Reminds me of a time that I played a Bitcoin poker game at some Google VP's place up in the hills with Charlie Lee and a few other early crypto luminaries in 2014. It took us over an hour to figure out sending BTC to the "buy-in" pot because most of us had 2FA enabled on our Coinbase accounts and the cell reception was so bad at that we couldn't get our confirmation texts. We ended up writing IOUs on a sheet of paper.
I thought, "if the people in the vanguard of this movement can't figure this out, maybe it isn't all that it's cracked up to be".
That's more on simply poor cell service if anything at all though no?
The tech even then seemingly worked for you then. Your anecdotal is comparable to saying students at a college not being able to add one another on Facebook in it's early days, because the campus Wi-Fi was on the fritz.
Yes, but in real life blame doesn't matter. What matters is the alternative (a hardwired credit card terminal or cash) would've worked, and this didn't.
I mean, if the wifi didn't work the credit card terminal likely might not have either. I've had issues tons of times in remote places with credit card readers.
And cash is cash, but I don't think crypto is really competing with cash, more with cash-alternatives (like credit cards, venmo etc.)
If you were going to talk about the beginning of the movement, and then compare it to a credit card.
. Consider his this would have worked at the beginning of the credit card movement. You would have pulled out your triplicate form and your credit card imprinter and basically made your IOUs that way... And then mailed them in!
You can build a transaction and sign it in Bitcoin without sending it though. It just that they weren't ready for that, and probably were not interested in doing it that way either.
I think commenter is suggesting a non custodial wallet with internet access would work fine, which is true. The problem seemed to be cell signal, not internet, as they were able to use the coinbase app or website.
Not disagreeing with any of you but a blockchain payment terminal that’s itself connected to the internet could technically receive your signed transaction from your (offline) phone and then submit it to the network on your behalf. The balance on your phone wouldn’t update until it itself gets back onto the network and resyncs its state with the blockchain.
The problem with that is, these networks are rather convoluted and are basically unusable for most people without relying on exchanges or other similar services.
It's no different than doing it over an exchange... The same fields are available on an application wallets and on an exchange. There's nothing convoluted there.
> if the people in the vanguard of this movement can't figure this out
the people “in the vanguard of [the cryptocurrency] movement” absolutely use non-custodial wallets (SW or HW). the part of this story where “the vanguard” is using custodial wallets is the least believable.
the average speculator, sure — they’ll go with whatever’s easiest for them, which is probably to keep their crypto on the exchange. “vanguard” users? lmao.
Then 90% of people don't get crypto or don't care. Which seems to be true. They just keep it in their coinbase or robinhood account and wait for the price to go (back) up until they sell.
Wouldn't you still need some sort connection to the greater network to use a credit card? Of course if you're speaking about cash then yes, but BTC also comes in the form of physical coins as well if you really wanted it.
> Wouldn't you still need some sort connection to the greater network to use a credit card?
Nope. Reminder for those new to how credit cards actually work, there are two distinct transactions and they are not connected. Authorization transactions establish that this is, in fact, really a credit card issued by BIG BANK, and optionally that some credentials you've got are genuine (e.g. a PIN for modern chip and PIN cards, or a 3-4 digit security code for a remote payment). Authorization aims to protect merchants from crooked customers and to some extent to protect banks from crooked merchants. Nobody cares about the customer, if you want protecting ask your government. Settlement transactions move money from the customer's account to the merchant's account.
An offline credit card terminal may be able to perform some limited Authorization with chip cards in particular, it can confirm that the chip card says this is the correct PIN for example, but regardless it can begin the Settlement transaction.
Now, the Settlement won't actually happen immediately, but eventually the transactions are batched up and sent to a bank and the bank executes them, and the settlements occur.
Debit cards can need an online transaction because the card may be unwilling to authorise the Settlement process if it can't confirm you actually have the money, as these cards may be issued to people who aren't allowed credit.
The credit card transaction involves fungible currency, the Bitcoin transaction doesn't do that. As a result the batch operation succeeds for the credit card.
Six equivalent cards, each performing six offline transactions for $5 each results in thirty six $5 transactions, $180 from one account to various merchants. Settlement transactions can complete more or less instantly or take several days, you don't care and your card isn't involved.
The credit card transaction isn't about the specific money. A Bitcoin transaction about this Bitcoin A is different from one about this other Bitcoin B. If I do two offline transactions paying with Bitcoin A, but keep Bitcoin B each time, then even though I received goods worth two Bitcoins, the blockchain says only one merchant gets Bitcoin A and neither gets Bitcoin B. But if I do two $100 credit card transactions, those aren't for the "same" $100, when settlement is completed two $100 transactions adds up to $200.
Yes, but a reasonable bitcoin wallet wont let you spend the same coin twice, even if offline. As far as I know, none of the common wallet software that support offline transactions will let you do this by accident.
Credit cards suffer from a similar problem, the transactions will not necessarily go through when you get online.
> The tech even then seemingly worked for you then
Only because they trusted each other! I mean, any currency or barter mechanism anywhere in the world or throughout history works if you trust the person to pay you tomorrow.
BTC was supposed to be able to move beyond that, somehow. And it turns out that the world still runs on trust.
I imagine that the ancient version of this story is exactly how money began in the first place. "Man, it was just too hard to coordinate who got how many cows for the rocks, we just wrote a bunch of IOUs"
Perhaps it was SMS 2fac, which is additionally funny because luminaries should know it's the vastly inferior choice. In fact, it must be because I don't think authenticator apps generally need an internet connection.
I believe Google Voice can do text directly from the app, no cell service required (just an internet connection). And my phone service has been able to do LTE over WIFI for a number of years.
