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I'm not convinced. People talk grand about "permissionless data" but I fail to see any practical applications. NFTs are a scam and are retroactively obsoleted

I'm not convinced. People talk grand about "permissionless data" but I fail to see any practical applications. NFTs are a scam and are retroactively obsoleted by digital signatures. All of the ideas about logistics tracking, deed tracking, etc etc are all rendered pointless by the oracle problem, you can get identical guarantees with digital signatures minus the blockchain. DeFi is DOA. Gas fees are insane, "layer 2" is just a diplomatic way of saying "offchain centralization", every DeFi scheme is a money loser relative to just buying eth and waiting for a pump, "collateralized" loans where you pay coin so someone will loan you coin is not a valuable use-case to the vast majority of the population... None of this is about giving power back to individuals, it's all about making money on mining fees and cryptocurrency speculation.

Gravyness 5y ago
> None of this is about giving power back to individuals Exactly, when people claimed web3 is about the individual and decentralization I knew 100% it is a power play being attempted by some stupid people who have no idea how the web works.
doomrobo 5y ago
> NFTs are a scam and are retroactively obsoleted by digital signatures I'm not one to ever defend NFTs, but this is not right. Suppose I bought an extremely trendy natural number k ∈ ℤ and I have a signature σ from its inventor that says "doomrobo owns k". Suppose in a year the trend has passed and I'd like to sell k. How do I transfer ownership to someone else? Clearly sending σ doesn't suffice, since σ is public. Do I need a new signature? Ok different setup: σ is actually a signature from me and the inventor saying "the non-inventor pubkey that signed of this message is the owner of k". How do I transfer σ now? Do I send my signing secret key? Who makes sure I deleted my copy of the signing key?
- galaxyLogic 5y ago
  Good questions. Let's say I create a piece of digital art and create an NFT out of it. The NFT somehow starts increasing in value. Then I copy my original digital art-asset and perhaps use a Photo-Shop filter to make it have a different hue. I turn that into another NFT. And I keep on doing this for all colors of the rainbow. What prevents me from creating new NFTs with the same or slightly modified underlying digital asset?
  - raesene9 5y ago
    In many cases you don't even need to modify it. Ownership of an NFT often does not provide copyright on the original image (https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2021/04/article_0007.html https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2021/04/article_0007.h... has some interesting details on what you do and don't get with an NFT). So if you made the original image, you can just mint a new NFT of that image and sell it. Heck you can mint as many NFTs as you like of any image you own the copyright of :)
    - kpommerenke 5y ago
      Why do I need to own the copyright to mint an NFT of the image?
      - raesene9 5y ago
        So, if you don't own the copyright and then mint an NFT, in theory the copyright holder could get the source image for your NFT taken down (depending on where it's hosted of course) That hasn't stopped loads of NFTs of copyrighted images being minted ofc.
  - quickthrower2 5y ago
    It is worse than that, there are no pixels! The NFT is a short string, usually a URL. It’s effectively a QR code! You can create as many copies as you like. The “value” of an NFT comes in somehow convincing people you are the official one. This needs a lot of clout: e.g. a sale by Sotherbys that is well known that people can trace back the NFT to. In a sense its like a digital antique when there are easy fakes. My way of thinking is an NFT is a shitcoin with supply 1 and smallest denomination 1.
    - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
      > My way of thinking is an NFT is a shitcoin with supply 1 and smallest denomination 1. Ah, see, I ususually skip over NFT nonsense because of the sheer number of WHY and WHO it brings up… but now and then it’s summed up nicely.
- root_axis 5y ago
  The NFT would contain "$doomrobo_public_key owns $k as of $date" signed with the minter's private key. When you decide to sell someone the NFT you append "$new_owner_public_key owns $k as of $date" to the NFT and sign it with your private key: this establishes a secure and verifiable chain of ownership.
  - quickthrower2 5y ago
    You can send two of those assignment signatures to two different parties simultaneously. Is there a way in your system to avoid the double send?
    - root_axis 5y ago
      You can do the same thing with blockchain NFTs, just mint another blockchain NFT with the same content. You can say "well, the NFT that was minted first is the true original" but the same is true of the "double sent" digital signature NFT, one will be dated more recently than the other, which affords one identical guarantees of authenticity to the blockchain NFT.
      - quickthrower2 5y ago
        Thats not the same thing.
