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Without the ability to sue people who break the rules that create the artificial scarcity, how do you keep it scarce? And yeah, when it comes to NFT's for some

Without the ability to sue people who break the rules that create the artificial scarcity, how do you keep it scarce? And yeah, when it comes to NFT's for some random jpeg... That's pretty useless. But that's all that can be done with them right now because there's infrastructure available to connect the NFT with whatever supposedly valuable side-effect it's supposed to go with. That'll take time. But when it's ready, the side effects won't be some random jpeg, they'll be things that you can touch. It'll be obvious that continuing to support the people who do whatever-the-thing-is is a good idea, and that's why we'll value the associated token. > It doesn’t give you insight into the circumstances around it. You still have to take whatever people say at face value, That's the missing supporting infrastructure I'm talking about. If a bridge washes out because of a storm, and somebody repairs it and mints an NFT of the before/after photos, that's just an image. But with a supporting web of trust, complete with verifiers who inspect the bridge afterward and put "yeah that's a good job, and this is the only NFT for it" on the blockchain... now you've got something more.

__MatrixMan__ 5y ago
s/because there's infrastructure/because there's NO infrastructure/ # oops
meheleventyone 5y ago
The problem for the blockchain and by extension NFTs is that the transactions are only trustless for the things that can be known about by the chain. Which is a vanishingly small amount of information, basically the exchange of tokens. There is no way to link a token to something in the real world without bringing in trust of a third party. At which point you’re just replicating what we already have with more complexity and less protection. You can already donate to people doing good things across a whole spectrum of options and see tangible side effects. You don’t have to wait for NFTs to maybe grow infrastructure to allow this! You can literally build bridges, schools and all sorts of infrastructure for people around the globe right now!
- __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
  I don't think we need things to be trustless. Most economic activity relies on trust of some sort. We can implement webs of trust on chain and incentivize trusted individuals to validate whatever relationships between the chain and the real world that the NFT's represent. The actual data that the algorithm knows about can be pretty small, just a string: > There was a pothole in the road at such-and-such time and place, and now there's not. Validated by users X, Y, Z Just little promises, and don't value the token if your don't trust the validator. The only kind of trust that's a problem here is custodial trust. A platform can never be more trustworthy than its least trustworthy admin. And yes, I know that I don't need a blockchain to do good things, but I do need a blockchain to retire on having done good things. And more importantly, to live in a world that's full of people doing the same. Centralized institutions become less trustworthy over time, so whatever work I put in to curry favor with whatever authority might reward me will be lost when that authority falls to corruption.
  - NoGravitas 5y ago
    > I don't think we need things to be trustless. If you don't need it trustless, then you don't need a blockchain.
    - __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
      Trusting somebody with admin access to the platform is quite different than peers using the platform to scale the to benefits from trusting each other. Blockchain is too specific, but you're going to need some kind of consensus tech to achieve the latter without the former.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    > And yes, I know that I don't need a blockchain to do good things, but I do need a blockchain to retire on having done good things. And more importantly, to live in a world that's full of people doing the same. I don't think a case has been made for that yet. For example: > We can implement webs of trust on chain and incentivize trusted individuals to validate whatever relationships between the chain and the real world that the NFT's represent. This sounds amazing! Except it falls into a recursive problem. You need to trust the knowledge about the real world so you validate it but you also need to trust the validators so you need to validate them somehow and that reoccurs. You could argue that there is a social proof in terms of users vouching for one another a 'web of trust' but those are easily gamed. You exchange explicit centralization for implicit centralization so not only have the issues of a centralized institution anyway but all the extant issues we see in crypto land in terms of fraud and so on. It's also veering into dystopian territory in terms of keeping an immutable reputation score about people which is deeply disturbing.

__MatrixMan__ 5y ago

s/because there's infrastructure/because there's NO infrastructure/ # oops

meheleventyone 5y ago

The problem for the blockchain and by extension NFTs is that the transactions are only trustless for the things that can be known about by the chain. Which is a vanishingly small amount of information, basically the exchange of tokens. There is no way to link a token to something in the real world without bringing in trust of a third party. At which point you’re just replicating what we already have with more complexity and less protection. You can already donate to people doing good things across a whole spectrum of options and see tangible side effects. You don’t have to wait for NFTs to maybe grow infrastructure to allow this! You can literally build bridges, schools and all sorts of infrastructure for people around the globe right now!

__MatrixMan__ 5y ago
I don't think we need things to be trustless. Most economic activity relies on trust of some sort. We can implement webs of trust on chain and incentivize trusted individuals to validate whatever relationships between the chain and the real world that the NFT's represent. The actual data that the algorithm knows about can be pretty small, just a string: > There was a pothole in the road at such-and-such time and place, and now there's not. Validated by users X, Y, Z Just little promises, and don't value the token if your don't trust the validator. The only kind of trust that's a problem here is custodial trust. A platform can never be more trustworthy than its least trustworthy admin. And yes, I know that I don't need a blockchain to do good things, but I do need a blockchain to retire on having done good things. And more importantly, to live in a world that's full of people doing the same. Centralized institutions become less trustworthy over time, so whatever work I put in to curry favor with whatever authority might reward me will be lost when that authority falls to corruption.
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  > I don't think we need things to be trustless. If you don't need it trustless, then you don't need a blockchain.
  - __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
    Trusting somebody with admin access to the platform is quite different than peers using the platform to scale the to benefits from trusting each other. Blockchain is too specific, but you're going to need some kind of consensus tech to achieve the latter without the former.
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  > And yes, I know that I don't need a blockchain to do good things, but I do need a blockchain to retire on having done good things. And more importantly, to live in a world that's full of people doing the same. I don't think a case has been made for that yet. For example: > We can implement webs of trust on chain and incentivize trusted individuals to validate whatever relationships between the chain and the real world that the NFT's represent. This sounds amazing! Except it falls into a recursive problem. You need to trust the knowledge about the real world so you validate it but you also need to trust the validators so you need to validate them somehow and that reoccurs. You could argue that there is a social proof in terms of users vouching for one another a 'web of trust' but those are easily gamed. You exchange explicit centralization for implicit centralization so not only have the issues of a centralized institution anyway but all the extant issues we see in crypto land in terms of fraud and so on. It's also veering into dystopian territory in terms of keeping an immutable reputation score about people which is deeply disturbing.