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> But the math and incentives are there. Can you elaborate on this? The best critiques of blockchain tech, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, DeFi, etc. describe fatal f

> But the math and incentives are there. Can you elaborate on this? The best critiques of blockchain tech, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, DeFi, etc. describe fatal flaws at the core of those technologies. For example, the lack of monetary policy and regulations, privacy and security shortcomings, and high transaction costs. It'd be great to read a positive analysis of the core merits (the math and the incentives) and how those can be applied to solve problems.

deltarholamda 5y ago
Decentralized proof of ownership is the core merit, as I see it. That has some value, and NFTs are kind of the perfect vehicle to use the technology. But does it have any practical use? That's the question. NFTs are hot right now as an investment vehicle, or as a way for artists to sell unique creations (leading to investment vehicles, I suppose). I'm not sold on the utility, long term.
- Yizahi 5y ago
  > Decentralized proof of ownership is the core merit But it's neither decentralized nor a proof AT ALL. NFT literally can't facilitate anything by itself, without adding some centralized DB to it and some centralized humans governing all interactions between clients.
  - orange8 5y ago
    > NFT literally can't facilitate anything by itself, without adding some centralized DB to it What exactly do you want an NFT to facilitate? And are you raving mad at the people who make the NFTs, the people who buy them or both?
    - Yizahi 5y ago
      Well at minimum at least something, at maximum - fully what cryptobros already promise today (so that their messages won't be lies) - proof of ownership, transfer of ownership, enforcement of ownership, decentralization, universal standards and so on. Nothing special, only the things crypto fans already say today to the gullible buyers.
      - xchaotic 5y ago
        Exactly. If you want to buy any NFT, you have to go to a centralised marketplace like opensea.io. On top of that you probably have to exchange fiat to ETH in a centralised exchange. If any of those two stop existing your NFTs become worthless, at least when denominated to fiat. And if you can't convert to fiat or buy real things, it's all imaginary.
        detaro 5y ago
        > If you want to buy any NFT, you have to go to a centralised marketplace like opensea.io. With hicetnunc.xyz, there is already one example of a "marketplace" shutting down and being immediately replaced with alternative interfaces - which works because the underlying smart contract doesn't care what system people use to interact with it. The "blockchain is a distributed database" part does indeed work if a system is designed to use it.
      - orange8 5y ago
        > proof of ownership, Ask for a reciept. An NFT is not selling "proof of ownership", its selling you a product > transfer of ownership, The so called "gullible buyers" would not be buyers without this process occurring. An NFT is not selling "transfer of ownership", the transfer is the process itself. It consists of a seller (aka crypto fan), a buyer (aka gullible buyers) and a product (the NFT). The product is what is being being transferred, so how can what is being transferred also facilitate the transfer of ownership? > enforcement of ownership, Again, ask for a reciept. If someone robs you, sue them or call the police. That "enforcement of ownership" you seek is a separate product. > decentralization, How much more decentralized do you want a jpeg on the internet to be, really? > universal standards and so on What universal standards exactly?
        Yizahi 5y ago
        > Ask for a reciept. An NFT is not selling "proof of ownership", its selling you a product No, it's not, unless you are calling an entry in DB with an URL inside "a product". NFT system is selling NFT only, and NFT itself is almost nothing and useless. > The so called "gullible buyers" would not be buyers without this process occurring. An NFT is not selling "transfer of ownership", the transfer is the process itself. It consists of a seller (aka crypto fan), a buyer (aka gullible buyers) and a product (the NFT). The product is what is being being transferred, so how can what is being transferred also facilitate the transfer of ownership? Ok, I see you really calling the NFT itself a product. This is amusing but I must tell you that you are either misled or malicious, because other cryptobros sell people not NFT but the stuff it links to - digital file usually. And they brainwash buyers that they (buyers) are really buying the digital file. >Again, ask for a reciept. If someone robs you, sue them or call the police. That "enforcement of ownership" you seek is a separate product. I won't write long here, but we can see here that NFT don't facilitate any kind of "proof of ownership" and even NFT fans agree with this - you need some centralized receipts and police according them too :) >How much more decentralized do you want a jpeg on the internet to be, really? Decentralized proof of ownership, which is impossible today. >What universal standards exactly? That was about new NFT fad I'm seeing - gaming NFTs, where bros expect that different competing corporations will for some reason implement a universal standard for items between different competing games and voluntarily implement and support it. Pure BS but that is one of the NFT promises today.