        root_axis 5y ago
        I just explained why it is. A one line response of "nuh uh" is not convincing.
        quickthrower2 5y ago
        Its an analogy and diverts from the original point. We were talking about how you were going to solve double spends without a chain. You point about minting another is an interesting point but its not a double spend so we veer off the topic. If we take your point then its the same as saying anyone can create a new crypto and call it Bitcoin. If I have an OG Bitcoin and you have a fake one then you can steel my real one. No you cant. The reason is that people discern what Bitcoin is vs. other coins. NFT cooy/paste is a problem but it is a distinct and different problem to double spend.
- jboy55 5y ago
  You bought a NFT on some blockchain that exists now, you didn't buy the number. I can sell that same number to someone else, and I could print a big picture of it on fancy paper in a nice frame and afix a hologram seal of authenticity. You owning the NFT of that number doesn't give you any rights to that sale, just as my framed picture doesn't give me any rights over the NFT.
- chrischen 5y ago
  You create a new signature signing a message saying you transferred this. The important bit here is some public immutable record. If this happened on Ethereum, and Ethereum ceased to exist, then your NFT would cease too. If you used say a archive.org snapshot then your NFT would live as long as archive.org servers are up.
andreilys 5y ago
DeFi is DOA. Gas fees are insane, "layer 2" is just a diplomatic way of saying "offchain centralization" It may come as a surprise but there are other chains that support DeFi apps and which do not have high gas fees like Ethereum. For example, Avalanche and Solana. Collateralized crypto loans are the equivalent of people taking loans out on their equity position so they don’t have to pay cap gains and don’t need to Liquidate. So the use case is already demonstrated, it’s just now applied in a crypto world.
- mgraczyk 5y ago
  That is not why people take out loans. They do it for leverage and to avoid selling because they want exposure to ETH or BTC. There are easier ways to avoid taxes.
  - pazimzadeh 5y ago
    Go on
  - ur-whale 5y ago
    > There are easier ways to avoid taxes. Such as?
- akudha 5y ago
  Solana is centralized, no? If a handful of people can shut down the entire network in a few minutes, how is it a strong network? How is it not centralized?
  - FridgeSeal 5y ago
    To add to this, are not most blockchains centralised around the core dev team? The money transfer/bookkeeping system might be decentralised in comparison with standard finance, but it’s no less centralised than a fiat currency, and at least the democratically elected government in my country can 1: be voted out, and 2: employs people who actually understand finance and economics…
- suikadayo 5y ago
nfw2 5y ago
Do digital signatures really make the blockchain obsolete if they fill the same niche? Even if blockchain are technically equivalent to digital signatures, it seems like it has some real advantages from a business perspective: - it is capturing the market of people who want to buy "official" digital assets and is becoming the de facto way to do so - the market is one that should have strong network effects - gaining the trust of that market is crucial to supporting these sort of trades I still think NFTs are a bubble that will come back down to Earth eventually. But I also find sneaker and stamp collectors equally perplexing, and people don't discuss these phenomena with the same sort of skepticism.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jaredsohn 5y ago
  >But I also find sneaker and stamp collectors equally perplexing, People for the most part don't get rich off of stamps. Is more of a hobby than an investment.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - andybak 5y ago
    I know people who made a decent living from sneaker trading though.
    - altdataseller 5y ago
      Same. Know a handful of ppl making well into 6 figures a year selling on StockX.
    - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
      Yeah I grew up in the hood and some of the more successful people from my area started their financial life by sneaker trading.
    - 5y ago
scyclow 5y ago
The critical innovation of blockchain is that it takes your digital signatures and orders them in a way that's byzantine fault tolerant.
- gameswithgo 5y ago
  if you are trying to be persuasive you should know that what you said is complete gibberish to tech saavy people who are not already bought in to whatever you are talking about.
  - ShamelessC 5y ago
    This shit is so pervasive. Honestly seems more like they're trying to get up-votes from fellow crypto enthusiasts than trying to convince anyone; except perhaps themselves.
    - scyclow 5y ago
      I don't really care about upvotes, I just think that it's an important point to understand the technology. I'm not saying anything positive or negative about it. I'm just that blockchains are about more than logging cryptographic signatures -- they're also about ordering those cryptographic signatures.
