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The FAQ has: > Is this a crypto thing? >> No. I realize that crypto is a bad word for some people, but I think that the above answer has a corollary: > Does

The FAQ has: > Is this a crypto thing? >> No. I realize that crypto is a bad word for some people, but I think that the above answer has a corollary: > Does it have a single point of control that will attract corruption if enough of us start using it? >> Yes Certainly plenty of poorly designed crypto things also have that point of control, but a well designed crypto thing at least has a shot at resilience.

fwip 2y ago
I think the failure rate for crypto organizations is much higher than the average org.
- sam0x17 2y ago
  centralization is easy
  - portaouflop 2y ago
    >the reason all crypto companies are scams and corrupt is just because the problem is so hard, not because of inherent flaws in the idea and the incompatibility of lofty goals with reality. I’m all for decentralisation but blockchain ain’t it.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  Certainly, but when the average org becomes corrupted, you just stop buying its project and let it die. This thing endeavors not to sell you a product, but to sell your product. If it's going to get buy-in from artists, I think it's going to need to make significant promises about not making them regret it. I'd love to see it succeed, but building enough social capital to back long term promises like that is a difficult thing.
theamk 2y ago
Smart contracts only affects on-chain stuff, and this deals with real-world things. No smart contract is going to help you if webmasters update website, or if a board decides to add a rule. See also: NFT delisting.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  When I imagine using crypto for this problem, the on-chain portion is a registry of hashes (for the songs) which maps them to addresses which I can send money to and then the contract multiplexes the money out to the appropriate people. So if it's one dude with a guitar and a microphone, 100% goes to him. But if it's a remix of a remix of a remix, then maybe that money gets split 50 ways. I don't know if I need a website or a board for that. Of course I'm not the one building this, so my imagined design doesn't matter. But the question is: if not that, then what? I'm curious, I'm just gonna sleep on it before I decide that I'm $100 curious. Edit: I see I can get the zine digitally first before deciding to be an owner. I guess I have some reading to do.
  - cyberax 2y ago
    What would happen if somebody forgets or loses the key? Reality: there's nothing that blockchain does better than an Excel sheet.
    - kalaksi 2y ago
      Saying something is "reality" doesn't make it so.
      - cyberax 2y ago
        Care to name a few industries transformed by the blockchain? And no, payments for ransomware don't count. Illicit payments for CSAM and drugs also are not an example I'm looking for. And no, international sanctions busting is not a good example either. The same goes for Ponzi schemes.
    - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
      They create a new address and from it they publish a revocation of the old address. Then they re-register their content and associate it with payment patterns that pay out to the new address. Then they propagate the new address in-person. When fans trust the new address, their client notices the conflict and they're prompted to prune the old one (since the trust-score on the new one is higher). If the artist-fan-trust-relationship is multi-hop, it may take a little while for the switch to propagate from fan-to-fan rather than from artist-to-fan, but when it does they'd be notified to consider making the same change. Meanwhile, a timer has been going since the last time the artist collected funds from the account with the lost key. Once it gets suitably high, the pending payments into it are reversed back to the fans, and the pattern is altered to exclude the abandoned address and notify payers that they might be a better pattern to use, prompting them to find