6 ms·

I'm not convinced it isn't crypto itself, and NFT is just an extension of that.

randomhodler84 5y ago
It’s degrees of suspension of disbelief. Software is just tricking sand into to thinking. I have no issue believing that an imaginary consensus stored ledger in thousands of computers all secured by massive amounts of energy and limited to 21M units over 100 years might be valuable. The ability for people to copy this software idea? Not valuable. The ability for people to issue new tokens on existing chains? Not valuable. The ability for people to post and sell jpegs, Not valuable. Only original ideas are scarce. It’s the first step vs the n-th step.
- birdyrooster 5y ago
  I think SV libertarians saw the scam of world finance and thought, y’know what if we could get in on this too and then we would never have to innovate again.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  > I have no issue believing that an imaginary consensus stored ledger in thousands of computers all secured by massive amounts of energy and limited to 21M units over 100 years might be valuable. It's not "secured" by energy. You can't convert a Bitcoin into the original amount of power required to produce it, which is the defining quality of a financial security. It's more accurate to say that Bitcoin's value is retained by the ongoing commitment of power into the network. But that correctly suggests that the network collapses without a perpetual source of electricity, which is not the kind of positive connotation that I think you meant to supply.
  - randomhodler84 5y ago
    Hmmm, you do agree it has value then! It’s a little more nuanced, while some component of maintaining hashrate/energy, it’s best be be thought of as a point in time expenditure given the network size, participants and technology available. Once a block is minted at a given difficulty, it can never be undone (with a negligible probability), as a chain reorganization would need to put in more energy than that to undo it. It’s a conversion, abstractly. Probabilistic finality at a given level of technological and economic resource exploitation.
    - woodruffw 5y ago
      The wonderful thing about economic value is that, for better or worse, we get to decide what has it. A large number of people have decided that Bitcoins have economic value, and it's not particularly salient to my arguments as to whether that's true or not. The rest of what you've written doesn't really concern me, because all I was interested in was pointing out that Bitcoin doesn't securitize energy.
  - thebean11 5y ago
    The person you are replying to is using the word secured in a literal sense I think. Not the financial sense meaning backed by.
    - woodruffw 5y ago
      Okay. In what "literal" sense of the word is Bitcoin secured by electricity? The need for electricity seems to be Bitcoin's greatest practical liability, since the entire network depends on it.
      - thebean11 5y ago
        The more electricity is used to secure it, the more electricity is required to attack it
        woodruffw 5y ago
        I think that fits more into "ridiculous economic Chinese finger trap" than "security feature." It's similar to calling gold's physical weight a security feature, but at least there's a consistent and non-economic relationship between how much gold you have and how hard it is for someone to pick it up and walk away with it. (It's also not immediately obvious that "more electricity" is needed to attack it, since a handful of extant larger pools could just conspire as-is.)
        thebean11 5y ago
        Larger pools doing that would be subtracting energy from the honest side, and adding it to the dishonest side, so the logic still holds
        woodruffw 5y ago
        > Larger pools doing that would be subtracting energy from the honest side, and adding it to the dishonest side Why would that be the case? It isn't necessarily zero-sum; the more realistic scenario is that the remaining honest participants ramp up their energy consumption in an attempt to prevent the attack. But that's still only the most boring of the many, many latent threats to Bitcoin. Solar flares and electronic warfare strike me as more interesting.

It’s degrees of suspension of disbelief. Software is just tricking sand into to thinking. I have no issue believing that an imaginary consensus stored ledger in thousands of computers all secured by massive amounts of energy and limited to 21M units over 100 years might be valuable. The ability for people to copy this software idea? Not valuable. The ability for people to issue new tokens on existing chains? Not valuable. The ability for people to post and sell jpegs, Not valuable. Only original ideas are scarce. It’s the first step vs the n-th step.

birdyrooster 5y ago
I think SV libertarians saw the scam of world finance and thought, y’know what if we could get in on this too and then we would never have to innovate again.
woodruffw 5y ago
> I have no issue believing that an imaginary consensus stored ledger in thousands of computers all secured by massive amounts of energy and limited to 21M units over 100 years might be valuable. It's not "secured" by energy. You can't convert a Bitcoin into the original amount of power required to produce it, which is the defining quality of a financial security. It's more accurate to say that Bitcoin's value is retained by the ongoing commitment of power into the network. But that correctly suggests that the network collapses without a perpetual source of electricity, which is not the kind of positive connotation that I think you meant to supply.
- randomhodler84 5y ago
  Hmmm, you do agree it has value then! It’s a little more nuanced, while some component of maintaining hashrate/energy, it’s best be be thought of as a point in time expenditure given the network size, participants and technology available. Once a block is minted at a given difficulty, it can never be undone (with a negligible probability), as a chain reorganization would need to put in more energy than that to undo it. It’s a conversion, abstractly. Probabilistic finality at a given level of technological and economic resource exploitation.
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    The wonderful thing about economic value is that, for better or worse, we get to decide what has it. A large number of people have decided that Bitcoins have economic value, and it's not particularly salient to my arguments as to whether that's true or not. The rest of what you've written doesn't really concern me, because all I was interested in was pointing out that Bitcoin doesn't securitize energy.
- thebean11 5y ago
  The person you are replying to is using the word secured in a literal sense I think. Not the financial sense meaning backed by.
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    Okay. In what "literal" sense of the word is Bitcoin secured by electricity? The need for electricity seems to be Bitcoin's greatest practical liability, since the entire network depends on it.
    - thebean11 5y ago
      The more electricity is used to secure it, the more electricity is required to attack it
      - woodruffw 5y ago
        I think that fits more into "ridiculous economic Chinese finger trap" than "security feature." It's similar to calling gold's physical weight a security feature, but at least there's a consistent and non-economic relationship between how much gold you have and how hard it is for someone to pick it up and walk away with it. (It's also not immediately obvious that "more electricity" is needed to attack it, since a handful of extant larger pools could just conspire as-is.)
        thebean11 5y ago
        Larger pools doing that would be subtracting energy from the honest side, and adding it to the dishonest side, so the logic still holds
        woodruffw 5y ago
        > Larger pools doing that would be subtracting energy from the honest side, and adding it to the dishonest side Why would that be the case? It isn't necessarily zero-sum; the more realistic scenario is that the remaining honest participants ramp up their energy consumption in an attempt to prevent the attack. But that's still only the most boring of the many, many latent threats to Bitcoin. Solar flares and electronic warfare strike me as more interesting.