  - scyclow 5y ago
    I mean, if you don't know what byzantine fault tolerance [1] is, then that's fine. It's not gibberish to people who are into distributed systems. And I'm not claiming it's a silver bullet or trying to persuade anyone either. BFT is overkill for most use cases, but sometimes it's useful. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault
    - vanusa 5y ago
      The commenter above was certainly familiar with BFT. It wasn't the term as such that was gibberish. But rather, the implication you were attempting to make that this is a "critical innovation" that provides value.
johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago
>every DeFi scheme is a money loser relative to just buying eth and waiting for a pump Maybe, until ETH never pumps again. Eventually the blue chip cryptocurrencies will find their fair price, and price swings of 10-20% in a single day will be a thing of the past. DeFi DAOs like Curve Finance [0] (currently leading the DeFi pack in terms of Total Value Locked [1]) will generate income for whoever holds a CRV token... so long as the crypto trading markets exist. Curve actually provides a service. They pool liquidity to enable larger trades with less slippage, and as such they're extremely popular. The gas fees are not an issue either, as Curve works across 7 different layer 1 blockchains at the moment and I am sure that is bound to increase in the future. [0] https://curve.fi/ https://curve.fi/ [1] https://defillama.com/ https://defillama.com/
everfree 5y ago
> "layer 2" is just a diplomatic way of saying "offchain centralization" Some popular types of Layer 2s, namely zk rollups, have on-chain data and on-chain transaction verification, so I believe you are wrong on this count.
- IgorPartola 5y ago
  I guess I am really out of touch but I understood about two and a half words of what you just said.
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    It means that everything you need to arrive at a consensus on the validity of a transaction is on the blockchain, and thus enforced by the decentralized network of nodes that validate the blockchain. So contrary to what the grandparent comment claims, these layer 2 (i.e. scalability) solutions make no compromises on decentralization, as they would if they had a consensus-critical component that was managed by a centralized off-chain party.
  - manojlds 5y ago
    It's a bit like having an in-mem db that then commits your transactions to the actual DB which is much slower.
- hestefisk 5y ago
  Are you referring to the likes of Polygon / MATIC?
  - everfree 5y ago
    Polygon has several products. Usually when people say "Polygon" they are referring to Polygon's popular sidechain product, but Polygon's Hermez product is a zk rollup like I was talking about.
CryptoPunk 5y ago
>>NFTs are a scam and are retroactively obsoleted by digital signatures. A credibly open and neutral protocol for holding and trading digital assets is not something digital signatures can provide alone. Digital signatures do not solve the double spending problem without trusted third parties. Thus far only blockchains have been able to provide this set of qualities. >>All of the ideas about logistics tracking, deed tracking, etc etc are all rendered pointless by the oracle problem, you can get identical guarantees with digital signatures minus the blockchain. Digital signatures provide no guarantees about data processing and availability. Massively distributed public blockchains do.
xmly 5y ago
I have to say your statement is quite accurate. But the last sentence just reflects the eventual success of the Web3. It is all about making money, aka being greedy.
- csbartus 5y ago
  Agree. It's only the term `web3` is confusing. It should be called `crypto`, since it's a niche, not like `web2`, which is universally suitable for everyone.
xmly 5y ago
One correctiong. NFTs is just a tool. I believe what you mean is that Digital Arts market based on NFTs is a bubble.
- __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
  I agree and I wish more people understood this distinction. To say that NFTs are all scams is like saying that pixel shaders are all games. One is often used to implement the other, but they're not the same thing. NFTs will likely find niches outside of signifying ownership. For instance, I'd like to see them used to denote package maintainer status. That way you could have automation that allows package maintainers to do certain maintenance things like publish the hash of the next version, and if they transfer the token to a new maintainer, no permission rejiggering would be required.
  - grey-area 5y ago
    Pixel shaders are useful.
    - pcwalton 5y ago
      Except, ironically, when they're used for mining cryptocurrencies (okay, not pixel shaders, but close enough).
    - __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
      Token ring protocol was useful, back in its day. Those tokens were also non fungible (admittedly, there were weaker assurances around that nonfungibility, but I think that's orthogonal).
  - simonw 5y ago
    What happens to the package if the maintainer loses their password?
    - simonmales 5y ago
