(01-19-2022, 01:43 PM)LandSeaLion Wrote: NFTs and blockchains is their horrendous impact on the environment.

(01-20-2022, 09:30 AM)sanjay Wrote:

(01-19-2022, 01:43 PM)LandSeaLion Wrote: NFTs and blockchains is their horrendous impact on the environment.

Not exactly true. Blockchain works on different Consensus algorithm. Pow (Proof of work) are those which cost lots of energy and hence impact of environment. Bitcoin and Ethereum the largest Crypto are Pow and hence it has adverse impact on Nature.

Recently the PoS (Proof of Stack) consensus is getting popular ( Solana, Cardano etc) and their impact on environment is less.

(01-22-2022, 03:29 AM)Vanteal Wrote: Not a fan of Crypto. It's a Ponzi scheme.

Quote:The most popular alternative to proof of work is proof of stake, where validators post collateral of some kind (usually whatever currency is endemic to the chain) with the amount of collateral determining their odds of being rewarded the validation bounty for any given transaction. The main proposal of proof of stake is that it significantly reduces the wasted power problems of proof of work, but it's less resilient than proof of work. On the energy cost side of things, proof of stake is still inefficient just by virtue of the sheer volume of redundancy, but on a per-user basis it's at least inefficient on the scale of, like, an MMO as opposed to a steel foundry.

This is difficult to assess because the most popular proof of stake chains are still unpopular and low traffic in the scope of things, and heavily centralized. Claims about scalability are backed up by nothing but the creators' word. Proof of stake is also significantly more complex because there now needs to be some mechanism for determining who gets to do the validations, and also determining how audits are conducted, and then the question of who has control over that system, and whether or not someone can gain control of that system or control over the whole stake via just buying out the staking pool, etc etc etc.

Proof of stake also, even more explicitly, rewards the wealthy who have the capital to both stake and spend. It's also even more explicitly exclusionary. Ethereum's proposed proof of stake migration has a buy-in of 32 Ether, which at the time of writing is about $130,000 - so really, only early adopters and the wealthy can actually meaningfully participate for most than just crumbs. This is, in turn, compounding inherent problems with the long term growth of the chain.

Even if you solve the escalating power requirements of proof of work, the data requirements of storing the chain and participating as a validator are also prohibitive in a way that inevitably centralizes power in the hands of a few wealthy operators.

Quote:Value on the coins themselves is so volatile that, unless you're willing to engage with the speculative nature of the coins, there's actually a huge risk in accepting them as payment for anything. Bitcoin in particular, owing to its glacial transaction times, suffers from problems where the value of a coin can change dramatically between the start and end of a transaction. This is such a problem that it's led to the rise of an entire strata of middle men in the ecosystem, so-called "stable coin" exchanges like Tether that exist to quickly transfer cryptocurrencies between each other and lock-in values. The stable coins, rather than having a speculative value, have a value that's pegged to the value of an actual currency, like the Euro or US dollar.

The underlying problem that they exist to solve is itself twofold. One is that converting cryptocurrency into dollars is the step of the process that makes you to the tax man, and the primary goal of crypto in general is to starve public services, so that's a no go. The second is that there just aren't actually that many buyers and there's not enough liquidity in the ecosystem to cash out big holdings. Tether, the largest stablecoin, used to advertise itself as being backed on a one-to-one basis back when it was called Realcoin, but that language has become far more nebulous over time as it's become obvious that it just isn't true. This is a very complicated situation, but the short version is that the people who own tether also own a real money exchange called Bitfinex, and there's evidence that the two services, both which requiter having actual dollars on hand in order to back their products and facilitate exchanges, are sharing the same pool of money, swapping it back and forth as needed. This means that at any given time, either service is potentially backed by zero dollars, or at least that's what the data implies might be the case.

Point is, that if you're a high roller with hundreds of millions of conceptual dollars tied up in cryptocurrency, there's a fundamental cash problem. Your holdings have inflated to tens, hundreds, or thousands of times what you put in, but that price is just theoretical. It's speculative. You have all this crypto, but you can't meaningfully spend it, and there's not enough buyers for you to get it out. In order for you to cash out, you need to convince someone else to buy in. These factors, taken holistically, mean that cryptocurrency is a Bigger Fool scam. There's a lot of digital ink spilt trying to outline if it's a decentralized Ponzi scheme or a pyramid scheme or some hybrid of the two, which is a taxonomical argument that I'm not here to settle, but, like both of those, it's a Bigger Fool scam. The whole thing operates by buying worthless assets believing that you will later be able to sell them to a bigger fool. The entire structure of cryptocurrencies at their basic level of operation is designed to deliver the greatest rewards to the earliest adopters, regardless of if you're talking about proof of work or proof of stake. This is inherent to their being. As Stephen Diel put it:

"These schemes around crypto tokens cannot create or destroy actual dollars, they can only shift them around. If you sell your crypto and make a profit in dollars, it's only because someone else bought it at a higher price than you did. And then they expect to do the same, and so on, so on, ad infinitum. Every dollar that comes out of cryptocurrency needs to come from a later investor putting a dollar in. Crypto investments cannot be anything but a zero sum game, and many are actually massively negative sum. In order to presume a crypto investment functions as a store of value, we simultaneously need to suppose an infinite chain of greater fools who keep buying these assets at any irrational price and into the future forever."