- OnlineGladiator 5y ago
  > Decentralized proof of ownership is the core merit > But does it have any practical use? That's the question. Sounds like a solution searching for a problem.
  - jay_kyburz 5y ago
    I always thought we only owned things because a central authority says we do.
  - anonymouse008 5y ago
    That is, until you close on a house and spend hundreds to potentially tens of thousands of dollars on title searches and bank fees. Then ETH at the worst gas fees looks generous
    - deltarholamda 5y ago
      True, but the title searches and bank fees are just regulatory cruft slathered on from the real estate business. The cryptocurrency guys who think cryptocurrencies will be immune to this are probably gonna be shocked and annoyed.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    You have described what a home computer was in the 80s. It found many problems.
    - Joeboy 5y ago
      Did it? Today's computers are mostly descendents of more heavyweight '80s computers. I know there are like a few C64s running webservers and stuff for kicks. Home computers were good for games or learning to program, not sure they were actually that useful outside of those things. Edit: Ok Atari STs were good for music and Amigas were apparently good for graphics rendering.
  - culebron21 5y ago
    To me cryptocurrency sounds like monorail or electric bus. Both technologies were designed to fix one aspect of existing transport systems. Monorail concept appeared around 1900, trying to reduce the elevated railways problem. One designer thought of reducing the use of metal. Wuppertal suspension railway uses much more metal for tracks than conventional trams. There is a special monorail in Britain, built in 1940s, that stands on A-shaped legs. The only rail is supported by some metal triangles, using the same amount of metal. Later models, first built in Disneyland, use concrete (which contains a lot more iron in the concrete itself besides the reinforcement), and rubber wheels (sacrificing the advantage of low friction). Their biggest problem is switches: they're heavy and huge. Suspended monorails use big box instead of a rail, because swaying carriages are uncomfortable, and to hold them, the track must resist the force of a long lever. Errr... what was the reason to go for all that, in the first place? Make simpler track and use less rails/metal? Not achieved at all. Electric buses... just 2 words: they're 3-5 times more expensive, and a whole route of e-buses requires just as much electric equipment as trolleybus line. Plus, e-buses spend twice more time charging than riding. Which means you need to triple the fleet of triple-quintiple more expensive vehicles. Even if battery technology progresses, as some insist, let it improve for private, not public money. It seems that blockchain is similar: couple of advantages, lots of big disadvantages.
- bcrosby95 5y ago
  Decentralized proof of ownership only matters if people with guns think it matters. I saw a short video of Keanu Reeves laughing at NFTs because they had value but are easy to copy. Which I found somewhat funny. Keanu gets paid a lot because he acts in things that have value but are easy to copy (movies). The reason why those have a high value is because of copyright. The people that financed the film have control over the copying of the film. Because people with guns agree with the copyright scheme (US government). NFTs cannot have actual value unless people with the ability to enforce that scarcity cares about them.
  - angryasian 5y ago
    not only that but the idea of ownership of a token and the underlying asset have yet to be challenged in court
  - basch 5y ago
    >NFTs cannot have actual value unless people with the ability to enforce that scarcity cares about them. You're confusing the hyperlink with the destination. The hyperlink has scarcity and is impossible to copy. You can make a new near identical hyperlink, but it's not the same as the original, the community says so and will ignore the imposter. The hyperlink are what people are buying and flipping. It has whatever market value other participants agree it has.
  - shiohime 5y ago