      This is a cool problem. Never looked into it any further but there is some proof of concept code out in the wild about this. "Social key recovery" https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html
hestefisk 5y ago
Largely agree with this. The big promise of defi was to “bank the unbanked”, but Eth is - slow (15 txn/sec, 22-23 with the move to proof of stake) - expensive (I read somewhere that globally Eth users spend more on 30M USD in fees per day!) - too volatile to be reliable for everyday banking use cases - bad for the environment Blockchain technology is interesting and very powerful, but VCs and founders have all too often put the cart before the horse. A few years ago I spoke to an Aussie tech entrepreneur who had raised funding for his “Airbnb for RV” platform. He didn’t get much attention until he said it was blockchain based. In 9.99 out of 10 cases there is no need for a blockchain when a trusted, centralised ledger will do just fine. Edge cases I can think of where a blockchain makes sense is in cases such as post-trade activities or trade finance where multiple parties need to settle complex transactions in a distributed way (Contour is a good example of this). Disclaimer: I do not own shares in Contour; I just find it interesting.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  >>- slow (15 txn/sec, 22-23 with the move to proof of stake) - expensive (I read somewhere that globally Eth users spend more on 30M USD in fees per day!) - This is no longer the case with L2 solutions, like zk-Rollups. See what StarkEx, which is one particular Validium/zk-Rollup L2 solution, is doing: https://twitter.com/EliBenSasson/status/1475206185762578437?s=20 https://twitter.com/EliBenSasson/status/1475206185762578437?... >>Past week, @ethereum ~ 9M txs. StarkEx ~ 6.25M TWO THIRDS THE TX COUNT OF ETHEREUM. L2 solutions can process transactions at scales and fees a couple orders of magnitude greater and lower than Ethereum L1, respectively. >>too volatile to be reliable for everyday banking use cases Stablecoins aren't volatile, and they are a major, and rapidly growing use case of Ethereum >>bad for the environment Ethereum's energy consumption declines by 99.95% upon the completion of the transition to Proof of Stake.
  - yunohn 5y ago
    > Ethereum's energy consumption declines by 99.95% upon the completion of the transition to Proof of Stake. Why do Ethereum fans keep using this example as if it’s already done, when it still isn’t?
mch82 5y ago
> None of this is about giving power back to individuals Artificial scarcity is the aspect of web3 that bothers me most. The web is all about abundance; reducing the marginal cost of software and information to zero so as many people as possible can have access. It seems like web3 advocates seek to do the opposite and lock software and information inside the digital equivalent of diamond mines.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  I've asked for this many times (though not here) and still haven't received a satisfactory answer, so I'm curious: who said any of this? Is there a single influential architect of the net or the web who believed this or is this something that was and is a politically aspirational goal by special interest groups like the GNU folks?
  - mch82 5y ago
    One reference is “Free” by Chris Anderson, https://www.amazon.com/Free-Future-Radical-Chris-Anderson/dp/1401322905/ https://www.amazon.com/Free-Future-Radical-Chris-Anderson/dp... DHH has written about abundance as part of his approach to Rails, https://world.hey.com/dhh/i-won-t-let-you-pay-me-for-my-open-source-d7cf4568 https://world.hey.com/dhh/i-won-t-let-you-pay-me-for-my-open... The “Post-scarcity economy” article on Wikipedia lists a number of references, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy Generally, computing trends toward abundance. Computers are priced about the same, but do more each generation.
    - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
      Right but none of these folks were associated with the origins of the net or the web at all. They're people who either inferred post-scarcity through trends they saw or wanted to apply an ideology to the net and the web. DHH is the only technical person in that list. The reason this distinction is important is because a lot of folks try to make the case that the ideological origins of computer networking were with an eye toward post-scarcity, but this seems incorrect to me. Instead it seems to be ideological anger that the internet is not supporting post-scarcity economics.
chrischen 5y ago
What are your thoughts on Ethereum sharding and proof of stake for scaling transactions and lowering costs?
emptybottle 5y ago
NFTs can also contain unlockable content which gives them utility, and more than one edition of a given NFT can be minted. Gas fees vary drastically depending on the chain. Digital signatures could provide some sense of ownership, but how does that solve transferring value/payment, especially the common scenario of splits/royalty percentages on subsequent sales? As a concept I don’t think they are going away, but their implementation will vary over time.

