5 ms·

What do you see? I've just had a 2 hour conversation with someone trying to get me into this "business" without being able to articulate a single use case where

by chimen 5y ago

What do you see? I've just had a 2 hour conversation with someone trying to get me into this "business" without being able to articulate a single use case where NFTs actually make my day better in a way that is not currently possible with other tech so, yeah...what do you see? I see a whole new wave of fouls about to lose their money to ponzi schemes and over-hyped "investments", much like it happened with the bitcoin/crypto train. Just write NFT or crypto in Youtube and you immediately see all the sharks promising you millions in their videos, trying to manipulate you into investing - don't read the comments though, it's even worse. I see a lot of red flags and trouble for nothing. I hold crypto assets so I'm not talking out of my but here - I must confess; I've had no real benefits yet from this new tech. The crypto I hold is because one of my products has crypto as a payment method so I decided to just hold a piece of it and try to make use of "new tech".

somebodythere 5y ago
In the crypto space I'm most excited about the ability to have open projects where anyone who contributes can have a stake in the financial rewards of the project, and there are no barriers to becoming a contributor. A lot of the time the financial benefits of open-source contributors are fully captured by a "host" corporation, and open collaboration platforms for non-software projects like textbooks and IRL shared spaces are almost nonexistent. Proof-of-personhood a la BrightID is something that governments could theoretically provide, but most don't, and even if they did, there are serious privacy and interoperability concerns. SaaS companies trying to provide a free trial can prevent abuse by verifying unique personhood using web3 tech without needing to ask for any more information about the user. I'm sure you can think of other applications for that tech. Even if every government in the world provided this service, everyone who wants to use it either has to implement 195 different APIs or fork over money to a cottage industry whose sole job it is to unify those APIs. Finance and commerce on blockchains has a lot of real-world benefits that traditional finance can't or refuses to provide. You can't easily set up a 3-of-5 multisig for your photography club in traditional finance. A lot of normal people have their payments blocked or funds frozen in TradFi for arbitrary reasons. Sex workers get kicked off of platforms all the time, and a friend recently had their PayPal frozen while raising funds for a school reunion party. I'm not super into NFTs personally, but I can see them having a use case as a more consumer-friendly business model for gacha games and games with similar mechanics. There are probably other promising applications that I just don't know about because I don't follow that space very closely.
- rezonant 5y ago
  Not super familiar with BrightID but I took a look at the website. So I guess the idea is that other humans verify a human and issue cryptographic proof that they are a human. My question: What about BrightID stops you from verifying and creating multiple identities by simply joining these Zoom-based verification parties multiple times? If someone does that, what's to stop someone from then providing those multiple identities to other people?
- rezonant 5y ago
  > SaaS companies trying to provide a free trial can prevent abuse by verifying unique personhood using web3 tech without needing to ask for any more information about the user A trial is usually backed by a financial instrument. Usually that financial instrument is a credit card. A credit card can be uniquely identified, and so if you really are concerned about trial reuse, you can check reuse of the credit card, and that gets you pretty far. Folks can use prepaid cards, but you can also block those, which isn't totally unreasonable when you are talking about a subscription-- and a lot of subscription services do block them. Is it indefeatable? No. Is it good enough? Yeah actually. So why do I need to replace the concept of a credit card with an entirely new type of financial instrument that most users (especially non-technical users) don't have or understand?
  - somebodythere 5y ago
    SaaS just seemed relevant to the audience here, but there are a lot of applications which want to limit one account per natural person, not just SaaS. For example, social networks want to prevent astroturfing, and video games want to prevent cheaters from ban-evasion. Anyway, a lot of people don't want to provide their credit card info for a service they are not sure if they want to use yet (purpose of a trial), and a lot of services want to allow credit card-free trials without opening themselves up to abuse. I think the vast majority of reflexive dismissals of crypto tech have two themes in common: "if the technology doesn't satisfy this use case, or the UX is not perfect yet, then surely there is no way to fix that and we should discard the whole idea;" and "why use this decentralized solution when we can use this centralized one which, in many cases, doesn't work as well?" I've reached my weekly budget on the amount of time I want to spend explaining this tech online, but maybe consider if problems you see are truly insurmountable, or if you are simply uncomfortable with the idea of an economic layer that is actually open to build on.

by chimen 5y ago

somebodythere 5y ago

In the crypto space I'm most excited about the ability to have open projects where anyone who contributes can have a stake in the financial rewards of the project, and there are no barriers to becoming a contributor. A lot of the time the financial benefits of open-source contributors are fully captured by a "host" corporation, and open collaboration platforms for non-software projects like textbooks and IRL shared spaces are almost nonexistent. Proof-of-personhood a la BrightID is something that governments could theoretically provide, but most don't, and even if they did, there are serious privacy and interoperability concerns. SaaS companies trying to provide a free trial can prevent abuse by verifying unique personhood using web3 tech without needing to ask for any more information about the user. I'm sure you can think of other applications for that tech. Even if every government in the world provided this service, everyone who wants to use it either has to implement 195 different APIs or fork over money to a cottage industry whose sole job it is to unify those APIs. Finance and commerce on blockchains has a lot of real-world benefits that traditional finance can't or refuses to provide. You can't easily set up a 3-of-5 multisig for your photography club in traditional finance. A lot of normal people have their payments blocked or funds frozen in TradFi for arbitrary reasons. Sex workers get kicked off of platforms all the time, and a friend recently had their PayPal frozen while raising funds for a school reunion party. I'm not super into NFTs personally, but I can see them having a use case as a more consumer-friendly business model for gacha games and games with similar mechanics. There are probably other promising applications that I just don't know about because I don't follow that space very closely.

rezonant 5y ago
Not super familiar with BrightID but I took a look at the website. So I guess the idea is that other humans verify a human and issue cryptographic proof that they are a human. My question: What about BrightID stops you from verifying and creating multiple identities by simply joining these Zoom-based verification parties multiple times? If someone does that, what's to stop someone from then providing those multiple identities to other people?
rezonant 5y ago
> SaaS companies trying to provide a free trial can prevent abuse by verifying unique personhood using web3 tech without needing to ask for any more information about the user A trial is usually backed by a financial instrument. Usually that financial instrument is a credit card. A credit card can be uniquely identified, and so if you really are concerned about trial reuse, you can check reuse of the credit card, and that gets you pretty far. Folks can use prepaid cards, but you can also block those, which isn't totally unreasonable when you are talking about a subscription-- and a lot of subscription services do block them. Is it indefeatable? No. Is it good enough? Yeah actually. So why do I need to replace the concept of a credit card with an entirely new type of financial instrument that most users (especially non-technical users) don't have or understand?
- somebodythere 5y ago
  SaaS just seemed relevant to the audience here, but there are a lot of applications which want to limit one account per natural person, not just SaaS. For example, social networks want to prevent astroturfing, and video games want to prevent cheaters from ban-evasion. Anyway, a lot of people don't want to provide their credit card info for a service they are not sure if they want to use yet (purpose of a trial), and a lot of services want to allow credit card-free trials without opening themselves up to abuse. I think the vast majority of reflexive dismissals of crypto tech have two themes in common: "if the technology doesn't satisfy this use case, or the UX is not perfect yet, then surely there is no way to fix that and we should discard the whole idea;" and "why use this decentralized solution when we can use this centralized one which, in many cases, doesn't work as well?" I've reached my weekly budget on the amount of time I want to spend explaining this tech online, but maybe consider if problems you see are truly insurmountable, or if you are simply uncomfortable with the idea of an economic layer that is actually open to build on.