this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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Jesus Christ.
Anyway, I'm... Actually somewhat impressed they're still having Monkey PNG meetups. I kind of assumed every NFT was a scam but this one is just a very expensive buy-in to a cryptonerd club, I guess.
I also kinda figured the people who are into the Monkey PNGs aren’t exactly the ones who go to meetups
I think it's more that they tend not to get invited to non-monkey PNG meetups. Possibly in part due to their habit of turning any meetup into a monkey PNG one.
Have to go out there and put in the work to proselytize their Lord and Savior Blockchain.
Blockchain and NFT are not synonymous. All Camrys are cars but not all cars are Camrys.
Eh, the relationship isn't quite the same as that one.
It's more like the relationship between a video game framework and a video game. Pygame, Unity, or Godot are not games you can play; they're tools for programmers to build games with.
Similarly, blockchain is a technology for implementing scams; NFTs are one specific scam.
By that logic the US dollar is a means for facilitating crime. It's certainly used for that, a lot, but that isn't what it is for. A blockchain is for keeping an immutable and verifiable record by way of cryptography. That there are a lot of scams doesn't change what it is.
See, the difference is that dollars have legitimate uses.
As does Blockchain, which is widely used for such purposes already.
Not really, unless you think ransomware is a legitimate use.
Nope, you can go and check common usage of blockchain tech, plenty of legit uses, especially in banking.
Like what?
As I said, in banking, often to confirm that transactions are real.
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2022/01/28/blockchain-in-the-banking-sector-a-review-of-the-landscape-and-opportunities/
Yeah, you're hating for the sake of hating with no clue why. I'm just going to go ahead and block you, kthxbye.
It's not for the sake of hating, it's because blockchain / cryptocurrency / NFTs / etc. are problems in search of a legitimate solution. So far all they've found is massive energy wasting and ransomware.
You are conflating the ideas for some weird reason. It's like blanket arguing against the internet because things happen on it which are illegal.
I'm not sure what you mean. Are you not aware that NFTs are built on top of blockchain tech?
Yes, and? There are other usages as I've said.
No. Blockchain is a technology where you generate a hash of an event that happened - e.g. garage door opened at 7:00am, and then you hash another event - garage door closed at 7:02am, continue doing that for years, hundreds of thousands of garage door movements, and just by looking at the last hash in the event chain, you can verify, in less than a millisecond, that two copies of the blockchain are identical (e.g. the working data set and a backup copy of it).
It's just a simple and efficient data integrity checker and it's shit for scams - because there's no way to hide your tracks when the feds investigate you... as Sam Bankman-Fried just learned.
Pretty soon the scammers will realise they're better off with cash and paper books which can easily be doctored (or simply misplaced - "sorry your honor, we can't find records for July 2021 anywhere!").
Yep. It's hard to feel sorry for anyone who got grifted, who knew that buying the equivalent of a graffiti'd up CVS receipt would turn out to be worthless.
Bullshit and horseshit are different, but they're both shit.
It's all the same to the cryptobros
Sure they are, they're just always nervous Chris Hansen is going to be there already.
This one hasn't yet proven that it isn't, just that the people who bought in had a lot of disposable income to begin with.
Sunken cost fallacy at this point. They have to keep believing it's a thing otherwise they have to face the reality that they were duped.
Or the opposite, they know it's dropping like a stone so they try to keep it relevant for potential buyers to offload it to?
Sunk cost, I guess. A lot of people in the crypto industry are still here because they don't want to admit that they were wrong about it.
NFTs have a number of interesting legitimate use cases. Jpeg pump-and-dumps are, however, not one of them.
The thing about the jpg ones is that the jpgs can't be stored in the blockchain, so what is actually stored is a URL to some server (and that URL endpoint could be redirected elsewhere, the server could go offline, etc).