Gravyness 5y ago

> None of this is about giving power back to individuals Exactly, when people claimed web3 is about the individual and decentralization I knew 100% it is a power play being attempted by some stupid people who have no idea how the web works.

doomrobo 5y ago

> NFTs are a scam and are retroactively obsoleted by digital signatures I'm not one to ever defend NFTs, but this is not right. Suppose I bought an extremely trendy natural number k ∈ ℤ and I have a signature σ from its inventor that says "doomrobo owns k". Suppose in a year the trend has passed and I'd like to sell k. How do I transfer ownership to someone else? Clearly sending σ doesn't suffice, since σ is public. Do I need a new signature? Ok different setup: σ is actually a signature from me and the inventor saying "the non-inventor pubkey that signed of this message is the owner of k". How do I transfer σ now? Do I send my signing secret key? Who makes sure I deleted my copy of the signing key?

galaxyLogic 5y ago
Good questions. Let's say I create a piece of digital art and create an NFT out of it. The NFT somehow starts increasing in value. Then I copy my original digital art-asset and perhaps use a Photo-Shop filter to make it have a different hue. I turn that into another NFT. And I keep on doing this for all colors of the rainbow. What prevents me from creating new NFTs with the same or slightly modified underlying digital asset?
- raesene9 5y ago
  In many cases you don't even need to modify it. Ownership of an NFT often does not provide copyright on the original image (https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2021/04/article_0007.html https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2021/04/article_0007.h... has some interesting details on what you do and don't get with an NFT). So if you made the original image, you can just mint a new NFT of that image and sell it. Heck you can mint as many NFTs as you like of any image you own the copyright of :)
  - kpommerenke 5y ago
    Why do I need to own the copyright to mint an NFT of the image?
    - raesene9 5y ago
      So, if you don't own the copyright and then mint an NFT, in theory the copyright holder could get the source image for your NFT taken down (depending on where it's hosted of course) That hasn't stopped loads of NFTs of copyrighted images being minted ofc.
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  It is worse than that, there are no pixels! The NFT is a short string, usually a URL. It’s effectively a QR code! You can create as many copies as you like. The “value” of an NFT comes in somehow convincing people you are the official one. This needs a lot of clout: e.g. a sale by Sotherbys that is well known that people can trace back the NFT to. In a sense its like a digital antique when there are easy fakes. My way of thinking is an NFT is a shitcoin with supply 1 and smallest denomination 1.
  - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
    > My way of thinking is an NFT is a shitcoin with supply 1 and smallest denomination 1. Ah, see, I ususually skip over NFT nonsense because of the sheer number of WHY and WHO it brings up… but now and then it’s summed up nicely.
root_axis 5y ago
The NFT would contain "$doomrobo_public_key owns $k as of $date" signed with the minter's private key. When you decide to sell someone the NFT you append "$new_owner_public_key owns $k as of $date" to the NFT and sign it with your private key: this establishes a secure and verifiable chain of ownership.
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  You can send two of those assignment signatures to two different parties simultaneously. Is there a way in your system to avoid the double send?
  - root_axis 5y ago
    You can do the same thing with blockchain NFTs, just mint another blockchain NFT with the same content. You can say "well, the NFT that was minted first is the true original" but the same is true of the "double sent" digital signature NFT, one will be dated more recently than the other, which affords one identical guarantees of authenticity to the blockchain NFT.
    - quickthrower2 5y ago
      Thats not the same thing.
      - root_axis 5y ago
        I just explained why it is. A one line response of "nuh uh" is not convincing.
        quickthrower2 5y ago
        Its an analogy and diverts from the original point. We were talking about how you were going to solve double spends without a chain. You point about minting another is an interesting point but its not a double spend so we veer off the topic. If we take your point then its the same as saying anyone can create a new crypto and call it Bitcoin. If I have an OG Bitcoin and you have a fake one then you can steel my real one. No you cant. The reason is that people discern what Bitcoin is vs. other coins. NFT cooy/paste is a problem but it is a distinct and different problem to double spend.
jboy55 5y ago
You bought a NFT on some blockchain that exists now, you didn't buy the number. I can sell that same number to someone else, and I could print a big picture of it on fancy paper in a nice frame and afix a hologram seal of authenticity. You owning the NFT of that number doesn't give you any rights to that sale, just as my framed picture doesn't give me any rights over the NFT.
chrischen 5y ago
You create a new signature signing a message saying you transferred this. The important bit here is some public immutable record. If this happened on Ethereum, and Ethereum ceased to exist, then your NFT would cease too. If you used say a archive.org snapshot then your NFT would live as long as archive.org servers are up.