    NFTs do not have to be links to pictures on cloud / decentralized storage. That is just their primary implementation right now, but they can quite literally be a token to represent anything, not simply a jpg. But even in this case, yeah it's easy to make copies of the pictures. However, there is intrinsic value in owning something that is legitimate. However, I want to focus on the other possibilities for NFTs - I am making an NFT project that does have the art aspect, however the tokens also provide access to unique services like hooking into a video game engine to allow users to interact with their art. Since it's trivial to detect forgeries and ownership, even if someone was to create an NFT pointing to even the exact same piece of art, they would be denied access to the service as it is a forgery. Right now proof of ownership is usually in the form of discord bots allowing access to servers, but there's much more you can actually do with this concept than we are seeing now, like the example above.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  How does decentralized proof of ownership better provide for developed economies than modern monetary policy with robust tooling to e.g. ease economic downturns, prevent high (20%+j inflation and prevent hoarding of capital to incentivize investment?
- xtracto 5y ago
  >NFTs are hot right now as an investment vehicle, I'd say speculation more than investing. The peoblem with public blockchains and related technologies is that they have been list in the middle of huge speculation markets... which brings all sorts of bullshit and scams. That's why I like to look at hyperledger and similar technologies. If you remove the money incentives, you are left with the pure technology essence. And then you can judge it by what it is.
  - deltarholamda 5y ago
    Yeah, I should have said "speculation," not investment. They smell similar, but they're definitely different.
- lawtalkinghuman 5y ago
  > Decentralized proof of ownership I mean, the 'ownership' is as real as "buy a plot of land on Mars" scams. An inefficient distributed database filled with assertions of legally unenforceable pseudoproperty rights seems somewhat underwhelming.
  - angryasian 5y ago
    well said.
- 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
  If two NFTs point at the same underlying asset, how do I go about deciding which one is authoritative without relying on exactly the same sorts of trust and authority relationships that I'd use in the absence of a blockchain?
- dwaite 5y ago
  The problem (as others have said) is ownership is a legal construct not a mathematical one. A smart contract may not be recognized as a valid contract in a court of law, or have precedent over say the actual handshake agreement. Even ignoring that, many NFTs do not convey any ownership of the digital work, but rather of the NFT itself. So far the most likely value is in a platform that actually lets you leverage that ownership, such as Meta letting you put a framed monkey on the wall in your virtual home. But that sort of platform tie-in means it is basically the same as say the DRM-encoumbered media stores we've seen go bye - ownership which is only recognized within a platform is only really providing durable value to that platform.
emptysongglass 5y ago
There's also fatal flaws at the heart of capitalism and a centrally controlled currency whose value is manipulated at will completely outside a citizen's power to control. These fatal flaws have not prevented capitalism from blooming all over the world. Lest you think I'm some species of these crypto libertarians, I believe it's an imperfect solution to hand humans more greed levers to go about life dictating their actions by perverse incentives. The solution for me looks more like a free net whose power is contributed by a mass group of volunteers. But who then will run the datacenters? With what materials will they build them and who will freely give it to them? Capitalism needs to be ripped up from its roots before we can have a hope of a free in all senses world for all. Until then, maybe we first take control of the machinery by replacing the currency with which the state does its business of violence.
- lapinot 5y ago
  > Capitalism needs to be ripped up from its roots before we can have a hope of a free in all senses world for all. Until then, maybe we first take control of the machinery by replacing the currency with which the state does its business of violence. I agreed up until your last sentence: is the state the bigger problem (versus multi-billion corps and capitalists)? is currency the main lever of states (versus diplomacy, infrastructures, military, etc)?
  - nathias 5y ago
    Let's just say that the geostrategically important states that tried to move away from the dollar got freedomed very quick.
delaaxe 5y ago
Zero knowledge proofs will revolutionize civic life
- xchaotic 5y ago
  solving people problems with tech.
- thraxil 5y ago
  Zero knowledge proofs have existed since the 80s. How much longer do we have to wait for this revolutionizing?
baby 5y ago
> privacy and security shortcomings, and high transaction costs I think these are the only technical arguments here, and there's real improvements there depending on what project you're looking at.