Yes, in college I carried a cheap pay-per-minute flip-phone plus an iPod touch. Most of the time I had wifi and could text for free from the iPod using Google Voice. In the rare cases when I was not in a place with wifi, I could just use the phone. It was a nice setup :)
its just a dumb-phone you get at the grocery store. it makes calls and does texts, but in some cases you pay per text.
edit: am i getting downvoted for not having a smart phone or for asking a dumb question? i cant tell what i've done wrong here, I'm just not a phone person.
the first man to ever build and sell a car, recounting his critics in the transportation industry: “There’s nothing the matter with me. It’s you! You’re crazy if you think this fool contraption you’ve been wasting your time on will ever displace the horse.”
> Perhaps that was what Nguyen was thinking when he spent more than $330,000 on the various ape NFTs on display at his restaurant.
Wow. I can't imagine what anyone is thinking when they pay that much to brag about some random blockchain that says they own an arbitrary URL that may or may not link to an image.
It works fine with actual art but I've yet to see an NFT comparable to say: the Mona Lisa. When I got into the blockchain space ~9 years ago I would have never imagined years later people would be going crazy over pictures of jpegs. People used to discuss amazingly cool tech stuff: like SSL oracles or privacy-preserving payment protocols. Now it's all about what the price is and moronic NFTs. It's embarrassing.
>People used to discuss amazingly cool tech stuff: like SSL oracles or privacy-preserving payment protocols. Now it's all about what the price is and moronic NFTs. It's embarrassing.
It is because blockchains cannot actually be used to do any of those cool tech things in any meaningful way. If you try to build any of those things on top of a blockchain you will realize quickly that blockchains are bad solution. The only purpose of them is to pump up the value of a casino token which is then used to pay a tax to the operators of the network. It's no surprise that after this nonsense you're only left with irrational actors.
And that is only for the average user; for the whales, the purpose of them appears to be mainly profiting off of massive amounts of fraud and criminal activity while maintaining the plausible deniability of being able to say "technically we don't control the blockchain so we're not responsible".
earlier you said blockchains cannot do these things. now you’re saying that blockchains aren’t the best for these tasks. pick one or the other and stick to it. don’t confuse things by claiming one point and then going on to argue a different point.
Blockchains indeed cannot do that, those things are added on separately, they exist independently of blockchains, and have uses outside of it. If this is hard to understand, let me illustrate with a more clear example. Some blockchains have smart contracts, and you can technically write a game of chess into a smart contract. This does not mean that it is accurate or meaningful to say "blockchains can play chess" or "chess is a feature of blockchains" or something like that. Even if blockchains became totally unpopular for everything else, and were only used to play chess, it would still not be accurate as the idea of a blockchain still would not actually include the ability to play chess. It is about as accurate as saying "chess is a feature of tables". Also, it would be pretty horrible to play that way and blockchain gaming is a total disaster, so I doubt that would happen.
> It is because blockchains cannot actually be used to do any of those cool tech things in any meaningful way.
even in the comment you just wrote, you’re still arguing a different point than what you originally said. this time you’ve shifted from “cannot be used to do” to “cannot do”.
there are interesting discussions to be had (why didn’t we have permission-less privacy-preserving coins before blockchains? what are the better ways of achieving such global systems, and solving double-spend/consensus than blockchain, today?). but it’s impossible to have those discussions if you keep claiming one thing and then arguing the other thing.
>even in the comment you just wrote, you’re still arguing a different point than what you originally said. this time you’ve shifted from “cannot be used to do” to “cannot do”.
I think it is clear enough that I meant the same thing. If that wasn't clear, you can ask for further clarification. There is no need to make this into a pedantic game.
>but it’s impossible to have those discussions if you keep claiming one thing and then arguing the other thing.
No, it is not? Why would it be? In fact I will have those discussions with you now.
>why didn’t we have permission-less privacy-preserving coins before blockchains?
We don't have those with blockchains either. They are not permissionless nor are they privacy preserving except under some very extreme and impractical circumstances. You can have your permission to use a blockchain revoked if all the miners/validators reach consensus on blacklisting your wallet. Also, all public blockchains have no privacy by default as all the data is public.
>what are the better ways of achieving such global systems, and solving double-spend/consensus than blockchain, today?
Basically anything else, because blockchains do not actually "solve" consensus. The "consensus" is done simply by paying off the participants in increasing numbers as an incentive to stop them from bad behavior, it has nothing to do with the actual blockchain itself. They are able to "solve" double spend in a very contrived way, at the expense of being able to solve any other problem that might befall the network. The traditional way to solve double spend is to use good old fashioned accounting, it doesn't have that same constraint.
> We don't have those with blockchains either. They are not permissionless nor are they privacy preserving except under some very extreme and impractical circumstances. You can have your permission to use a blockchain revoked if all the miners/validators reach consensus on blacklisting your wallet.
i assume we’re talking about Monero or zcash, as the better-known privacy coins. i grant you that Monero miners can block you by address. how can you be censored on zcash? it’s cryptographically impossible to link addresses to each other, so you can’t block by address. is it permissioned based on IP address? is that defeatable with trivial means like VPNs or Tor or just going to the neighborhood coffee shop? has censorship of zcash transactions ever been demonstrated?
If integrating a blockchain makes it worse, then I think it's fair to say that you're not "in any meaningful way" using a blockchain to make it happen.
I think its more because only the greatest artworks have ended up being curated. I'm sure if NFT art were as old as physical art there would be more to choose from. I want to also say that in my view I don't believe an NFT has value by itself unless its being used somewhere that people like. For example: a skin in a (popular) game. Otherwise it really is just a file sitting on a computer. It ought to have an impact somewhere and there ought to be at least some backing promise that such an impact will stay.
I really do think digital property has value but only when you do it right.
No, or at least not entirely. Even if I was to (theoretically) copy the Mona Lisa so perfectly that no existing technology could tell the difference, the original would still be worth more than my copy.
The original you see today isn’t the original that would have been seen immediately after it was painted.
Mona Lisa is pretty crap anyway, if you ever find yourself in the Louvre, look at what’s hung on the opposite wall. Now that is an impressive painting.