andreilys 5y ago

DeFi is DOA. Gas fees are insane, "layer 2" is just a diplomatic way of saying "offchain centralization" It may come as a surprise but there are other chains that support DeFi apps and which do not have high gas fees like Ethereum. For example, Avalanche and Solana. Collateralized crypto loans are the equivalent of people taking loans out on their equity position so they don’t have to pay cap gains and don’t need to Liquidate. So the use case is already demonstrated, it’s just now applied in a crypto world.

mgraczyk 5y ago
That is not why people take out loans. They do it for leverage and to avoid selling because they want exposure to ETH or BTC. There are easier ways to avoid taxes.
- pazimzadeh 5y ago
  Go on
- ur-whale 5y ago
  > There are easier ways to avoid taxes. Such as?
akudha 5y ago
Solana is centralized, no? If a handful of people can shut down the entire network in a few minutes, how is it a strong network? How is it not centralized?
- FridgeSeal 5y ago
  To add to this, are not most blockchains centralised around the core dev team? The money transfer/bookkeeping system might be decentralised in comparison with standard finance, but it’s no less centralised than a fiat currency, and at least the democratically elected government in my country can 1: be voted out, and 2: employs people who actually understand finance and economics…
suikadayo 5y ago

nfw2 5y ago

Do digital signatures really make the blockchain obsolete if they fill the same niche? Even if blockchain are technically equivalent to digital signatures, it seems like it has some real advantages from a business perspective: - it is capturing the market of people who want to buy "official" digital assets and is becoming the de facto way to do so - the market is one that should have strong network effects - gaining the trust of that market is crucial to supporting these sort of trades I still think NFTs are a bubble that will come back down to Earth eventually. But I also find sneaker and stamp collectors equally perplexing, and people don't discuss these phenomena with the same sort of skepticism.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jaredsohn 5y ago
>But I also find sneaker and stamp collectors equally perplexing, People for the most part don't get rich off of stamps. Is more of a hobby than an investment.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- andybak 5y ago
  I know people who made a decent living from sneaker trading though.
  - altdataseller 5y ago
    Same. Know a handful of ppl making well into 6 figures a year selling on StockX.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    Yeah I grew up in the hood and some of the more successful people from my area started their financial life by sneaker trading.
  - 5y ago

scyclow 5y ago

The critical innovation of blockchain is that it takes your digital signatures and orders them in a way that's byzantine fault tolerant.

gameswithgo 5y ago
if you are trying to be persuasive you should know that what you said is complete gibberish to tech saavy people who are not already bought in to whatever you are talking about.
- ShamelessC 5y ago
  This shit is so pervasive. Honestly seems more like they're trying to get up-votes from fellow crypto enthusiasts than trying to convince anyone; except perhaps themselves.
  - scyclow 5y ago
    I don't really care about upvotes, I just think that it's an important point to understand the technology. I'm not saying anything positive or negative about it. I'm just that blockchains are about more than logging cryptographic signatures -- they're also about ordering those cryptographic signatures.
- scyclow 5y ago
  I mean, if you don't know what byzantine fault tolerance [1] is, then that's fine. It's not gibberish to people who are into distributed systems. And I'm not claiming it's a silver bullet or trying to persuade anyone either. BFT is overkill for most use cases, but sometimes it's useful. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault
  - vanusa 5y ago
    The commenter above was certainly familiar with BFT. It wasn't the term as such that was gibberish. But rather, the implication you were attempting to make that this is a "critical innovation" that provides value.

johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago

>every DeFi scheme is a money loser relative to just buying eth and waiting for a pump Maybe, until ETH never pumps again. Eventually the blue chip cryptocurrencies will find their fair price, and price swings of 10-20% in a single day will be a thing of the past. DeFi DAOs like Curve Finance [0] (currently leading the DeFi pack in terms of Total Value Locked [1]) will generate income for whoever holds a CRV token... so long as the crypto trading markets exist. Curve actually provides a service. They pool liquidity to enable larger trades with less slippage, and as such they're extremely popular. The gas fees are not an issue either, as Curve works across 7 different layer 1 blockchains at the moment and I am sure that is bound to increase in the future. [0] https://curve.fi/ https://curve.fi/ [1] https://defillama.com/ https://defillama.com/

everfree 5y ago

> "layer 2" is just a diplomatic way of saying "offchain centralization" Some popular types of Layer 2s, namely zk rollups, have on-chain data and on-chain transaction verification, so I believe you are wrong on this count.

IgorPartola 5y ago
I guess I am really out of touch but I understood about two and a half words of what you just said.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  It means that everything you need to arrive at a consensus on the validity of a transaction is on the blockchain, and thus enforced by the decentralized network of nodes that validate the blockchain. So contrary to what the grandparent comment claims, these layer 2 (i.e. scalability) solutions make no compromises on decentralization, as they would if they had a consensus-critical component that was managed by a centralized off-chain party.
- manojlds 5y ago
  It's a bit like having an in-mem db that then commits your transactions to the actual DB which is much slower.
hestefisk 5y ago
Are you referring to the likes of Polygon / MATIC?
- everfree 5y ago
  Polygon has several products. Usually when people say "Polygon" they are referring to Polygon's popular sidechain product, but Polygon's Hermez product is a zk rollup like I was talking about.

CryptoPunk 5y ago

>>NFTs are a scam and are retroactively obsoleted by digital signatures. A credibly open and neutral protocol for holding and trading digital assets is not something digital signatures can provide alone. Digital signatures do not solve the double spending problem without trusted third parties. Thus far only blockchains have been able to provide this set of qualities. >>All of the ideas about logistics tracking, deed tracking, etc etc are all rendered pointless by the oracle problem, you can get identical guarantees with digital signatures minus the blockchain. Digital signatures provide no guarantees about data processing and availability. Massively distributed public blockchains do.

xmly 5y ago

I have to say your statement is quite accurate. But the last sentence just reflects the eventual success of the Web3. It is all about making money, aka being greedy.

csbartus 5y ago
Agree. It's only the term `web3` is confusing. It should be called `crypto`, since it's a niche, not like `web2`, which is universally suitable for everyone.

xmly 5y ago

One correctiong. NFTs is just a tool. I believe what you mean is that Digital Arts market based on NFTs is a bubble.

__MatrixMan__ 5y ago
I agree and I wish more people understood this distinction. To say that NFTs are all scams is like saying that pixel shaders are all games. One is often used to implement the other, but they're not the same thing. NFTs will likely find niches outside of signifying ownership. For instance, I'd like to see them used to denote package maintainer status. That way you could have automation that allows package maintainers to do certain maintenance things like publish the hash of the next version, and if they transfer the token to a new maintainer, no permission rejiggering would be required.
- grey-area 5y ago
  Pixel shaders are useful.
  - pcwalton 5y ago
    Except, ironically, when they're used for mining cryptocurrencies (okay, not pixel shaders, but close enough).
  - __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
    Token ring protocol was useful, back in its day. Those tokens were also non fungible (admittedly, there were weaker assurances around that nonfungibility, but I think that's orthogonal).
- simonw 5y ago
  What happens to the package if the maintainer loses their password?
  - simonmales 5y ago
    This is a cool problem. Never looked into it any further but there is some proof of concept code out in the wild about this. "Social key recovery" https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html

