this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
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You call them scammers, then say their right to scam should be protected by licenses? I say we scam the scammers by forking it and doing whatever the fuck we want with it π
Whether something is open-source or not is dependent on what license if any its creator chooses to put it under. a) This comment confuses me more than anything, and b) if you want to make a better Flappy Bird game, you'll probably have a better shot forking one of the existing clones than waiting for whatever steaming, uninspired pile of shit comes out of Belfort's wallet.
One small but important correction. NFTs are not a scam, it's an amazing technology that has the potential to revolutionize lots of stuff, that became popular when people used it for stupid shit.
Saying NFT is a scam because people have used it to scam others is like saying phones are a scam because people call others over the phone to scam them.
NFTs are essentially a decentralized token. This means that they can be used to represent anything you might want to represent with a token, e.g. ownership of a physical object such as a car or a house; ownership of a digital asset, such as a website or game; some predetermined amount of something, similar to a stock or bonds; etc. The fact that some people used it to mean ownership of random pictures and people thought buying random pictures on the internet for a ridiculous amount of money was a good idea tells you more about people than about the technology.
No.
NFTs are not proof of ownership. At best they are the equivalent to receipts, at worse they are mere url links. They are certainly not title deeds, not proof of copyright ownership or anything of that sort. They are just a ledger that person D paid something to person C who paid something to person B who paid something to person A.
Lets use those NFT monkeys as an example. There is literally no proof anywhere on that NFT chain that person A is the rightful copyright owner or has the rights to sell said image. Furthermore, there is no proof that person A gave the rights to person B to resell said image. Or that anyone down the chain sold the complete rights instead of just selling the link to access monkey.jpg
The whole point of cryptocurrency is decentralized ownership. That's the big breakthrough in technology, it's the whole point of it, I can try to ELI5 how that works if you want to, but for the moment I'm just going to assume you accept that cryptocurrency can demonstrate ownership.
NFTs are an extension of that, except they can't be split or traded by one another, i.e. they're non-fungible. Therefore you can by definition prove ownership of those tokens, as that's the whole point of the technology, which again, if you're curious I can try to explain how it works.
How does ownership of those tokens transfers to ownership of something else? Well, that's an excellent question, and the answer is that it happens in the same way that a piece of paper grants ownership of a house. There's no innovative technology behind that piece of paper, but still everyone would agree that it grants ownership, and the reason is that the authority that enforces that chose to respect that piece of paper. Nowadays this is mostly databases and the piece of paper is just generated from the records there, but this is very insecure as anyone with database write access (or access to the physical folder containing the documents in case of old paper deeds) can transfer ownership. NFTs solve this because only the owner of a token can transfer it to someone else, so they're inherently safer than any of the alternatives.
Again, the technology is great and has millions of excellent applications, but people use it for pyramid schemes and scamming others, but people do that with any piece of technology.
So NFTs are not inherently proof of ownership as the person above said. The general concept of owning crypto (which no one is questioning here) is a very different topic than using NFTs as proof of ownership of literally anything else.
Do you consider a deed to be proof of ownership? A stock? The registry of a car? They're not inherently proof of ownership, they're just pieces of paper or entries on a database. If you go down the road of what is proof of ownership then no technology we have is able to prove it.
The thing is that NFTs you can prove ownership of the token, if the token correlates with something, e.g. if the DMV stored car ownership in a Blockchain, NFTs could be used to represent car ownership in a secure and decentralized way.
but, why? is there some problem with the way we prove ownership of things now? as far as i know there isnβt an epidemic of car titles or house deeds getting hacked.
No, there isn't, but there are advantages to it as well, just like how a database has advantages over a paper folder.
An NFT can't be transferred by anyone other than the owner, and ownership can be verified independently.
Here's an example of a use that would be very cool and would take advantage of it (even though I know it's unlikely to happen). Ownership of games, some games are sold on different platforms, to verify the ownership of the game (or DLC, or cosmetics) games have to verify with first party services (like PSN or Steam), which means that for the most part you need to buy games on each platform individually, but if platforms used an NFT for it games would be buy once play anywhere, and they would allow you to sell or even borrow games, and no company could prevent you from doing so. Which is obviously the reason this will never happen, but it's a nice idea.
That being said there are downsides to it as well, such as a person being the full owner of stuff means that a person can lose the key and therefore lose access to the house, or that scammer can steal everything, whereas making you sign your house to someone else is a lot more beurocratic, which serves to protect you from you.