deltarholamda 5y ago

Decentralized proof of ownership is the core merit, as I see it. That has some value, and NFTs are kind of the perfect vehicle to use the technology. But does it have any practical use? That's the question. NFTs are hot right now as an investment vehicle, or as a way for artists to sell unique creations (leading to investment vehicles, I suppose). I'm not sold on the utility, long term.

Yizahi 5y ago
> Decentralized proof of ownership is the core merit But it's neither decentralized nor a proof AT ALL. NFT literally can't facilitate anything by itself, without adding some centralized DB to it and some centralized humans governing all interactions between clients.
- orange8 5y ago
  > NFT literally can't facilitate anything by itself, without adding some centralized DB to it What exactly do you want an NFT to facilitate? And are you raving mad at the people who make the NFTs, the people who buy them or both?
  - Yizahi 5y ago
    Well at minimum at least something, at maximum - fully what cryptobros already promise today (so that their messages won't be lies) - proof of ownership, transfer of ownership, enforcement of ownership, decentralization, universal standards and so on. Nothing special, only the things crypto fans already say today to the gullible buyers.
    - xchaotic 5y ago
      Exactly. If you want to buy any NFT, you have to go to a centralised marketplace like opensea.io. On top of that you probably have to exchange fiat to ETH in a centralised exchange. If any of those two stop existing your NFTs become worthless, at least when denominated to fiat. And if you can't convert to fiat or buy real things, it's all imaginary.
      - detaro 5y ago
        > If you want to buy any NFT, you have to go to a centralised marketplace like opensea.io. With hicetnunc.xyz, there is already one example of a "marketplace" shutting down and being immediately replaced with alternative interfaces - which works because the underlying smart contract doesn't care what system people use to interact with it. The "blockchain is a distributed database" part does indeed work if a system is designed to use it.
    - orange8 5y ago
      > proof of ownership, Ask for a reciept. An NFT is not selling "proof of ownership", its selling you a product > transfer of ownership, The so called "gullible buyers" would not be buyers without this process occurring. An NFT is not selling "transfer of ownership", the transfer is the process itself. It consists of a seller (aka crypto fan), a buyer (aka gullible buyers) and a product (the NFT). The product is what is being being transferred, so how can what is being transferred also facilitate the transfer of ownership? > enforcement of ownership, Again, ask for a reciept. If someone robs you, sue them or call the police. That "enforcement of ownership" you seek is a separate product. > decentralization, How much more decentralized do you want a jpeg on the internet to be, really? > universal standards and so on What universal standards exactly?
      - Yizahi 5y ago
        > Ask for a reciept. An NFT is not selling "proof of ownership", its selling you a product No, it's not, unless you are calling an entry in DB with an URL inside "a product". NFT system is selling NFT only, and NFT itself is almost nothing and useless. > The so called "gullible buyers" would not be buyers without this process occurring. An NFT is not selling "transfer of ownership", the transfer is the process itself. It consists of a seller (aka crypto fan), a buyer (aka gullible buyers) and a product (the NFT). The product is what is being being transferred, so how can what is being transferred also facilitate the transfer of ownership? Ok, I see you really calling the NFT itself a product. This is amusing but I must tell you that you are either misled or malicious, because other cryptobros sell people not NFT but the stuff it links to - digital file usually. And they brainwash buyers that they (buyers) are really buying the digital file. >Again, ask for a reciept. If someone robs you, sue them or call the police. That "enforcement of ownership" you seek is a separate product. I won't write long here, but we can see here that NFT don't facilitate any kind of "proof of ownership" and even NFT fans agree with this - you need some centralized receipts and police according them too :) >How much more decentralized do you want a jpeg on the internet to be, really? Decentralized proof of ownership, which is impossible today. >What universal standards exactly? That was about new NFT fad I'm seeing - gaming NFTs, where bros expect that different competing corporations will for some reason implement a universal standard for items between different competing games and voluntarily implement and support it. Pure BS but that is one of the NFT promises today.
OnlineGladiator 5y ago
> Decentralized proof of ownership is the core merit > But does it have any practical use? That's the question. Sounds like a solution searching for a problem.
- jay_kyburz 5y ago
  I always thought we only owned things because a central authority says we do.
- anonymouse008 5y ago
  That is, until you close on a house and spend hundreds to potentially tens of thousands of dollars on title searches and bank fees. Then ETH at the worst gas fees looks generous
  - deltarholamda 5y ago
    True, but the title searches and bank fees are just regulatory cruft slathered on from the real estate business. The cryptocurrency guys who think cryptocurrencies will be immune to this are probably gonna be shocked and annoyed.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  You have described what a home computer was in the 80s. It found many problems.
  - Joeboy 5y ago
    Did it? Today's computers are mostly descendents of more heavyweight '80s computers. I know there are like a few C64s running webservers and stuff for kicks. Home computers were good for games or learning to program, not sure they were actually that useful outside of those things. Edit: Ok Atari STs were good for music and Amigas were apparently good for graphics rendering.