hestefisk 5y ago

Largely agree with this. The big promise of defi was to “bank the unbanked”, but Eth is - slow (15 txn/sec, 22-23 with the move to proof of stake) - expensive (I read somewhere that globally Eth users spend more on 30M USD in fees per day!) - too volatile to be reliable for everyday banking use cases - bad for the environment Blockchain technology is interesting and very powerful, but VCs and founders have all too often put the cart before the horse. A few years ago I spoke to an Aussie tech entrepreneur who had raised funding for his “Airbnb for RV” platform. He didn’t get much attention until he said it was blockchain based. In 9.99 out of 10 cases there is no need for a blockchain when a trusted, centralised ledger will do just fine. Edge cases I can think of where a blockchain makes sense is in cases such as post-trade activities or trade finance where multiple parties need to settle complex transactions in a distributed way (Contour is a good example of this). Disclaimer: I do not own shares in Contour; I just find it interesting.

CryptoPunk 5y ago
>>- slow (15 txn/sec, 22-23 with the move to proof of stake) - expensive (I read somewhere that globally Eth users spend more on 30M USD in fees per day!) - This is no longer the case with L2 solutions, like zk-Rollups. See what StarkEx, which is one particular Validium/zk-Rollup L2 solution, is doing: https://twitter.com/EliBenSasson/status/1475206185762578437?s=20 https://twitter.com/EliBenSasson/status/1475206185762578437?... >>Past week, @ethereum ~ 9M txs. StarkEx ~ 6.25M TWO THIRDS THE TX COUNT OF ETHEREUM. L2 solutions can process transactions at scales and fees a couple orders of magnitude greater and lower than Ethereum L1, respectively. >>too volatile to be reliable for everyday banking use cases Stablecoins aren't volatile, and they are a major, and rapidly growing use case of Ethereum >>bad for the environment Ethereum's energy consumption declines by 99.95% upon the completion of the transition to Proof of Stake.
- yunohn 5y ago
  > Ethereum's energy consumption declines by 99.95% upon the completion of the transition to Proof of Stake. Why do Ethereum fans keep using this example as if it’s already done, when it still isn’t?

mch82 5y ago

> None of this is about giving power back to individuals Artificial scarcity is the aspect of web3 that bothers me most. The web is all about abundance; reducing the marginal cost of software and information to zero so as many people as possible can have access. It seems like web3 advocates seek to do the opposite and lock software and information inside the digital equivalent of diamond mines.

Karrot_Kream 5y ago
I've asked for this many times (though not here) and still haven't received a satisfactory answer, so I'm curious: who said any of this? Is there a single influential architect of the net or the web who believed this or is this something that was and is a politically aspirational goal by special interest groups like the GNU folks?
- mch82 5y ago
  One reference is “Free” by Chris Anderson, https://www.amazon.com/Free-Future-Radical-Chris-Anderson/dp/1401322905/ https://www.amazon.com/Free-Future-Radical-Chris-Anderson/dp... DHH has written about abundance as part of his approach to Rails, https://world.hey.com/dhh/i-won-t-let-you-pay-me-for-my-open-source-d7cf4568 https://world.hey.com/dhh/i-won-t-let-you-pay-me-for-my-open... The “Post-scarcity economy” article on Wikipedia lists a number of references, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy Generally, computing trends toward abundance. Computers are priced about the same, but do more each generation.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    Right but none of these folks were associated with the origins of the net or the web at all. They're people who either inferred post-scarcity through trends they saw or wanted to apply an ideology to the net and the web. DHH is the only technical person in that list. The reason this distinction is important is because a lot of folks try to make the case that the ideological origins of computer networking were with an eye toward post-scarcity, but this seems incorrect to me. Instead it seems to be ideological anger that the internet is not supporting post-scarcity economics.

chrischen 5y ago

What are your thoughts on Ethereum sharding and proof of stake for scaling transactions and lowering costs?

emptybottle 5y ago

NFTs can also contain unlockable content which gives them utility, and more than one edition of a given NFT can be minted. Gas fees vary drastically depending on the chain. Digital signatures could provide some sense of ownership, but how does that solve transferring value/payment, especially the common scenario of splits/royalty percentages on subsequent sales? As a concept I don’t think they are going away, but their implementation will vary over time.