Just to be clear, I'm not a "we should use NFT for everything" type of person, in fact I don't think there are many use cases nowadays that are worth using it, but the technology is interesting regardless, and solves the problem of how to prove ownership without a centralized trusted organization.
yummy koolaid
Buddy must have purchase a couple of bored apes just after the peak. He's still waiting for them to peak again
Nope, never bought any of the NFTs that were sold to idiot speculators because I understand the technology and see no value in owning a token representing a digital image. I feel that the rage of downvoting comes from people who got scammed because they didn't understood the technology and now see it mentioned and think it's all a scam, similar to how old people used to think emails were a scam because they sent money to a prince in Nigeria.
I dream of one day owning a link to a pdf document
That's neat. Until a representation of something on a blockchain has any legal meaning regarding authenticity, ownership, or anything else, and until the overwhelming majority usage of NFTs isn't as a scam, NFTs remain a pathetic and comically stupid class of speculative asset constituting a pyramid scheme that also happens to destroy the environment.
The legal validity of things come from people using it and courts enforcing it, someone years ago might have said:
The thing is that even if a technology is used mostly for stupid things that tells you more about humans than about the technology itself. Or do you also think that phone calls are scams because 90% of the phone calls you receive nowadays are scams, even though the technology behind phone calls is the same used for mobile internet.
Also the destroy the environment claim is really bogus, for starter money pollutes more than crypto when you consider all of the chain of what it takes to produce and transport money. But also for example if you live in the US your home probably pollutes more than a mining farm since they're usually in places where electricity is extremely cheap, mostly in China near a hydroelectric power plant. But also the technology itself doesn't need to consume that amount of energy, that's just the current implementation, but there's a push to move to PoS instead of PoW, which would mean that NFTs (and crypto in general) would not need farms or even a specially powerful computer.
Ok, I was in agreement with you (the concept of NFTs is great, what people do with it is dumb) until the environment part
Crypto, even proof of stake, isn't energy efficient and never will be, the banking sector uses more energy but it also manages quadrillion in funds and transactions, crypto's value as a whole is orders of magnitude less than that and there's more energy spent per transaction than in the traditional financial sector. Crypto replacing banks and cash would be an environmental disaster.
Next, even if mining is done using green energy, it means that this energy isn't used to reduce emissions in other, actually essential, sectors. There's an environmental cost to green energy (what do you think was under the dam's reservoir?) so having to produce more infrastructure just for crypto is wasteful.
exactly, and also saying our houses use more energy than crypto as a justification is just relative privation. yes our houses use energy because we need to survive. that doesnβt mean we should just give a blank energy check to whatever inefficient new technology comes along.
I didn't even get to that, house energy usage can't be compared to crypto energy usage, they're not used for the same thing!
There are some valid points here, and I agree that the energy could be used elsewhere and that green energy is not entirely green.
I even agree that for most cryptocurrency as they are now the cost per transaction is higher than alternatives. However the technology for cryptocurrency, especially with PoC can be a lot more efficient in scale. To get an idea of it you can look at Visa, which processes 1700 transactions per second, BCH can do 178, so 10% of it, ETH2 is supposed to be able to process at least 20k, so 10x that amount. I imagine either of those coins pollute a comparable amount to visa when you consider everything that visa needs to operate (machines, cards, servers, etc). I feel that people don't take these sort of stuff into consideration when they talk about the energy consumption of crypto. There is a discussion to be had here, but blankly stating that it's an environmental disaster is fear mongering.
Visa can process a maximum of 24k TPS
Crypto energy usage goes up the more it's being used and the more decentralized it becomes. Centralized services like Visa can increase the network load while barely increasing the energy requirements.
Crypto bros always forget that to replace the banking system, crypto would need to replace the infrastructure as well, but because of decentralization it would be less energy efficient for the same result.
You can just stop, there's no way to greenwash crypto and decentralization. The amount of transactions happening on all crypto networks at the moment could be handled by one server if it was centralized. There's benefits to it, stop trying to sell it as being green, it's not and never will be.
That's wrong, crypto energy consumption has to do with how hard is the PoW difficulty, it does not correlate at all with usage or centralization, it's only related with security, i.e the more energy it consumes the more energy someone would need to use to attack the technology.
But the energy needed to mine 1 transaction or 1000 is the same. There are problems at scale, but power consumption is not one of them.
Not really, they need more servers to process more transactions, but cryptocurrency can scale up much more easily because the whole infrastructure from consumer to miner is decentralized.