In truth, the painting is suffering from deterioration, the poplar panel is warped, the columns that used to frame her are missing, and restoration has obscured some details. A print doesn't convey the physicality of the cracked, rough surface of the paint, the sfumato technique, the almost total lack of visible brushstrokes, the gauzy veil, Mona Lisa's hair, the luminescence of her skin and the overall impression of glowing.
Whatever the actual quality and condition of the original, no reproduction will adequately represent it.
A very minor side interest of mine. Enough to know the basics of art history, criticism and conservation. I know terms to use and where to look up details I don't recall off the top of my head. My side gig is photography, using film, and making physical prints. As with painting, a digital image or calendar page can't quite match the experience of seeing say an original Ansel Adams or Robert Frank print in person.
It's FOMO because they knew people that bought at something you would feel is ridiculous and sold for 40x or whatever and so they convince themselves the same thing will happen. I think this is less crazy than the first round of buyers after the initial pop.
The short answers are: they don't, no, and it doesn't. Some NFTs do have a separate legal document saying you get a copyright license (or maybe even the copyright) if you "own" the NFT, but this is not required, and is entirely separate from the NFT. The author could very easily mint multiple NFTs of the same thing or just sell more licenses of the same thing on the side; if you look into the fine print of any NFT marketplace they will say straight out that you are not actually getting any exclusive ownership of anything unless the seller explicitly says so in separate legal terms. And even then, it usually is on the buyer to do any due diligence to make sure that the copyright actually belongs to them and the artwork isn't ripped off.
I expect NFTs are most analogous to owning a copy of a work, not the copyright. So you pay $330k and you get rights equivalent to prints of a piece of art. This may come with an implied right to publicly display the art, or may not, and that right may be limited in some ways. And, like a print, you can keep and treasure your NFT or re-sell it.
But you don’t own the copyright and can’t make more prints unless there was a separate agreement to that effect.
Certainly the first person to buy a bored ape from BAYC, they definitely entered into a legal contract with BAYC that granted them a copyright license.
But if you bought a Bored Ape NFT from someone else, did the sale contract you made with them definitely include another copyright license transfer? Or did you just buy an NFT?
What if the previous owner of your Bored Ape, while they held the copyright, took it upon themselves to separately sell the copyright to someone else, so by the time you bought the NFT, they didn't even have the copyright any more?
What if the previous owner of the Ape, as its copyright holder, and perhaps unknown to you, chose to release it to the public domain?
I don't think they're transferring the copyright but granting IP and commercial rights to the NFT holder. As many of the other commenters are pointing out, this isn't the typical way NFT's work but some are like this. Just like some NFT's don't point to a url but either are stored on chain (cryptopunks) or via content-based addressing (IPFS hash).
The problem is when you buy a second hand bored ape, you don’t have any direct contract with BAYC.
They might be able to enforce terms of their original contract on the first party buyer - ‘once you sell the ape you no longer have this license’. But they have no contractual relationship (no ‘privity’) with you.
Perhaps possession of the ape entitled you to go to BAYC and get a license contract?
That’s great, so long as BAYC 1) continues to honor that agreement (and since you have no contract with them to begin with there’s nothing obliging them to do so) and 2) continues to exist. If they go under and their copyright in their apes gets auctioned off, good luck finding whoever acquired your ape and persuading them that since you own a hash in a blockchain they really have to grant you a license to use that ape.
And as an owner of a second hand ape you have no legal recourse if they (or their successors, or their receivers during their bankruptcy) decide they no longer want to.
Is this fundamentally different then any other licensing agreement? Presumably if you want more security you'd get a lawyer and sign a contract but it's not something I've ever had to deal with before. If you think the company is going to go bankrupt then you probably wouldn't make the deal to begin with.
If you have purchased a license from a copyright holder, and then they go bust, and the copyright gets picked up in the ensuing fire sale by someone else, you still have the ability to go to the new rightsholder and say ‘hey, those rights were licensed to me, I plan on continuing to exercise them.’
But it is by no means clear that someone who bought an NFT from someone who bought an NFT from someone who bought an NFT from the original copyright holder has any basis for being able to expect the new holder of that copyright to continue to allow them to exercise the terms of the original license agreement made between the original seller and the original buyer.
> ii. Personal Use. Subject to your continued compliance with these Terms, Yuga Labs LLC grants you a worldwide, royalty-free license to use, copy, and display the purchased Art, along with any extensions that you choose to create or use, solely forthe following purposes: (i) for your own personal, non-commercial use; (ii) as part of a marketplace that permits the purchase and sale of your Bored Ape / NFT [...]
> iii. Commercial Use. Subject to your continued compliance with these Terms, Yuga Labs LLC grants you an unlimited, worldwide license to use, copy, and display the purchased Art for the purpose of creating derivative works based upon the Art (“Commercial Use”). Examples of such Commercial Use would e.g. be the use of the Art to produce and sell merchandise products (T-Shirts etc.) displaying copies of the Art. [...]
> The Bored Ape Yacht Club terms of service grant a commercial license to exploit the copyright of each Bored Ape to the owner of the relevant NFT.
So the holder of a Bored Ape NFT has a license to commercially use the off-chain image associated with the NFT by way of an on-chain URL. That license is granted by the actual copyright holders of all of the Bored Apes.
And this is important because? It doesn’t need to be globally visible. If I sell you ownership, I can do that via email or a piece of paper. And then when it’s disputed you can bring up the email and transaction receipt.
And it doesn’t even require an entire countries worth of electricity to do it.
Even if that’s the case, does anyone think procedurally generated computer art of Bored Apes would be worth even a fraction of a few dollars if it wasn’t for crypto marketing making people believe they can sell it for much more? In other words, the only value these things have is the belief that a bigger sucker will come around who will pay even more for it.
And has it actually been copyrighted with the USPTO and the various copy protection agencies across the world? Because if not, then who will actually enforce it and what legal backing does that copyright have?
And if it has been copyrighted, then what value does putting it on a blockchain add when the copyright enforcement is being maintained by the same entities that would have done it if it was on Shutterstock?