and use the new pattern. It's not the simplest way, but it's the best I can do without having anybody on payroll, which means maximizing the amount received by the artists. Besides, art is supposed to be transformative, not status-quo preserving. Even though 99% of artists don't have to worry about being censored directly, I think they're more likely to be interested in protecting the 1% who do. That means having both groups using the same payment rails, and they must be rails that don't respect the kind of bullies that freeze accounts based on content. Finally, you can lean on this web of trust for the distribution of things like concert tickets, making life more difficult for scalpers (and you can identify the scaplers who have infiltrated your fan network, and explicitly distrust them for next time).
PoignardAzur 2y ago
> Does it have a single point of control that will attract corruption if enough of us start using it? By opposition to crypto, which attracts distributed corruption when enough people use the project? I'm being glib, but complaining that a project not using crypto makes it inherently unsafe is pretty rich.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  It's not really a complaint about the project itself. I'm actually considering paying the $100 to be a member because I think they're attempting to address an important problem and I want to see how it goes and it would probably be more fun to do so as an owner. But you've got to admit that its a peculiar rhetorical choice to explain at the landing page that your strategy doesn't involve coupling ownership/control of the platform with the ability to control tokens on a blockchain somewhere, without using the same space to explain what it does do instead.
  - lifeformed 2y ago
    It does the normal thing instead: using a legal system to define and enforce ownership and control.
    - ZoomZoomZoom 2y ago
      There's no "legal system", there's a huge bunch of local legal systems, most of them slightly broken in various ways.
  - portaouflop 2y ago
    I for one would stay away 100 feet from any project that remotely alludes to being vaguely interested in crypto/blockchain. So not doing that is a huge green flag for me. Haven’t yet seen and canola where this crypto distributed network actually had benefits and wasn’t just a giant grift - to be fair I did not look very hard though.
zepton 2y ago
Musicians want to accept credit card payments (you lose a lot of potential sales if you only take crypto), which requires a central party to handle payment processing.
littlestymaar 2y ago
> Certainly plenty of poorly designed crypto things also have that point of control, They all have. They just claim they can work against social dynamics with technology but that's a fool errand.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  Several technologies have managed it. The printing press, the vaccine, the nuclear bomb. It's even crazier to not try.
  - cyberax 2y ago
    Wait, what? Are you comparing cryptocrap with vaccines?!?
  - theamk 2y ago
    It's been 16 years, I think by that time we can be pretty sure cryptocurrency is not going to transform anything other than ransomware payments, law evasion and financial speculation.
    - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
      It took the steam engine 100 years, I think the jury is still out.
      - theamk 2y ago
        The steam engine was almost immediately useful. It may not be used for cars or trains, but it was the best solution for pumping water from some mines. In the more recent comparison, I remeber using the web in early 1990's, when it was less then 5 years old. (Fun fact: the images thing were still new, I remember each image had a "download" link in case yser's browser did not support them). It was already used, and had no analogies, and most importantly, the pages I were used were _not_ related to web or even CS, it was some physics thing. It's time to accept reality: we've spent dozens of years and billions of dollars, and the most useful application is avoidance of financial controls. There is not going to be anything more.