That's what most people fail to see, the infrastructure for a scale at the size of visa is already in place for crypto. So there wouldn't be an increase in power consumption by mass adoption, only by miner adoption, and that's a difficult thought to grasp, it's like if everyone could borrow their computer to visa or Mastercard to process their transactions, the amount of people wanting to offer their computer to visa/master would define how much resources they use, but an increase in visa users doesn't mean an increase in visa borrowed servers and vice-versa.
I'm not trying to green wash, but crypto is not the environmental disaster the person claimed, especially not when you take into consideration PoS and newer coins with different validation methods.
From the get go, you're wrong
https://www.coindesk.com/learn/bitcoin-mining-difficulty-everything-you-need-to-know/
The more people mine, the more decentralized it is, the more energy is necessary because difficulty is increased. The more transactions happen, the more blocks are required, the more energy needs to be spent to confirm all the transactions. The more it's used, the higher the value, the more people mine.
There's a limit to the number of transactions per block as well, so no, your can't just say "1 or 1000 it's the same".
Visa is already able to handle 24000 transactions per second as is, no need for more infrastructure.
Crypto uses 1% of the world's energy production for a couple trillions in assets, the financial system uses 2.5% for quadrillions in assets, multiple thousands more than crypto, no, crypto can't scale to that without a huge environmental impact.
Yes you are trying to greenwash crypto, just stop.
Did you read the link you sent? It clearly states that only the amount of miners matter like I said before, the amount of transactions has nothing to do with it, you're mixing the two.
Wrong, decentralization is hard to measure, one person with a mining farm is centralized, while hundreds of people with their personal computer are decentralized but both produce the same amount of hash power. So you can have one person investing more and more in mining rigs increasing the total amount of mining power in the pool but decreasing it's decentralization.
Yes, this is correct, if you have more computers mining you will have a higher energy spending.
Wrong, there's one blonc every 10 minutes, regardless of the amount of transactions that happen. Did you even read the link you sent?
Wrong, the energy needed to confirm 1 or 1000 transactions is the same, and it's related to the hashing difficulty established by the total amount of hash power, again, did you even read the link you sent?
Wrong, the value of an asset does not necessarily correlate with it's use, for example gold is more valuable than dollar, even though dollar is a lot more used.
Yes there is, but until that limit is hit the amount of transactions doesn't matter. Also that limit is artificial and can be easily raised if needed, as it was done on Bitcoin Cash which can do hundreds of transactions per second more than Bitcoin, but because it has less miners uses less energy, thus proving you are wrong and the two are not correlated.
And ETH2 is theoretically capable of 100k, and that's just one coin which BTW is PoS so nothing of what we talked about miners applies to it. No miners means less power consumption by the network as a whole.
Do you have a source for that? But also you're measuring environmental impact as just energy consumption, and that's very wrong, by that same standard I could say crypto is green because it produces no plastic, whereas Visa has huge factories to produce plastic for their cards, their card machines, etc. If you only focus on one environmental impact it's easy to make anyone to be the bad guy, and for some reason people only see the Bitcoin energy usage and completely ignore that the energy consumption there is the whole story, whereas for other things there's hundreds of factors pilling on top to generate the environmental impact.
Again, I'm not, I recognize that PoW is an energy hungry method of confirmation, however it's not the environmental catastrophe that the original comment said and if you take into consideration ALL of the environmental impact of alternatives (not just energy consumption) you will see that it's not as bad as people make it out to be. Which doesn't mean it's good, but it's far from an environmental catastrophe.
Also when you take into consideration that we were originally talking NFTs, and that's mostly an Ethereum thing, and Ethereum is migrating to PoS, it's even less of an environmental catastrophe.
"is migrating"
It happened years ago buddy and PoS still uses more energy than centralized solutions for the same number of transactions.
I'm done, you're brainwashed, goodbye!
Cool, I've been out of the loop on crypto for years, just checked and you are correct, now the full Ethereum network, capable of beating visa in TpS runs at 0.0026 TWh/yr, i.e. 1/100x of the energy consumption of PayPal, therefore proving my point above.
Yikes, you're in a cult. unreachable.
Irony.
Hey, if you say NFTs arenβt a scam, then why is almost every single NFT project losing its value?
First of all losing value and being a scam are not correlated, the dollar is losing its value compared to the Euro for the past year but it's not a scam.
Secondly that would be an association fallacy, "X is a scam, X is an NFT, therefore all NFT are scam".