Speculation is one thing, and I think it is what drives the costs to such ridiculous extremes.
However, I don't think it explains all of the value.
First is the art itself, probably not worth much considering that it is rather generic and partly generated art, but some people may actually like it.
Then there is the idea of being part of something big. Some people think that NFTs are revolutionary, that in the future, this is what will represent property, more than a paper in some administrative office. Owning a NFT now is like owning a piece of history.
And there is also this idea that many collectors share that if it is rare and unique, it is worth having, and apes are rare and unique.
I know some collectors who spend thousands on collectable items, like video game cartridges or trading cards with no intention to ever sell them back. It is their treasure, it represents a lot of dedication and effort, they may have memories attached to it. It may sound stupid to outsiders but it is important.
I would have no problem with NFTs if they were simply billed as a useless "collectible" thing sitting in an account that you can use as an excuse to show off how you donated to an artist. But from that perspective, you don't need blockchains or smart contracts; the only thing needed is a donations platform like Patreon. The ridiculous nonsense about how NFTs are going to be "rare unique property" and "an investment" is a pure grift. It is shameful to see artists repeating those lies just to make a dollar. You are getting nothing from them. At least with trading cards you technically do get a picture you can look at, and maybe you could use them for enjoyment to play a game. With NFTs you are literally getting nothing. They are designed to seize the minds of people who have that "collector" personality and take advantage of them.
In many NFTs, the content itself is not covered by a hash (although the URL pointing to it is) so it would be incredibly difficult to prove that “ownership” in any case?
The copyright holder is free to write up a license that says the current holder of the NFT may use it as if they hold the copyright, though. Many NFTs don’t, but it’s possible.
But nothing guarantees that the seller of the NFT, the current holder of the NFT, is also the current copyright holder.
It's basically completely disconnected, so while the transfers may traditionally be done at the same time between the same entities, that's not a contract. The NFT just gives you a Blockchain url. If you didn't sign anything else then you got nothing else.
> When you purchase an NFT, you own the underlying Bored Ape, the Art, completely.
> Subject to your continued compliance with these Terms, Yuga Labs LLC grants you an unlimited, worldwide license to use, copy, and display the purchased Art for the purpose of creating derivative works based upon the Art (“Commercial Use”).
Remember the case of the crypto guys who bought a physical copy of Dune worth $40,000 for $3 million and thought that gave them the rights to make an animated series out of it? Good times. https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a38815538/dune-c...
What use is the copyright ownership? Does anyone have any interest in the images, other than their speculative "value" as an NFT? I can't imagine anyone being able to (for example) sell posters or prints of a bored ape. Or is my imagination simply lacking?
This has nothing to do with copyright. You own a piece of the blockchain, sad thing is that thing is not even an image or anything, its a url, and its target can change. It’s like a collective delusion.
This emperor has no clothes, but still mant people choose to believe.
No one ever believed. Other than crypto tech bros on HN shilling it all day. Take a look at what the general public thinks. They saw it as a scam on day one, and continued to see it as a scam which is why all the consumer product companies failed to have their NFT products take off.
Dark markets are described as a small piece of the pie for LE.
But P2P music sharing / digital music sales was also that way until they couldn't be ignored and ultimately destroyed traditional music distribution.
There is a reason big, reliable markets get shut down and it isn't all exit scams. It's because they're incredibly successful and they would not be so without crypto.
The ransomware market is too hard for most to get into and the "deals" take time to put together. There's not a great reason for them to prop up coin value.
However, dark markets are open to just about anyone, and presumably haven't even begun to touch growth potential.
All that said: throw in parent's value prop too--is bitcoin worth $20k a coin today? IDK, maybe? I sold bitcoin-embroidered hoodies at the first ever national bitcoin conference in san jose for half a coin and that seemed a bit nuts.
> But P2P music sharing / digital music sales was also that way until they couldn't be ignored and ultimately destroyed traditional music distribution.
Traditional music distribution was buying an easily damaged CD for $20 a pop (in 90's dollars). We would have moved to digital distribution anyway, P2P was just a catalyst.
It's not fully anonymous even WITH crypto. They have call centers. Banning crypto won't make ransomware go away, it will just increase the cost of ransom.
> Banning crypto won't make ransomware go away, it will just increase the cost of ransom.
That must be why ransomware demands were so much higher in the pre-bitcoin era. Unless you're including the cost of sending a cargo jet full of cash or gold halfway around the world?
Before bitcoin was still the early days of ransomware. It existed mostly as tech support scams. Now that the floodgates have been opened ransoms will go back to being high-risk western union payments and will be much higher. You can't put the cat back in the bag.
This is laughably naive. Western Union payments are high-risk for the ransomer, since they have to go pick the money up. Also, Western Union has pretty low limits on how much you can send ($10K for US->US transfers, less for international transfers). Getting a million dollars (a low ransom in today's ecosystem) via Western Union would require at least 100 pickups, each of which comes with a risk of getting arrested.
There is a reason ransom amounts skyrocketed when cryptocurrency entered the picture, and no, it's not because it was "the early days" pre-bitcoin.
If you can't use it to keep armed men authorized to use deadly force from putting you in a cage for the rest of your life it will at best be peripheral.
That's why people use the currency of their nation.
They must pay taxes and fees to exist as a part of society. Not doing so means you either fall off the social ladder or are imprisoned and have your life destroyed.
It's one thing that Modern Monetary Theory gets right. The government creates demand for its currency through taxes and fees that must be paid under threat of violence. So you work and earn the currency to pay for your right to exist.
Is that nice? No. But denying that the threat violence keeps this version of society together is denying reality. And trying to replace a system that is willing to use violence to maintain it's existence with dreams just doesn't work.
So if taxes go up, there will be more demand for a currency? And if taxes go down, there will be less demand for a currency? I’m not sure that’s right.
Crypto does solve a few real world issues (fast, global, cheap, secure, anonymized transfer of value).
But it seems that some people thought it fixes the "i want to get rich fast" problem, and was bloated as a result. It was never meant for that problem.
