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> we’re moving towards a world where the digital economy is massive, global, and deeply embedded in livelihoods. True. > That world does require new tools to

> we’re moving towards a world where the digital economy is massive, global, and deeply embedded in livelihoods. True. > That world does require new tools to ascertain ownership of digital assets (since a lot of people will make their living through creating/selling these assets) and paying for digital assets (global commerce requires global and open payment systems). ... Why? The only things crypto has been truly innovative in paying for is illicit pornography and drugs. And like, the second one I don't have issue with, but the solution there is not to create an entire secondary financial system that burns down rain forests to execute transactions. The solution is to decriminalize drugs and use the existing financial system to pay for them. And even the owning/selling of digital assets point rests upon a single chain ending up the "winner" of this strange competition they've been holding for decades. Okay, so you "own" this piece of art on the Ethereum network. What if someone contends they own it on the Tezos chain, or any one of the hundreds if not thousands of other ones? Or more fun still, what if someone just mints another of the thing you own on the same chain? Nobody is stopping them. > At least crypto is trying to fix this problem No it's not. It's a casino pretending to be a bank and telling you poker chips are money. Step outside said casino and try to buy a hot dog, and you'll realize the problems quite quickly.

johanneskanybal 3y ago
You have a point that incentives makes people mostly obsessed with speculation and money machine scams. At the same time, even if it’s clunky buying a crypto hotdog compared to a paypal checkout or a international money transfer it’s been ahead for a while.
miracle2k 3y ago
> The solution is to decriminalize drugs and use the existing financial system to pay for them. When can we expect this utopia to be ushered in? What about paying for abortions? Sex work? Hosting of Kiwi Farms? There is no future where all these contentious decisions will align with your preferences. You can either throw your support behind the prohibitions that the collective enforces, or you can support an escape valve for individuals to defy it. > What if someone contends they own it on the Tezos chain, or any one of the hundreds if not thousands of other ones? Or more fun still, what if someone just mints another of the thing you own on the same chain? Nobody is stopping them. NFTs don't work this way; the goal is not for the chain to tell you which token is "real", whatever that means. That's up to you to decide. The chain just ensures that you get to own a token until you decide you no longer want it. No one cares that you print your own versions of valuable pokemon cards at home.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  > You can either throw your support behind the prohibitions that the collective enforces, or you can support an escape valve for individuals to defy it. I 100% support individuals defying illegitimate laws. I did so twice in the last few months. I did not require cryptocurrency to do it and presenting either supporting prohibitions I disagree with -OR- supporting cryptocurrency is a false dichotomy. We already have an untraceable value credit system in place for transacting illicit things. It's called cash, and it predates even the financial markets that crypto alleges to be trying to replace (while tripping over themselves to continue having access to the real financial system which incidentally is the main way crypto becomes non-anonymous because cryptocurrency cannot in fact create wealth it can only move it around from the actual financial system it claims to oppose, but that's a whole other thing entirely). If it's a release valve as you say, then it is a release valve bolted to the side of an oppressive financial plumbing system, and is therefore reliant upon it. It is not salvation, is it at best, a new set of masters who have different preferences to the old. Perhaps an improvement (sex work) perhaps merely a different sort of monster (hosting kiwifarms) but nevertheless, not freedom. Just a different puppeteer with a different set of strings. > NFTs don't work this way; the goal is not for the chain to tell you which token is "real", whatever that means. That's up to you to decide. THEN WHAT DOES IT MATTER!? I have decided I own the Brooklyn Bridge. May I now list it for sale on Zillow? Ownership as a concept only functions as a social contract with everyone else who shares your reality. I can SAY I own whatever the fuck I want, that is meaningless, utterly without value at all, if the person I'm attempting to sell it to does not recognize my ownership first, which for anything of value requires documentation. I own my home, because my name is on the deed, and it's also worth noting that I don't really, because the property is actually owned by a mortgage company, to whom I pay money. Nevertheless, I