You get used to that feeling: there’s so much money whose holders can’t think of productive uses that these bubbles happen periodically – during the 90s it was dotcoms who were guaranteed to lose money on every sale still having enormous valuations, with the ensuing collapse then leading investors to pour money into the “safe” housing market, etc.
The blockchain bubble has had enough speculators pump money in that there’s a whole industry creating things like NFTs trying to prop up valuations, and that part of the cycle always lasts longer than seems possible to anyone prone to thinking about the market analytically rather than emotionally.
Ha such a true statement. I am mid-thirties but I agree with the sentiment with regards to sales of digital art as NFTs.
I can see a use for NFTs such as for concert tickets but a JPG or GIF? Sorry but we already have good protocols in place to transfer ownership, copyright, etc. of artwork to someone that has been used for centuries. A blockchain isn't needed for a god damn GIF sorry.
Feels like they really jumped the shark pretty quick and I just started hearing about them.
Seems closer to trading cards than just about anything else so I haven't even done enough research to wrap my head around the technical side of what people are doing with them yet.
The best perspective I've come across on NFTs so far. Looking at it from this framework suddenly it makes more sense to me how something like this could potentially survive
I think of them as the canonical infinite of fiat currency. More than any other thing, they are ONLY the value of 'getting everyone to agree they are this value'. It's beyond meaningless, but there's a fundamental nature to what it is: a pure power play.
You might as well go, 'I have eleventy billion dollars, prove me wrong' and save a heck of a lot of energy. It will all come down to how many weapons you can bring to bear, regardless.
>...they are ONLY the value of 'getting everyone to agree they are this value'.
This is true of all kinds of tokens. The real takeaway is that cryptocurrencies are now so valuable that there are a plurality of individuals with over $100M, no taste, and no sense. This is a result of massive flows of money into the space. Fungible tokens are trivial replacements for large swaths of any financial system. There are great things going on adjacent to this sideshow.
They might make more sense when they are actually used in other applications. For example, NFTs representing probably rare digital playing cards (like magic the gathering).
No, they still don't make sense. What do you gain from "representing" a digital object? Nothing. You already have the digital object. The "representation" adds nothing to it.
Hypothetically? You could make a computer-based trading card game, where you must own the NFT to play the card in-game.
The advantage to the game maker, over just storing ownership in a SQL database, would be making it more like physical collectable cards (with 'limited printings' and 'first editions') that some chumps will pay six-figure sums for.
The direct advantage to the player of owning the NFT would be playing the card in-game, and the benefit of an NFT over normal digital items would be letting them "invest" while feeling assured them the game maker wasn't 'printing' more cards.
Obviously, a lot of people aren't interested in 'collectables', pay-to-win, skins/hats/lootboxes and so on. I'm certainly not. But there is an existing market for digital hats, baffling though it may seem, so there's precedent for people trading in-game digital items for real money.
> The direct advantage to the player of owning the NFT would be playing the card in-game,
"Thinking out loud here", so this may be wrong, obvious, or both.
I wonder how that would work. Presumably, the game maker would create a rare "card" and put it on the blockchain, and transfer it to a player in a transaction. That player could then transfer it to some other player, etc.
To be used in a game, a player would have to be able to prove that they are the rightful owner. The player would be represented as their private key ("wallet"), and any "card" that is sent to the player would need a chain of signatures that lead back to the creation of the card by the game maker. I think that blockchain would only be able to represent the custody of the "card", the barter would likely have to happen off-chain. ie, you send me $100 or 1mBTC or whatever and I will sign over my card to you...
All of these crypto things are protocols. The representation and actions on the representations are possible because everyone agrees on a protocol for it. Imagine a future where everyone agrees on using these representations where it makes sense by using the same protocol, just like everyone agrees to use the http protocol. In this case, it's an introduction of scarcity to digital items that wasn't possible before, and that has value in possibly lots of different environments.
The only value in faking scarcity is increased extraction by the latest wave of rent seekers. The world should be striving as hard as possible to move toward post-scarcity, and instead we are burning cities' worth of energy on...lucky numbers.
I'm sure there are many artists who would disagree with you and who aren't rent seekers at all. And they benefit massively from scarcity in the digital space. That's just one group, there are many others.
Some coworkers were talking about NBA Top Shot and I felt completely out of the loop. Now that I have done some research, I have wedged it into my theory that spending money and ownership is a social activity and therefore can mitigate loneliness.