Not fast. Most cryptocurrencies have unbearably slow transaction or confirmation times. Maybe if you are buying a car, they will be confirmed by the time the paperwork is done. Even with initiatives like the lightning network, it's still slow. So much so that some of the major exchanges will tally your transactions off-chain, to be confirmed later.
> cheap
It really isn't. Be it gas fees or computational power
> secure
Eh, depends. Surely the transaction itself may be from the blockchain's viewpoint. But if your coins get stolen or your exchange gets hacked you really have no recourse. And that's just one issue. And before anyone says "hardware wallet", exploits have been found for those as well, assuming they were even secure to begin with.
> anonymized
They are not anonymous. With a few exceptions, all transactions are visible in the chain, forever. This works as long as you never need to convert to/from fiat. The moment you do, your identity is exposed - even retroactively. It's way worse than cash. Tumblers only help so much.
I'll agree with anyone saying that this NFT craze is idiotic, and that most cryptocurrencies don't have any utility, but to say that crypto isn't fast, cheap or secure is like saying 90's internet couldn't have webpages with pictures because gopher couldn't have pictures. I send money to my sister from my algorand wallet to hers in one second (literally), any amount for something like $0.0001. I'm not well versed enough in security to make any claim about safety, but if I have to trust someone regarding the security of some software, it might as well be this company's founder. Right now it's by far the best method to send money accross the globe.
edit: forgot to add that it's also very energy efficient
>Right now it's by far the best method to send money accross the globe.
No it is not. In banking and in payments, security typically means that there are guarantees your money will not suddenly disappear or get stolen by hacks and fraud, which cryptocurrencies have zero guarantees against. In fact, it is extremely likely that at some point your money will disappear, because the value of these coins is extremely manipulated. And that is not even getting into the huge number of defi hacks, rug pulls and bankruptcies that have happened recently.
I mean sure but for the specific problem of sending money between two a people who have already established an out of band trust relationship but who reside in different parts of the globe the blockchain is a fine solution that’s secure, fast, and cheap (and the alternatives aren’t)
>Crypto does solve a few real world issues (fast, global, cheap, secure, anonymized transfer of value).
Crypto does not solve any of those issues. The actual solution to most of those issues is called a "payment service" of which there were many that existed before blockchains. How is it do you suppose that companies like ebay and amazon were able to securely and quickly process internet payments in the 90s? They certainly didn't need blockchains to do it. You could argue that they aren't anonymized, but neither is crypto; it is only pseudonymous at best, in practice it is not even that as the exchanges that do the bare minimum of fraud prevention will require you to identify yourself.
> Crypto does solve a few real world issues (fast, global, cheap, secure, anonymized transfer of value).
I pay people from Argentina to Ukraine and there are myriad ways I can transfer them money quickly (seconds, sometimes), cheaply (down to fractions of cent on the dollar) and securely without resorting to crypto. I have no need for total anonymity but from what I hear crypto is not great on that front, either.
Can you share your methods of doing this?
I’m naive and unfamiliar with payments that are settled in seconds and also fractions of a cent to conduct, but would like to learn.
I can do an instant SEPA transfer within the EU for a flat fee of 20€… For 5,000€ that’s literally fractions on the cent. There are plenty of other options if you dig deep into permutations of banking systems, neobanks, payment apps, etc.
With the first big boom, weren’t wallet companies (which most people seem to need to make things easy enough) requiring photo IDs to open accounts? That kids the anonymized piece and once that’s gone the traditional means were already fast and cheap (and I assume global as well).
I think the idea of digital cash is cool, but practically speaking, it isn’t enough of a upside to deal with crypto. I can’t even tell you the last time I used actual cash. It was at least a year ago.
Bitcoin can only process 7 transactions per second globally. Ethereum 25. That is not fast. If you want to get an actual transfer cheapness goes out of the window. And it is not anonym either.
There are much faster cryptoasset networks, which I'm sure you already know, but the problem then becomes liquidity and volume required to not create slippage in the process.
> “Yes, ethereum is a currency in a way where you can exchange [non-fungible tokens, or] NFTs and stuff … but as far as buying food and all that, maybe not,” one crypto-enthusiast diner, Marc Coloma, said as he munched on fries outside the restaurant. “People want to hold onto their ethereum. They’re not gonna want to use it.”
Then what is the point then? Apecoin and Ethereum certainly cannot be used for payments and holders don't even want to spend their ETH or APE crypto. They have either been terrified with the 10,000 BTC pizza purchase to never spend it or they are scared of the gas fees that will eat up the transaction cost if the chain gets congested again.
It is a loss of confidence that is so bad that they have no choice but to use dollars for payments instead.
That is a complete failure and it just took one crypto crash.
But that was the original promise of crypto currency, that it would replace cash and checks and credit cards for all transactions. It was based on a lot of ignorance about how money actually works, but that was the claim way back when. I had a manager back in 2007–8 whose wife had a bakery that accepted Bitcoin as payment and he was a big crypto advocate. I could tell back then that all the claims made no sense. What amazes me is that crypto still hasn’t gone to zero a decade and a half later. Although as John Maynard Keynes said: “Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
> But that was the original promise of crypto currency, that it would replace cash and checks and credit cards for all transactions.
Some fanatics may have claimed that. But the bitcoin whitepaper itself says that traditional payments are good enough for most cases (and then enumerates cases where it's not, such as if you want non reversible transactions).
Spending crypto at a spot where you in person ate a burrito leaves its own paper trail.
I guess you could make an onion router style delivery network to get your meal, but you’d also have to convince thousands of others to use it as well to hide amongst them.
It didn't take a crypto crash, crypto has been a failed currency since BTC hit a dollar...
Extreme deflation is arguably more deadly than hyperinflation. If you know that by holding a dollar today, you can get 2 dollars worth of goods tomorrow, why are you going to spend a dollar?