could sell my home, and then use the proceeds to pay off that mortgage company, and then take what's left and pocket it. But that entire arrangement depends on a contractual legal system with it's origin of trust in, ultimately, the Federal Government and judicial system, and because cryptocurrency is allergic ideologically to centralization (which isn't to say centralization isn't rife through the entire ecosystem anyway, because as it turns out, you kinda need central resources to use, well, anything) they refuse to do this. > No one cares that you print your own versions of valuable pokemon cards at home. In fact people do care! If you sold counterfeit Pokemon cards to a collector, you could be sued in civil court and possibly charged with fraud for misrepresenting goods! Not to mention sued by the holder of that intellectual property for reproducing it without their permission. Maybe they can't recover their money under this stupid system, perhaps that's true, but that only matters if literally all your assets are in crypto. If you have a car, they can take that. If you have a home, they can take that. If you have $50 to your name in a checking account, they can take that and burden you for life with debt for whatever that doesn't cover. And in the event you manage to somehow crypto your entire life and they "can't touch you," you then go to jail because while everything is else beyond the reach of the feds (kind of) YOU, as in the physical manifestation of you, are not. Up to the point where you leave this ecosystem, you have "money" in ethereum. Once you cross that threshold, you have *jack shit.* Actually you have less than jack shit, because you're down whatever real money you exchanged for fake money on the promises of whoever convinced you to buy into it.
spaceman_2020 3y ago
> Okay, so you "own" this piece of art on the Ethereum network. What if someone contends they own it on the Tezos chain, or any one of the hundreds if not thousands of other ones? This would be very easy to establish - the creator would have a minting hash, and that hash would have a date and time. If I create a piece of art and mint it on Ethereum with my wallet, it would be easy to prove that I own it, vs someone else copy-pasting the image and minting it two days later on Tezos.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  And what does that mean? That person can still sell it. That person can still claim they own it, because they own that NFT of the thing. You both own it, effectively, now. Without an authoritative chain that is the chain, it doesn't matter.
  - spaceman_2020 3y ago
    Why? If the NFT does not have the creator’s signature - a transaction signed by the creator’s key - why would anyone consider that to be authentic? You can mint 10 copies of the NFT on 10 different chains, but if the mint transaction is not signed by the creator’s key, it would not be authentic. In the real world, you used to authenticate things through signatures. In the digital world, you would do that by signing transactions with your known wallet.
kybernetikos 3y ago
> the solution there is not to create an entire secondary financial system that burns down rain forests to execute transactions This complaint is out of date for ethereum, the cryptocurrency system under discussion. The carbon footprint of an ethereum transaction is now about the same as watching two hours of youtube according to https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption and that's for the L1 - say you use Argent on Zksync as an example L2, you're most likely saving even more energy.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  And VISA handles 160,000 transactions for that same amount of energy. It's still catastrophically wasteful. You're still not even remotely in the realm where you can call it more or less efficient, one of these is efficient, and one of them is categorically, empirically not. And before you go to cite crypto using green energy sources: so fucking what? It's wasting energy that wasn't produced with fossil fuels, big fucking deal, now the people who could've used that energy might well need to use fossil fuel-based energy sources to make up what ethereum converted into heat in server rooms which was then cooled by air conditioning to play their monopoly money game. Great, terrific, awesome.
  - kybernetikos 3y ago
    The page I linked says that visa do 22 transactions for the same carbon footprint. This is really not terribly inefficient - they both use very little energy per transaction and ethereum is much more advanced than visa and a much better platform to build a global financial system on - it can handle arbitrary transactions so I can make atomic transfers, it's credibly neutral to its transactions, its costs are borne by those using it rather than by a rent seeking corporation. Its not a back box - anyone with a good idea can suggest improvements. Besides that, rollups provide further energy savings to the extent that I expect my zksync transactions probably actually use a very similar amount of energy to visa transactions.
    - ToucanLoucan 3y ago