- culebron21 5y ago
  To me cryptocurrency sounds like monorail or electric bus. Both technologies were designed to fix one aspect of existing transport systems. Monorail concept appeared around 1900, trying to reduce the elevated railways problem. One designer thought of reducing the use of metal. Wuppertal suspension railway uses much more metal for tracks than conventional trams. There is a special monorail in Britain, built in 1940s, that stands on A-shaped legs. The only rail is supported by some metal triangles, using the same amount of metal. Later models, first built in Disneyland, use concrete (which contains a lot more iron in the concrete itself besides the reinforcement), and rubber wheels (sacrificing the advantage of low friction). Their biggest problem is switches: they're heavy and huge. Suspended monorails use big box instead of a rail, because swaying carriages are uncomfortable, and to hold them, the track must resist the force of a long lever. Errr... what was the reason to go for all that, in the first place? Make simpler track and use less rails/metal? Not achieved at all. Electric buses... just 2 words: they're 3-5 times more expensive, and a whole route of e-buses requires just as much electric equipment as trolleybus line. Plus, e-buses spend twice more time charging than riding. Which means you need to triple the fleet of triple-quintiple more expensive vehicles. Even if battery technology progresses, as some insist, let it improve for private, not public money. It seems that blockchain is similar: couple of advantages, lots of big disadvantages.
bcrosby95 5y ago
Decentralized proof of ownership only matters if people with guns think it matters. I saw a short video of Keanu Reeves laughing at NFTs because they had value but are easy to copy. Which I found somewhat funny. Keanu gets paid a lot because he acts in things that have value but are easy to copy (movies). The reason why those have a high value is because of copyright. The people that financed the film have control over the copying of the film. Because people with guns agree with the copyright scheme (US government). NFTs cannot have actual value unless people with the ability to enforce that scarcity cares about them.
- angryasian 5y ago
  not only that but the idea of ownership of a token and the underlying asset have yet to be challenged in court
- basch 5y ago
  >NFTs cannot have actual value unless people with the ability to enforce that scarcity cares about them. You're confusing the hyperlink with the destination. The hyperlink has scarcity and is impossible to copy. You can make a new near identical hyperlink, but it's not the same as the original, the community says so and will ignore the imposter. The hyperlink are what people are buying and flipping. It has whatever market value other participants agree it has.
- shiohime 5y ago
  NFTs do not have to be links to pictures on cloud / decentralized storage. That is just their primary implementation right now, but they can quite literally be a token to represent anything, not simply a jpg. But even in this case, yeah it's easy to make copies of the pictures. However, there is intrinsic value in owning something that is legitimate. However, I want to focus on the other possibilities for NFTs - I am making an NFT project that does have the art aspect, however the tokens also provide access to unique services like hooking into a video game engine to allow users to interact with their art. Since it's trivial to detect forgeries and ownership, even if someone was to create an NFT pointing to even the exact same piece of art, they would be denied access to the service as it is a forgery. Right now proof of ownership is usually in the form of discord bots allowing access to servers, but there's much more you can actually do with this concept than we are seeing now, like the example above.
edgyquant 5y ago
How does decentralized proof of ownership better provide for developed economies than modern monetary policy with robust tooling to e.g. ease economic downturns, prevent high (20%+j inflation and prevent hoarding of capital to incentivize investment?
xtracto 5y ago
>NFTs are hot right now as an investment vehicle, I'd say speculation more than investing. The peoblem with public blockchains and related technologies is that they have been list in the middle of huge speculation markets... which brings all sorts of bullshit and scams. That's why I like to look at hyperledger and similar technologies. If you remove the money incentives, you are left with the pure technology essence. And then you can judge it by what it is.
- deltarholamda 5y ago
  Yeah, I should have said "speculation," not investment. They smell similar, but they're definitely different.
lawtalkinghuman 5y ago
> Decentralized proof of ownership I mean, the 'ownership' is as real as "buy a plot of land on Mars" scams. An inefficient distributed database filled with assertions of legally unenforceable pseudoproperty rights seems somewhat underwhelming.
- angryasian 5y ago
  well said.
0xcde4c3db 5y ago
If two NFTs point at the same underlying asset, how do I go about deciding which one is authoritative without relying on exactly the same sorts of trust and authority relationships that I'd use in the absence of a blockchain?
dwaite 5y ago
The problem (as others have said) is ownership is a legal construct not a mathematical one. A smart contract may not be recognized as a valid contract in a court of law, or have precedent over say the actual handshake agreement. Even ignoring that, many NFTs do not convey any ownership of the digital work, but rather of the NFT itself. So far the most likely value is in a platform that actually lets you leverage that ownership, such as Meta letting you put a framed monkey on the wall in your virtual home. But that sort of platform tie-in means it is basically the same as say the DRM-encoumbered media stores we've seen go bye - ownership which is only recognized within a platform is only really providing durable value to that platform.