Likewise, once Bitcoin went from fractions of a penny to a dollar, what incentive was left to spend it? You could argue an ideological want force it as a currency... but how many people's morals hold up at 10x returns? 100x returns? 1000x returns?
If BTC (or any major crypto) had become the official currency of a country, it'd be a failed state by this point.
BTC is an official currency in San Salvador, which is arguably indeed a failed state. I’d argue, though, that it’s just another symptom of the reasons which made it a failed state in the first place (populism, corruption, etc.)
I largely agree, I mean the president that got it through last year also violated their constitution to get another term and was upheld by his own puppet court...
But BTC hasn't helped at all. It's not even _the_ official currency, just one alongside USD, and yet it's already accelerated the country towards defaulting on their bonds.
While all this goes down the president is still making noise about a "Bitcoin city". A very "meta" commentary on cryto I feel.
>It's not even _the_ official currency, just one alongside USD, and yet it's already accelerated the country towards defaulting on their bonds.
And its day to day usage is very low.
There was a spike in use after $30 sign up bonus and during the 2021 bitcoin conference and following months which attracted tourism from bitcoiners though.
For the record, I was thinking about San Salvador Island which is also not a country, but during the time of the Salvadoran civil war, tourism at San Salvador Island suffered because apparently people confused it with El Salvador (all of this based on a vague memory of an NPR story I heard roughly 30 years ago).
That's interesting! I hadn't heard about that one.
There have been cases in which people book their air tickets to the wrong airport, and end up in San Salvador, El Salvador instead of Salvador, Bahia, Brasil.
I would say that being able to differentiate between El Salvador, Salvador and San Salvador is a shibboleth for those familiar with El Salvador. They are easy to confuse.
First off, if the 5 year treasury rate ever approaches 1000%, I assure you the Fed will collapse.
Second, problems with hyperdeflation and hyperinflation are both rooted in the hyper.
If you can buy a pizza today, or have $10 million dollars in a few years, why buy a pizza?
Third, the issue isn't just deflation, it's specifically deflation of a currency. If you invest $100 in a company, there's a chance it will be $1000 next year. But your $100 will circulate in the meantime and generate value.
Now if instead there was just as good a chance you could put $100 under your mattress, and next year it'd magically have become $1000 despite never having left your grasp... why would anyone ever invest again? You get to keep your money and have it increase in value, there's no incentive to invest or spend any more than you absolutely have to.
But then as people spend less and less, there's less and less economic activity being generated. You stop wanting to pay people so jobs disappear. Eventually you end up in a game of chicken where everyone is scared to spend money.
A BTC based country (fully BTC based, not El Salvador's lip service) would be an utter hellscape devoid of any economic output other than people waiting for their currency to appreciate. Not unlike the real thing...
President Bukele’s government declared a state of emergency on 27 March, following a spike in homicides allegedly committed by gangs, which has since been extended twice....Despite a drop in the homicide rate in recent years, El Salvador continues to be one of the most violent countries in the world....The government's financial problems are not because of bitcoin, but they have gotten worse because of bitcoin.
The president doesn't care about the issues that concern his position.
There was an intiative by the treasury to try and have people use a single document to deal with taxes, where we previously used two, this is something important for most people, the guy hasn't even mentioned on his social networks.
They also build a public vet that was supposedly financed with the earnings of BTC - when the price dropped the president mentioned that he hasn't sold any meaning all the money spent to promoto chivo or crypto has come from our tax dollars.
It's great to see a perspective from the ground on this.
I'm originally from an "emerging market" (aka 3rd world country) and I don't share the enthusiasm crypto bros do about emerging markets interacting with crypto.
It's rarely from a beneficial place. Crypto is absolutely perfect to allow a corrupt government to quietly siphon the nation. No planes full of dollar bills, no heavy gold bricks. Just a movement from one digital address to another.
Sure in a pinch it might be a lifeline, but it's a flimsy lifeline and these countries need a lot more than a glorified remittance system to recover. It's fun to laugh at NFT bros trying to buy overpriced restaurant food, but last few months have likely been disastrous for a lot of very poor people.
> That is a complete failure and it just took one crypto crash.
Disclosure: I hold virtually no crypto (a few thousand XRP)
As I watch this show from the sidelines, I wonder if the latest crash (and no doubt future crashes) isn't exactly the force needed to distribute crypto more widely into more hands, normalizing to some roughly steady state value. After several swings of the pendulum, you end up at some more or less stable value with many more users, making actual marketetplace purchases with crypto more ubiquitous. I guess time will tell, eh?
> exactly the force needed to distribute crypto more widely into more hands
Yes, but not "crypto." Bitcoin. The entire crash was due to VCs and hedge funds overleveraging into shitcoins [1]. It started with Luna and that created a domino effect for the rest of it. Sprinkle on the panic typical to all markets and kablamo.
In essence, that's good (albeit painful to some degree) because it's a truly free market. Bad players got washed out and there's more to come as far as I can tell. Fairly excited as, like you suggest, it means people have a chance to acquire more Bitcoin while they still can.
How is a crash going to distribute eth or btc into more hands? A bunch of people losing their shirts doesn't seem like it's going to motivate more people to buy in, and individual investors may panic sell before prices go down further.
> A bunch of people losing their shirts doesn't seem like it's going to motivate more people to buy in
It will if they're smart enough to ask "why" people lost their shirts and take the POV of someone like John Templeton. The best time to buy is when everyone else is panicking or ignoring an asset you view as undervalued.
Just like the stock market, though, that's not likely to happen. Most people are controlled by emotions, not logic, and so miss out on many opportunities.
Who does the distribution? The vast majority of people in the world can't afford to buy crypto. The people who hold most of the BTC, ETH, SOL, and whatever other major coins were already rich before they got into it. Maybe single digit thousands of people went from non-rich to rich through buying and holding crypto, but that's a tiny fraction.
That just means poor people are dividing their already limited resources to buy a fraction of something that they can't use to pay for rent, food, and clothing. If you can only afford to buy a fraction of something, then you can't afford it.