Quote:NFTs represent a high energy marketplace with an irrational pricing culture, where the mean buyer is easily flattered and not particularly discerning. The potential payoff is extremely high, much, much higher than a bootleg Redbubble store, the consequences borderline nonexistent, and the market is in a clearly untenable state, so there's an incentive to get in at as low a cost as possible before it collapses - hence the absolute plague of art theft. Even the argument that artists could make passive revenue off secondary sales turned out to have a lot of caveats attached. One, the smart contract for the token needs to have a function that defines royalties, so anyone who minted a token based off of hype making it sound like an inherent function of the  system was out of luck. And two, the token doesn't know what a sale is and can't differentiate between being sold and being transferred, so it's actually the marketplace that informs the token "you're being sold!" and collects the royalties.

End result: royalties are easily bypassed, simply by using a marketplace that doesn't collect royalties or uses a different format of royalty collection that's incompatible with the function that the token uses. While a few sellers, legitimate and otherwise, made off with undeniably big paydays, hundreds of thousands of artists bought in only to find that there wasn't a new, revolutionary, highly trafficked audience of digital art collectors. Instead, there was a closed market dealing in casino chips where the primary winners were those already connected, who already had the means to get the attention of the whales and the media, a market where participation required buying into a cryptocurrency at a rapidly fluctuating price in order to pay the minting costs to post the work, where it would sit, unsold. This left those artists in the lurch, where they had to choose between just eating the losses, or attempting to convince their existing audience to buy-in as well. The people who actually won were the people with large holdings of cryptocurrency, specifically Ethereum, which mediated the vast majority of those big ticket purchases. David Gerard, author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, summarized it on his blog very succinctly as such:

"NFTs are entirely for the benefit of the crypto grifters. The only purpose the artists serve is as aspiring suckers to pump the concept of crypto - and, of course, to buy cryptocurrency to pay for "minting" NFTS. Sometimes, the artist gets some crumbs to keep them pumping the concept of crypto."

The rush benefits them in two ways: first, the price of Ether itself goes up directly from the spike in demand - between January and May 2021, the price of Ether rose from $700 to $4000 - and second, there's new actual buyers who aren't just trading Bitcoin for tether for ether and back again, but are buying in with dollars, providing the whole system with the liquidity needed for whales to actually cash out.

This arrangement, needing to buy a highly volatile coin from people who paid far, far less for it in order to participate in a market that they control, is why people reflexively describe the whole arrangement as a scam. If you buy in at $4000 and compete against people who bought in at $4 - you're the sucker! It reveals the basic truth that these aren't marketplaces, they're casinos.

Quote:And, in another feature-not-bug arrangement, remember - nothing can be deleted from the blockchain without tremendous effort. Now, that's fine if the blockchain only contains a contextually relevant log of transactions. There are absolutely contexts where that level of transparency is desirable, but that falls apart when you start talking about using the blockchain itself as the storage medium for, like, an entire social network. Blockchain-based social network Scuttlebutt seems tacitly aware that this is a bad idea - like somewhere inside their human brains they recognize that it might be a mistake to make it impossible to remove things from the system when they warn users that anyone willing to dig can surface any old usernames, photos and bios - but that doesn't actually give them pause.

So, if someone posts, say, child abuse imagery, revenge porn, your home address, intimate details of your private life, there's just nothing you can really do about that. If you mistakenly over-share, post some information that maybe you shouldn't have, it's already too late. You can try to hide it, but you can't delete it. Remember, that if someone knows your wallet address, they can just put tokens directly into it? As alluded, there's a whole scam where you drop someone an NFT that lifts the art from - who cares, somewhere - but the smart contract is malicious code that drains their wallet if they ever interact with it to move it, sell it, stake it, burn it. It just becomes a landmine, sitting in their wallet, forever.

Even on the non-malware side of things, people have already been using this to dump promotional tokens into the wallets of celebrities and influencers. "Oh, look, I minted a photo of your front door and dropped it directly into your wallet!" And you can't just, like, delete it - you need to actively send it somewhere, and pay gas fees to do so. Revolutionary new vectors of harassment! The end product here is a massive power imbalance that's baked into the fabric of how you engage with this new world order. Users who engage with the system authentically as themselves expose vast swathes of information about themselves and their activities, while users who engage disingenuously are empowered in their ability to deceive, defraud, and disappear. A lot of this rhetoric stems from a pretty deep failure to understand what a central authority really is, or that you can decentralize data storage while centralizing data.

Ethereum is, ultimately, a central platform, and the fact that a few dozen people need to sign off on every major change before it can be implemented is largely meaningless and symbolic, with the validation network ultimately sitting somewhere between consortium and cartel. Every large platform has multiple internal and external stakeholders that form a consensus about the direction of the platform. Windows is not a single-minded monolith. Apple issues voting shares. Google is basically a hydra. While the network of Ethereum miners and validators are not a formal corporation - yet. There's no mechanism in existence that compels them to act in the interest of users - particularly poor and disempowered users - where those interests conflict with their own. The movement of Ethereum from proof of work to proof of stake has been vapourware in no small part because the validators simply choose not to. Because proof of work, volatility and high gas fees benefit them in the here and now, while proof of stake and low gas fees only benefit them in a hypothetical future.

(02-09-2022, 04:12 PM)kirezaev Wrote: I agree with almost everything you say. I think the upside potential is huge and it can reshape the way we transact online. I've been involved in crypto since 2017 and I am currently working on an NFT project that aims to donate most of the profits to charity. Let me know if you wanna have a chat about this :)