emptysongglass 5y ago

There's also fatal flaws at the heart of capitalism and a centrally controlled currency whose value is manipulated at will completely outside a citizen's power to control. These fatal flaws have not prevented capitalism from blooming all over the world. Lest you think I'm some species of these crypto libertarians, I believe it's an imperfect solution to hand humans more greed levers to go about life dictating their actions by perverse incentives. The solution for me looks more like a free net whose power is contributed by a mass group of volunteers. But who then will run the datacenters? With what materials will they build them and who will freely give it to them? Capitalism needs to be ripped up from its roots before we can have a hope of a free in all senses world for all. Until then, maybe we first take control of the machinery by replacing the currency with which the state does its business of violence.

lapinot 5y ago
> Capitalism needs to be ripped up from its roots before we can have a hope of a free in all senses world for all. Until then, maybe we first take control of the machinery by replacing the currency with which the state does its business of violence. I agreed up until your last sentence: is the state the bigger problem (versus multi-billion corps and capitalists)? is currency the main lever of states (versus diplomacy, infrastructures, military, etc)?
- nathias 5y ago
  Let's just say that the geostrategically important states that tried to move away from the dollar got freedomed very quick.

delaaxe 5y ago

Zero knowledge proofs will revolutionize civic life

xchaotic 5y ago
solving people problems with tech.
thraxil 5y ago
Zero knowledge proofs have existed since the 80s. How much longer do we have to wait for this revolutionizing?

baby 5y ago

> privacy and security shortcomings, and high transaction costs I think these are the only technical arguments here, and there's real improvements there depending on what project you're looking at.