That's rapidly changing. Considering that Bitcoin has the potential to help more than it hurts (developing countries don't have to plan growth at the barrel of a Western gun), there's an incentive to start moving in the direction of making it a standard.
See Central African Republic and El Salvador. Countries are waking up to the mafia operation that is the IMF and its favorite weapon, the dollar. Because it's still early in the adoption cycle, critics will continue to be "correct" until one day they wake up and find they've been left behind.
> doesn't the IMF use a basket of currencies called SDRs instead of dollars
Yes, which are just claims on that basket of currencies, the U.S. Dollar being the majority currency (in the current 5 year basket 43.38% with the next closest being the Euro at 30.93%). My point was admittedly hyperbolic, but as the majority currency in the SDR basket (and the world reserve currency) the USD has both voting and trade sway as countries need it to pay debts and acquire resources.
As for governance, U.S. votes account for over 16% (the greatest shareholder of votes) with the next closest being China at 6%. In effect, the U.S. has a soft-monopoly over the basket as the stated requirements for ranking/inclusion "take into account their current prominence in terms of international trade and national foreign exchange reserves."
Combine that with the U.S. military/intelligence threat, NATO threat, and all of the other tentacles of U.S. hegemony and its currency is—for all intents and purposes—a weapon.
Something like Bitcoin is a significant enough threat that the IMF as steered by the U.S. is incentivized to dismiss it (and has [1]).
As for El Salvador's holdings, well, yeah. Even as a Bitcoin maximalist I'd think Bukele were putting his country in a dangerous position short-term if he went all in as other countries would just threaten to cut them off from resources/aid (see link which makes my point).
A full-blown transition to Bitcoin is going to need enough countries with tradeable resources to start accepting it as payment. Again, we're in the early days of the transition away from state currencies. The real battle will be when they try to rug pull everyone with CBDCs [2] (which is precisely when the intelligent but timid will realize that Bitcoin is the only option to preserve personal/state sovereignty).
I agree to some extent, but there are far too many shitcoins out there and people think it's all a 'get rich quick scheme'. There's also lots of bad press about crypto scams, we have things like Terra and other stablecoins losing their peg, all these smart contract hacks etc.
Then we have all the whales and hedge funds manipulating the market, pump and dumps... it's really is the wild west out here still unfortunately. On top of all that, your parents probably think Crypto.com is the only place to buy it, and the more tech inclined may read 'not your keys, not your crypto', create a wallet and lose the keys or typo an address and lose the coins.
Plus we can't forget all the newer investors, over the past year or two. All of which are probably deep in the red right now and will sell at any opportunity when things look to start improving (and probably tell their mates to avoid it too).
I think the whole industry needs to take a step back, quietly work away for a few years, keep building things, improve security, increase trust. Drop all the DeFi farming pools with the ridiculous earn rates, stop the hype every time a new coin is launched. Get back to basics, create some real utility.
I'm not sure what the answer is on stablecoins or encouraging people to spend crypto. I think it's become too ingrained in peoples heads that crypto is an investment rather than a currency. Stablecoins were a partial answer to that, but they also kind of defeat the purpose too. We're back to trusting the US government, Tether and/or algorithmic stablecoins - which so far have proved to _not_ work. I believe it will take decades for people to stop tracking their crypto holdings and always converting it back to local currencies. Maybe we need some 'super' stable coin, that's backed by stocks, currencies (fiat and crypto) globally but not pegged to any one thing, kind of like an ETF? Is that possible algorithmically though and would governments ever legalise it and allow people to be paid in it?
I do think the tech that the crypto industry has created is great, and I do hold numerous cryptocurrencies (and am making a loss too...) but we're a long way off making prices recoveries, rebuilding trust and actually becoming useful in society.
> I wonder if the latest crash (and no doubt future crashes) isn't exactly the force needed to distribute crypto more widely into more hands, normalizing to some roughly steady state value.
I'm mostly crypto-skeptic, and appreciate your insights, but this part is to be expected with any market: when the value of something is up, certain business models become profitable and start manifesting. When the value goes down, they stop being profitable and those models vanish (or become sustained externally).
It's easy to see in high profile markets like resource extraction, real estate, venture capital availability, etc
So of course the business model of "use crypto as a currency" will vanish/diminish when the currency value of a coin is substantially down.
I dislike crypto, especially NFTs. But here's my best attempt at understanding.
BAYC transfers ownership of IP for the ape you've bought. It's not just a picture of the ape on OpenSean; you can use it. There's something really fascinating about this. It's one character, but it's also broadly part of the larger ecosystem.
We're so used to, say, Disney owning IP. But what if you could spend $300k and have a restaurant themed like Mickey Mouse? And you're not a cheap knockoff... you're expanding on the lore and the You could have a community of built in people or, like the guy in the article, maybe they just thought the vibe was cute and didn't know what BAYC was even.
I think it's really interesting that people are building and creating and expanding this universe. Imagine something like Pokémon, where everyone was able to create and consume games/content/etc.
Here in HN, the sentiment tends to be against Disney-style copyrights. The crypto community is playing with what community and intellectual property actually could mean.
> Subject to your continued compliance with these Terms, Yuga Labs LLC grants you a worldwide, royalty-free license to use, copy, and display the purchased Art, along with any extensions that you choose to create or use, solely for the following purposes: (i) for your own personal, non-commercial use; (ii) as part of a marketplace that permits the purchase and sale of your Bored Ape / NFT, provided that the marketplace cryptographically verifies each Bored Ape owner’s rights to display the Art for their Bored Ape to ensure that only the actual owner can display the Art; or (iii) as part of a third party website or application that permits the inclusion, involvement, or participation of your Bored Ape, provided that the website/application cryptographically verifies each Bored Ape owner’s rights to display the Art for their Bored Ape to ensure that only the actual owner can display the Art, and provided that the Art is no longer visible once the owner of the Bored Ape leaves the website/application.
That's not IP ownership, just a conditional license, despite their talk of "owning" and "purchasing".