fwip 2y ago

I think the failure rate for crypto organizations is much higher than the average org.

sam0x17 2y ago
centralization is easy
- portaouflop 2y ago
  >the reason all crypto companies are scams and corrupt is just because the problem is so hard, not because of inherent flaws in the idea and the incompatibility of lofty goals with reality. I’m all for decentralisation but blockchain ain’t it.
__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
Certainly, but when the average org becomes corrupted, you just stop buying its project and let it die. This thing endeavors not to sell you a product, but to sell your product. If it's going to get buy-in from artists, I think it's going to need to make significant promises about not making them regret it. I'd love to see it succeed, but building enough social capital to back long term promises like that is a difficult thing.

theamk 2y ago

Smart contracts only affects on-chain stuff, and this deals with real-world things. No smart contract is going to help you if webmasters update website, or if a board decides to add a rule. See also: NFT delisting.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
When I imagine using crypto for this problem, the on-chain portion is a registry of hashes (for the songs) which maps them to addresses which I can send money to and then the contract multiplexes the money out to the appropriate people. So if it's one dude with a guitar and a microphone, 100% goes to him. But if it's a remix of a remix of a remix, then maybe that money gets split 50 ways. I don't know if I need a website or a board for that. Of course I'm not the one building this, so my imagined design doesn't matter. But the question is: if not that, then what? I'm curious, I'm just gonna sleep on it before I decide that I'm $100 curious. Edit: I see I can get the zine digitally first before deciding to be an owner. I guess I have some reading to do.
- cyberax 2y ago
  What would happen if somebody forgets or loses the key? Reality: there's nothing that blockchain does better than an Excel sheet.
  - kalaksi 2y ago
    Saying something is "reality" doesn't make it so.
    - cyberax 2y ago
      Care to name a few industries transformed by the blockchain? And no, payments for ransomware don't count. Illicit payments for CSAM and drugs also are not an example I'm looking for. And no, international sanctions busting is not a good example either. The same goes for Ponzi schemes.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    They create a new address and from it they publish a revocation of the old address. Then they re-register their content and associate it with payment patterns that pay out to the new address. Then they propagate the new address in-person. When fans trust the new address, their client notices the conflict and they're prompted to prune the old one (since the trust-score on the new one is higher). If the artist-fan-trust-relationship is multi-hop, it may take a little while for the switch to propagate from fan-to-fan rather than from artist-to-fan, but when it does they'd be notified to consider making the same change. Meanwhile, a timer has been going since the last time the artist collected funds from the account with the lost key. Once it gets suitably high, the pending payments into it are reversed back to the fans, and the pattern is altered to exclude the abandoned address and notify payers that they might be a better pattern to use, prompting them to find and use the new pattern. It's not the simplest way, but it's the best I can do without having anybody on payroll, which means maximizing the amount received by the artists. Besides, art is supposed to be transformative, not status-quo preserving. Even though 99% of artists don't have to worry about being censored directly, I think they're more likely to be interested in protecting the 1% who do. That means having both groups using the same payment rails, and they must be rails that don't respect the kind of bullies that freeze accounts based on content. Finally, you can lean on this web of trust for the distribution of things like concert tickets, making life more difficult for scalpers (and you can identify the scaplers who have infiltrated your fan network, and explicitly distrust them for next time).

PoignardAzur 2y ago

> Does it have a single point of control that will attract corruption if enough of us start using it? By opposition to crypto, which attracts distributed corruption when enough people use the project? I'm being glib, but complaining that a project not using crypto makes it inherently unsafe is pretty rich.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
It's not really a complaint about the project itself. I'm actually considering paying the $100 to be a member because I think they're attempting to address an important problem and I want to see how it goes and it would probably be more fun to do so as an owner. But you've got to admit that its a peculiar rhetorical choice to explain at the landing page that your strategy doesn't involve coupling ownership/control of the platform with the ability to control tokens on a blockchain somewhere, without using the same space to explain what it does do instead.
- lifeformed 2y ago
  It does the normal thing instead: using a legal system to define and enforce ownership and control.
  - ZoomZoomZoom 2y ago
    There's no "legal system", there's a huge bunch of local legal systems, most of them slightly broken in various ways.
- portaouflop 2y ago
  I for one would stay away 100 feet from any project that remotely alludes to being vaguely interested in crypto/blockchain. So not doing that is a huge green flag for me. Haven’t yet seen and canola where this crypto distributed network actually had benefits and wasn’t just a giant grift - to be fair I did not look very hard though.

zepton 2y ago

Musicians want to accept credit card payments (you lose a lot of potential sales if you only take crypto), which requires a central party to handle payment processing.

littlestymaar 2y ago

> Certainly plenty of poorly designed crypto things also have that point of control, They all have. They just claim they can work against social dynamics with technology but that's a fool errand.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
Several technologies have managed it. The printing press, the vaccine, the nuclear bomb. It's even crazier to not try.
- cyberax 2y ago
  Wait, what? Are you comparing cryptocrap with vaccines?!?
- theamk 2y ago
  It's been 16 years, I think by that time we can be pretty sure cryptocurrency is not going to transform anything other than ransomware payments, law evasion and financial speculation.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    It took the steam engine 100 years, I think the jury is still out.
    - theamk 2y ago
      The steam engine was almost immediately useful. It may not be used for cars or trains, but it was the best solution for pumping water from some mines. In the more recent comparison, I remeber using the web in early 1990's, when it was less then 5 years old. (Fun fact: the images thing were still new, I remember each image had a "download" link in case yser's browser did not support them). It was already used, and had no analogies, and most importantly, the pages I were used were _not_ related to web or even CS, it was some physics thing. It's time to accept reality: we've spent dozens of years and billions of dollars, and the most useful application is avoidance of financial controls. There is not going to be anything more.