johanneskanybal 3y ago

You have a point that incentives makes people mostly obsessed with speculation and money machine scams. At the same time, even if it’s clunky buying a crypto hotdog compared to a paypal checkout or a international money transfer it’s been ahead for a while.

miracle2k 3y ago

> The solution is to decriminalize drugs and use the existing financial system to pay for them. When can we expect this utopia to be ushered in? What about paying for abortions? Sex work? Hosting of Kiwi Farms? There is no future where all these contentious decisions will align with your preferences. You can either throw your support behind the prohibitions that the collective enforces, or you can support an escape valve for individuals to defy it. > What if someone contends they own it on the Tezos chain, or any one of the hundreds if not thousands of other ones? Or more fun still, what if someone just mints another of the thing you own on the same chain? Nobody is stopping them. NFTs don't work this way; the goal is not for the chain to tell you which token is "real", whatever that means. That's up to you to decide. The chain just ensures that you get to own a token until you decide you no longer want it. No one cares that you print your own versions of valuable pokemon cards at home.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago
> You can either throw your support behind the prohibitions that the collective enforces, or you can support an escape valve for individuals to defy it. I 100% support individuals defying illegitimate laws. I did so twice in the last few months. I did not require cryptocurrency to do it and presenting either supporting prohibitions I disagree with -OR- supporting cryptocurrency is a false dichotomy. We already have an untraceable value credit system in place for transacting illicit things. It's called cash, and it predates even the financial markets that crypto alleges to be trying to replace (while tripping over themselves to continue having access to the real financial system which incidentally is the main way crypto becomes non-anonymous because cryptocurrency cannot in fact create wealth it can only move it around from the actual financial system it claims to oppose, but that's a whole other thing entirely). If it's a release valve as you say, then it is a release valve bolted to the side of an oppressive financial plumbing system, and is therefore reliant upon it. It is not salvation, is it at best, a new set of masters who have different preferences to the old. Perhaps an improvement (sex work) perhaps merely a different sort of monster (hosting kiwifarms) but nevertheless, not freedom. Just a different puppeteer with a different set of strings. > NFTs don't work this way; the goal is not for the chain to tell you which token is "real", whatever that means. That's up to you to decide. THEN WHAT DOES IT MATTER!? I have decided I own the Brooklyn Bridge. May I now list it for sale on Zillow? Ownership as a concept only functions as a social contract with everyone else who shares your reality. I can SAY I own whatever the fuck I want, that is meaningless, utterly without value at all, if the person I'm attempting to sell it to does not recognize my ownership first, which for anything of value requires documentation. I own my home, because my name is on the deed, and it's also worth noting that I don't really, because the property is actually owned by a mortgage company, to whom I pay money. Nevertheless, I could sell my home, and then use the proceeds to pay off that mortgage company, and then take what's left and pocket it. But that entire arrangement depends on a contractual legal system with it's origin of trust in, ultimately, the Federal Government and judicial system, and because cryptocurrency is allergic ideologically to centralization (which isn't to say centralization isn't rife through the entire ecosystem anyway, because as it turns out, you kinda need central resources to use, well, anything) they refuse to do this. > No one cares that you print your own versions of valuable pokemon cards at home. In fact people do care! If you sold counterfeit Pokemon cards to a collector, you could be sued in civil court and possibly charged with fraud for misrepresenting goods! Not to mention sued by the holder of that intellectual property for reproducing it without their permission. Maybe they can't recover their money under this stupid system, perhaps that's true, but that only matters if literally all your assets are in crypto. If you have a car, they can take that. If you have a home, they can take that. If you have $50 to your name in a checking account, they can take that and burden you for life with debt for whatever that doesn't cover. And in the event you manage to somehow crypto your entire life and they "can't touch you," you then go to jail because while everything is else beyond the reach of the feds (kind of) YOU, as in the physical manifestation of you, are not. Up to the point where you leave this ecosystem, you have "money" in ethereum. Once you cross that threshold, you have *jack shit.* Actually you have less than jack shit, because you're down whatever real money you exchanged for fake money on the promises of whoever convinced you to buy into it.

spaceman_2020 3y ago

> Okay, so you "own" this piece of art on the Ethereum network. What if someone contends they own it on the Tezos chain, or any one of the hundreds if not thousands of other ones? This would be very easy to establish - the creator would have a minting hash, and that hash would have a date and time. If I create a piece of art and mint it on Ethereum with my wallet, it would be easy to prove that I own it, vs someone else copy-pasting the image and minting it two days later on Tezos.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago
And what does that mean? That person can still sell it. That person can still claim they own it, because they own that NFT of the thing. You both own it, effectively, now. Without an authoritative chain that is the chain, it doesn't matter.
- spaceman_2020 3y ago
  Why? If the NFT does not have the creator’s signature - a transaction signed by the creator’s key - why would anyone consider that to be authentic? You can mint 10 copies of the NFT on 10 different chains, but if the mint transaction is not signed by the creator’s key, it would not be authentic. In the real world, you used to authenticate things through signatures. In the digital world, you would do that by signing transactions with your known wallet.

kybernetikos 3y ago

> the solution there is not to create an entire secondary financial system that burns down rain forests to execute transactions This complaint is out of date for ethereum, the cryptocurrency system under discussion. The carbon footprint of an ethereum transaction is now about the same as watching two hours of youtube according to https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption and that's for the L1 - say you use Argent on Zksync as an example L2, you're most likely saving even more energy.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago
And VISA handles 160,000 transactions for that same amount of energy. It's still catastrophically wasteful. You're still not even remotely in the realm where you can call it more or less efficient, one of these is efficient, and one of them is categorically, empirically not. And before you go to cite crypto using green energy sources: so fucking what? It's wasting energy that wasn't produced with fossil fuels, big fucking deal, now the people who could've used that energy might well need to use fossil fuel-based energy sources to make up what ethereum converted into heat in server rooms which was then cooled by air conditioning to play their monopoly money game. Great, terrific, awesome.
- kybernetikos 3y ago
  The page I linked says that visa do 22 transactions for the same carbon footprint. This is really not terribly inefficient - they both use very little energy per transaction and ethereum is much more advanced than visa and a much better platform to build a global financial system on - it can handle arbitrary transactions so I can make atomic transfers, it's credibly neutral to its transactions, its costs are borne by those using it rather than by a rent seeking corporation. Its not a back box - anyone with a good idea can suggest improvements. Besides that, rollups provide further energy savings to the extent that I expect my zksync transactions probably actually use a very similar amount of energy to visa transactions.
  - ToucanLoucan 3y ago