Full copyright transfer and licensing are not the same thing. The BAYC terms seem to be a sale of an instance of the Art, with a limited nonexclusive license to the intellectual property. An exclusive license is considered a transfer, but this isn't one. If you got an exclusive license, nobody else, including BAYC or OpenSea, could display the Art without your permission until the copyright runs out. BAYC didn't give up that much.
It's not clear that BAYC images are copyrightable in the US, because they are procedurally generated from templates. That will probably be litigated at some point.
There's an interesting trade dress question. Suppose you fed a supply of BAYC images into a machine learning system and had it crank out similar images. Does Yuga Labs have any claim against you?
But you can already license your IP using a contract or a license, and that contract can be inked in paper or done digitally. You can even give exclusive license or transfer your rights. The only difference using the blockchain is, well, the blockchain.
This is an even less interesting use of the blockchain than Bitcoin - at least with Bitcoin there is no longer a central authority needed to prevent double spending. Here the blockchain is facilitating a transaction that can already be done without some authority to recognize it.
I don't care about bored apes or jpeg nfts in general, and don't know how true it is that you receive ownership of the ip.
But if it worked that way, then the concept is pretty cool. You say "you can already license..." yeah, but this is one click stuff and you're good to go. What you're saying is slow lawyer stuff and a fully manual process.
Of course this one click to purchase IP could be done centralized. But decentralized can add transparency, instead of relying on paper trail and companies that can go defunct.
Okay, so they don't actually already do it, but they could do it.
How would you keep track of who currently has ownership? How do you make sure I don't sell ownership to 5 people, or keep using it myself? Do I need to hire a lawyer each time?
Yes, this can be done without the blockchain. But also, does it matter to you if the code is in SQL or the blockchain? The blockchain is just a technology. (I do think the environmental impact is worth considering, for the record.)
Ultimately these are problems that just do not need solving. There is no real world use case to sell and transfer ownership of a stock photo multiple times.
But experimenting with copyright law is fascinating. It’s like saying, 20 years ago, that concepts like Creative Commons solves no real world use case.
I don’t think 5 years from now BAYC will matter. I do think, however, experimentation with intellectual property, copyright and ownership will.
Problem is it’s 1% interesting experimentation and then 99% scams, criminal activity, and destroying the planet.
I find that AI generated imagery is a much more interesting experimentation on copyright. Rather than trying to introduce scarcity to digital items, AI will destroy ownership entirely as anyone could generate their own brand new stock images on demand.
You can mostly use any and every one of them for a lot of purposes under fair use. I have seen a lot of Apes around the net, way more than I would have liked.
You can't make, say, a cartoon featuring one of them, but would you want to do that?
The apes were algorithmically-generated, and copyright applies only to human work, not program outputs (so that you can't run a program that generates all possible images and claim you own then all), so the kitsch apes are probably free to use for everyone anyway.
no, it's one picture. some one else might own the rights to functionally the same character but with a smile instead of a frown or even just a different background color.
The only way this scales is that there are tens of thousands of "character" all of which are extremely similar, generated on a template and randomly arranged. None of them seem particularly iconic though I understand that certain hats etc are rarer than others. But none of them stand out as any sort of personality. So if you were to say try to make your own Bored ape restaurant a block away are you really standing out because _your_ ape has a nose ring?
Look at the parent article. The person quoted didn’t know what BAYC was; he went a few times a week because he liked the vibe.
Mickey had been around since 1928. I don’t think we’ll care about BAYC, specifically, but I do think it’s premature to say no NFT-based project will ever have any significant cultural impact.
Almost every human on the planet knows who Mickey Mouse is, and one corporation benefits. Aren’t you at least curious about a world where ownership of cultural icons is shared?
(I love Disney and hate NFTs so this is a weird position for me to be in, for the record)
This was intended as a 90-day pop-up, and they reported there were few crypto transactions even before the crash. ApeCoin already wasn't a huge part of this.
The entrepreneur plans another restaurant and is already selling NFTs for it. Their involvement with Yuga Labs was minimal. Bun B paid for the burgers.
Is it possible the entrepreneur still turned a healthy profit? Or that was killed in the crash?
One thing maybe missing from the many good comments here is a
separation of digital currencies from crypto coins.
We would do well to start separating the mechanism that stores value
from the mechanism of exchange.
That's why I think something like GNU Taler backed by ordinary dollars
is a much better way for selling burgers and pizza in any foreseeable
time-frame.
These merchant adoption and abandonment stories are always implementation issues with no inspiration or education.
A) Point of Sale systems have handled this "volatility" issue for an entire decade. Use an implementation that shields the merchant from volatility. They usually liquidate for you.
B) Why would you list the prices in ApeCoin or Ethereum? Just show dollars and accept whatever, because A) handles whatever proportion you want to keep in dollars or some other crypto.
C) If nobody wants to use that payment method, who cares its free. How often are you getting UnionPay customers, going to make an article about that too?
Crypto, web3 and NFTs are social movements. They are the crowd that knows things. As the hippies used to say about LSD and counterculture, "You're either on the bus, or off the bus."
Crypto, web3 and NFTs are spiritual tech that is throwing off the shackles of corporate control and making a new society. It's an identity. It's a brand. It's a community. If I was in my 30's I'd probably be into it. I would know damn well there was a lot of hype, but so what, it's fun and maybe something amazing will come out of it. Meantime, it's a party, and we can all take turns at the mic making deep pronouncements about how we're empowering the forgotten poor of the world. What's not to like? Who cares if we lose money. It's the price of entry to the party.
Edit: This isn't what I believe. This is me trying to see it through the eyes of a young enthusiast
Yeah but the hippie movement was about realizing the untapped potential for social freedoms locked away behind a repressive and outdated society. (Before it burned out and dissipated)
Crypto is about shallowly co-opting the patterns of discourse of genuine social movements to try and get rich quickly.
I thought, "if the people in the vanguard of this movement can't figure this out, maybe it isn't all that it's cracked up to be".