that's a strong basis for a banking API. The blockchain ecosystem has also fueled a lot of work into zero knowledge proofs and its components like homomorphic encryption, which has uses outside of blockchain. So even if the grand experiment fails (strongly doubt the whole thing fails) there will be a lot of cool technical progress that has been made alongside it.
- mleonhard 5y agoAny technological progress obtained from cryptocurrency research will be the most expensive progress ever purchased in human history. The costs come from: - Opportunity cost of having lots of smart people focusing on cryptocurrency who could have been researching medicine, clean energy, or space tech. - Money spent on manufacturing and maintaining the cryptocurrency mining equipment. Those factories could be making other products that directly benefit peoples' lives. We currently have a shortage of electronics because of the pandemic. Cryptocurrency mining makes that shortage worse. - Environmental pollution produced by the power plants used for cryptocurrency mining. For every $1 a miner spends on electricity, the rest of society will pay $N to remove the CO2 later. Also, emissions from coal power plants often poison people and soil nearby. - Increased environmental destruction caused by digging up energy and building and running more power plants. The ultimate benefit will not be worth the cost. How could it?
- rodiger 5y agoMany people in the world don't have access to a functioning financial system- what's the benefit in building one?
- 5y ago
- Kapura 5y ago> It's easy, when you see lots of people making absurd claims, to go beyond just refuting those claims, and to slip into purely dismissing everything without ever checking to see if there's something of value there. > But there is good, interesting stuff going underneath the madness frothing on twitter around crypto. Deep behind the apparent wall of film-flam artists, there's work going on in super weird math, formal software proving with billions of dollars on the line, new programming languages, new ways of scaling consensus, and lots of art being created. I'm reminded of a tweet: "drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,"[1] [1] https://twitter.com/dril/status/464802196060917762 https://twitter.com/dril/status/464802196060917762
- mysecretaccount 5y agoRemove "drunk" from that tweet and the opposite point is made: why must we demand that a thing is all bad or all good? Edit: not sure why this is being downvoted. I am not defending NFTs, just saying that a comparison to something clearly wrong like drunk driving needs to be established with more evidence than hyperlinking dril.
- Kapura 5y agoSo are you defending drunk driving because it helps people get to work on time?
- azundo 5y agoNot at all, they're suggesting that even clear benefits like driving have some negative outcomes. Whether NFTs/Crypto is more like driving (positives outweigh the negatives) or more like drunk driving (negatives outweigh the positives) is the question.
- meepmorp 5y agoAll you're saying is that if you leave out a crucial word in the initial statement, the meaning changes. Fine, but so what?
- s5300 5y agoWell, you had me until you brought up Fidenza. It’s something somebody with less than a CompSci or SWE bachelors could do. It looks like something a nerd who can program that just took an entry level mechanical engineering fluid dynamics course & thought it was cool made. In other words, practically worthless, and hardly art. You would put them on your wall? Poor wall.
- chana_masala 5y agoThe article agrees with you that there is interesting math and good art in crypto. But disagrees about why it's being done.
- b3morales 5y ago> And amidst the flurry of insanity in NFT world, there is some genuinely good art being created. ... The whole game around who gets to pay a stupid amount of money to say they own it of them doesn't diminish the fact that art has been created, and the art can be enjoyed anyone. It is good art, and thanks for the link, I hadn't heard of them before. But I don't see what the NFT aspect adds. They've been creating art for years. Are they creating more art because of NFTs? What's the practical difference in outcome for the artist between selling an NFT and selling a print?
- damon_c 5y ago> What's the practical difference in outcome for the artist between selling an NFT and selling a print? With NFTs, the artist gets the money before they're dead!
- vkou 5y agoWhat stops me from getting paid for selling an NFT of your art?
- iskander 5y agoIt wouldn't have any value for lack of actual provenance (you can test this by trying to sell your own copy of Fidenza, please report back).
- vkou 5y agoWhat part of the NFT protocol verifies provenance? And why did this not work for Davidson Carvalho, who hasn't seen a cent of the money made by someone selling NFTs of his work? If there was no provenance, why did anyone pay $170,000 for them? [1] Could it be the case that the NFT market doesn't give two figs about provenance? [1] https://twitter.com/colorblindmess/status/1450598198842593283 https://twitter.com/colorblindmess/status/145059819884259328...
- 5y ago
- majormajor 5y agoNot many of these things depend on crypto or blockchain, though. People on the internet made great art pre-NFTs. Even in terms of recent phenomena, "buy a copy of the constitution" would work just fine as a Kickstarter.
- 015a 5y agoLast night, I was buying some dumb something on some random website, as one does. And they offered cryptocurrency as a checkout option. "Well, I've got some money in coinbase; why not try it? Its only $10." It was the best "stateless" checkout experience I have ever had. Sure, Amazon is easier, but I already have an account with them. I'm talking specifically on a totally new website. Select a currency; pops up a QR code with the amount in crypto; punch it in to the coinbase app; scan the QR code; five seconds later its done. This could even be trivially improved, if that QR code also embedded the amount and the currency type. Just scan and go. Hope we get there. Of course, its predicated on me already owning crypto. Can't dispute that point. But not only was this a far better experience than "run to the other end of the house, find my wallet, rip it out, punch in twenty dumb numbers that have faded to near unreadability from being in my wallet, op security code". I'd argue Apple Pay is roughly as convenient as crypto; traditional solutions do exist. But to think that it was both the easiest checkout experience I've ever had, and (in theory) it doesn't rely on some centralized megacorp gatekeeper taking 5% of the transaction (Visa, Apple, etc), or acting as the centralized merchant every consumer has to interact with (Amazon). Nothing is perfect! This website was using one of them "centralized gatekeepers" to proxy the transaction. They probably never saw the crypto; they just see USD. I had to overpay a bit in the USD conversion to account for risk spread; speaking of which, the price was still set in USD. The gatekeeper probably took X%. And I use coinbase, which is another one of those centralized gatekeepers. Yet, I saw a sliver of the promise! It was shining in my eyes with undeniable brightness. This is why crypto exists. Its the Best Path toward allowing independent businesses to digitally transact with their customers, no Visa, no Amazon. Its not finished walking the path it has laid. Maybe it never will. But in our current economic climate, there's no other hope that I can see. Maybe if our government could compete with Visa and lay down a public, digital cash network (crypto or no crypto); but they aren't. So while it isn't perfect, even in its ideal state (intrinsic implications: environmental, sovereign economic policy, etc); nothing ever is.
- stanleydrew 5y agoThe ability to dispute a charge has value, and the cost will be borne by someone. Removing Visa just means replacing it with some other entity that fills this need. Truly peer-to-peer cash transactions without recourse is a bad idea that I think will actually increase friction in the market, since people will take longer to make purchasing decisions.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago“There are a lot of smart people working on this stuff” is something I’ve heard several times recently. It gives me reason to hope, but it’s not sufficient. At some point, concrete results are needed. Fingers crossed…