How appropriate that Taco Bell's NFT is followed by Charmin's.
In seriousness though, it's great that the money for these is going to charities. I expect a swath of brands to follow suit. It's essentially free advertising plus free good will, and it seems like they must be having fun making the artwork.
Just as it's expected to add the year to a HN post title if it's old, or [pdf] if it's a pdf link, pages with rapidly flashing images should be marked with a seizure warning too.
I was surprised at that, too. I see the art style they're going for, but it's strange that no one at Charmin (or their lawyers) flagged this as a potential liability.
NFTs allow you to buy and sell ownership of unique digital items and keep track of who owns them using the blockchain. NFT stands for “non-fungible token,” and it can technically contain anything digital, including drawings, animated GIFs, songs, or items in video games. An NFT can either be one-of-a-kind, like a real-life painting, or one copy of many, like trading cards, but the blockchain keeps track of who has ownership of the file.
> Selling work on a blockchain can be a technically challenging task. For this reason, many platforms and websites have emerged, aiming to make this process as seamless and easy as possible for artists. Unfortunately, currently many of these websites are based on the Ethereum blockchain, which is very inefficient and ecologically costly by design. E.g. selling just a single-edition artwork on Ethereum has a carbon footprint starting at around 100 KgCO2, which is equivalent to a 1 hour flight (and depending on the platform, can reach a long-haul flight) [2]. Selling an edition of 100 works has a carbon footprint of over 10 tonnes CO2, which is more than the per capita annual footprint of someone in the EU - including all emissions from industry and trade [3].
But is all the carbon it's already produced going to just magically go away too?
And what about all the carbon from all the hot air produced by all the people repeating "this whole carbon footprint concern is going to go away" again and again, for so many years?
So I guess it depends how much of the increase in Ethereum's energy consumption you put down to NFTs/their popularity. No idea how you'd calculate that but it's increased hugely the past few months: https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption
Someone tell me why you need the Ethereum blockchain for NFTs when you can just have non-divisible coins represent them, and be watched by a subset of the network instead of the whole network. I mean this is like transporting a beanie baby inside an armored truck with a convoy.
It’s not like we need the history of all UTXOs ever, the coin may have changed hands like 100 times max, so it has an easily checked history. Same principle on Ethereum.
Instead of Ethereum, other blockchains are used. This can be up to hundreds of times better for the environment in terms of carbon footprint. Some of these chains include Algorand, Tezos, Polkadot and other PoS networks.
Not at all, unless the network has a global bottleneck like a miner. Networks built on global blockchains are the problem. And if they use proof of work that’s even worse!
Considering NFTs are on Ethereum: soon to be insignificant, since Ethereum is already running the Beacon Chain (proof of stake network) and the merge from Eth 1 to Eth 2 will occur sometime later this year.
Before getting too concerned about the power usage of blockchain technology, go look at how much power generated in the USA is thrown away (rejected energy)
I don't believe that means the power plant or company is throwing energy away, it means how much is lost to inefficient devices or processes, including at the end user. So the more efficient LED lights throw away less energy than the older incandescent bulbs, since we know we can literally feel the heat radiate off those. And since the heat isn't the intended function of that bulb, light is, that heat is just wasted energy.
Since those Bitcoin blockchain calculations are pretty intense, they make your processor work hard. In doing so there is extra energy that literally gets wasted bc it heats up the processor, and again just like the bulb heat isn't the intended function so that heat byproduct is just wasted energy.
These use Ethereum, not Bitcoin, and ETH is usually mined with GPUs, not CPUs. This isn't overly relevant to your point, since it probably doesn't matter too much in terms of power consumption per unit of work; GPUs consume huge amounts of power and generate lots of heat, just like CPUs, and often more.
Rejected energy is not thrown away energy. It is a result of the fact that our technologies do not have an efficiency degree of 100%.
Bitcoin Mining uses 120 TWh/year[1] which is way to much imo. The problem is that bitcoin uses the Hashcash proof of work system[2].
But there are mechanisms like proof of stake which can solve this problem.[3] Its about time to convert all blockchains to energy-saving mechanisms..
how can someone sell something that doesn't belong to them? I don't get it. like this guy getting 1 million dollars offers for a QR code pointing to the first bitcoin transaction[0]?