The other major use case I see touted is "own your game objects and bring your objects to different games" but 1) why would a company spend resources supporting an object they did not sell you and 2) could this not be handled more simply on e.g. Steam? (yes, locked into a service, but that's just the way the industry is and I don't see why it's worth the time and effort for them to change that)
I do see how potentially a blockchain that stored actual data, e.g. some JSON, could be of more use. However, I struggle to find cases where just a regular database wouldn't be more practical. I guess it would be limited to cases where auditability and visibility of changes are topmost concerns, and where it's important that anyone can have a local backup copy at any time.
If you have some examples of where this technology could be one of the best solutions, I'd love to hear them. The blockchain does fascinate me but I feel like it's often a solution in search of a problem rather than the other way around.
Blockchains can absolutely store a jpeg. There's no data size or format limit on an entry.
They chose not to store it.
Oh, fascinating! I wonder if it's more concerns about the size of the blockchain itself then. I had assumed, clearly incorrectly, that it was a platform limitation itself. This makes the ways NFTs have been implemented even dumber. 🙃
It's just impractical and expensive to store more than a Textstring in a Blockchain, because everytime the Blockchain is updated with new data, you have to send a copy to all the other databases that share this Blockchain. This will get very resource heavy I'd you get 100000 10MB files each day and must keep them in sync with 200 other databases, who also received a similar amount of data from different users.
... No. Think about it for more than a second before assuming it was done in a stupid way. If you have to update with an image each time it's updated you're going to run out of storage everywhere and overload networks.
I have an example but it's not necessarily the best and most practical solution, it's just one very good solution to a problem that not everyone experiences, so it's generally shot down as unnecessary.
In countries where buying a car or house involves an asynchronous exchange of money and keys or signing of documents, with all the trust issues involved, having an NFT represent ownership (which requires recognition and acceptance by the state) is a perfect use case, where you transfer ownership and receive payment in one atomic operation.
In countries... so you're already under the country's legal system, so there's no need for a blockchain. You can just use an ownership database maintained by the country. Blockchain offers nothing at all of value in that situation.
Exactly why blockchain is pointless. Blockchain, if it has any value, is in that it is a distributed ledger that is not subject to any state's laws. That's great if you want to have a monetary system that no country can control, but of course that also means that no country can help you in a dispute over who owns something. In a cryptocurrency / blockchain world, there's no appealing to the state, but also no recognition or acceptance by the state.
Yep, I knew you would show up.
You have obviously never sold a car or a house in a country where you have to trust that the cash the buyer is giving you is not counterfeit, or if using a bank transfer, that they will actually make the transfer once you signed away your ownership. You're privileged to be able to trust your fellow american (I guess you're from the US) and your legal system.
The blockchain would be the ownership database maintained by the country. The key is the atomic exchange of money for ownership. In case you don't know what I mean by "atomic", I mean that the two operations cannot be done separately: either the ownership and the money are both transferred, or none are. Which solves the problem that you apparently don't have but many others less privileged do.
Blockchain doesn't solve that.
Blockchain doesn't solve that.
Why would you use blockchain instead of just a database. Blockchain is an extremely expensive, inefficient "database" that only makes sense if you don't have a central authority you can trust to run the database. If you're relying on the country to run and own the database, blockchain offers nothing useful.
Yes, it's a very standard property that most databases have, along with consistency, isolation and durability. So-called ACID. Again, this isn't some magical "blockchain" thing, this is a basic database feature.
You truly made an effort to ignore everything I wrote. Well done, I guess.
You had nothing to say.
Smart contracts are the most obvious. There are a lot of applications. Like jungle said, it's a good fit for ESCROW-type asset exchanges, but also for recurring transactions like royalty payments or dividends.
Your gaming asset example is also a valuable use. While industry inertia is indeed a relevant factor, consider: why would a company spend resources creating an object if it's cheaper to support the framework for customers to supply their own? There's a break-even point where it's more profitable to outsource asset-creation and trim your staff. What's better is the nerds who care about that sorta thing spend a lot on games.
And there are certainly others, cases where transparency is a topmost concern. Gaming seems like a fantastic proving ground for the technology: customers expect excellence, it's a thriving and diverse market, but ultimately, a failure of the technology won't have serious consequences in the grand scheme. If it proves secure in that arena, it might be a useful technology to incorporate into more serious applications.