Regardless of what you think of NFTs, you have to recognize that the author's only counterargument against NFTs is that they're bad for the "rest of us" due to externalities that everyone else has to pay.
The "rest of us" don't pay for the electricity use. The ETH miners are paying for it directly. And creators and buyers are paying for it indirectly through ETH usage. It isn't an externality. That's like saying the physical art world shouldn't exist because it uses physical real estate, electricity, and raw materials to be made on -- and the rest of us pay for those things.
Is it a good use of electricity? Maybe, maybe not. That's for people to decide individually, unless we'd want to go down the moral rabbit hole of judging every single use of electricity.
The "rest of us" don't pay for the electricity use. The ETH miners are paying for it directly. And creators and buyers are paying for it indirectly through ETH usage. It isn't an externality. That's like saying the physical art world shouldn't exist because it uses physical real estate, electricity, and raw materials to be made on -- and the rest of us pay for those things.
Negative environmental consequences with costs imposed upon society are literally externalities. All the things you list are textbook examples.
> you have to recognize that the author's only counterargument against NFTs is that they're bad for the "rest of us
No, I think he makes a valid point that they're intentionally misleading and a scheme to sucker someone out of money.
Let's look at Jack Dorsey's 'minted' first tweet.[0]
This is in no way gives to exclusivity to 'owning' this tweet. It literally is just 'owning' the rights to 'Valuable's' NFT of this tweet (if they even are committing, legally, to never create another NFT of it). There are no limit of companies that can do exactly what they are doing and 'selling' this tweet in the same way, nor is Jack Dorsey committing never to accept those 'sales'.
To me, it seems like an outright scam that anybody but Twitter is trying to do this.
Same for art though. You don't own a copyright. You own only the bragging right as well as the useless physical canvas and paint. All artful beauty it has can be copied much more cheaply than the original painting's price.
Until the price of carbon is accounted for in the price of electricity, using ridiculous amounts of electricity for such trivial uses is externalizing the costs of these transactions onto all of us.
We are facing a climate crisis that is projected to accelerate a mass extinction crisis and create tens of millions of displaced refugees and yet we are spending 200 KgCO2 of wasted compute on a 'digital ownership token' on this: http://cryptoart.wtf/#https://superrare.co/artwork-v2/the-fo...
That's an argument for a different question, which is "should we allow people to waste electricity if they pay for it?". If your answer is that we should regulate what people are allowed to use electricity for, then we'll need to change the laws in this country.
It is very difficult to start being the moral judge for every single use of electricity. Instead, we let the free market decide in most situations. And when there are true externalities (meaning costs that borne by the broader population, e.g. car emissions) we do impose regulations to reduce those externalities.
"This is bad because of externalities, the externalities are big and will grow" is exactly why we don't have general nuclear power, saying it's the only argument doesn't make it a weak argument.
The electricity argument loses weight when you look at the world allocation of GPUs. Although mining has cut into supply, they're also being used for gaming, workstation, and cloud compute tasks. One way or another all of that chip supply would be sold, and then it is a case of benchmarking the social value, load and efficiency of the different uses to some utilitarian optimum.
Much easier to cut off the framing early and declare "all crypto is bad and has no value", which is what the contra side is leaning towards. It's easily embraced by authoritarian-left ideologues, since their inclination is to reject market solutions anyway.
My suspicion is that we'll all be surprised in eighteen months. The "boom" will be gone, but an unalterable trend will have taken hold regardless, and the platforms will have largely moved on to proof of stake, closing the environmental argument.
The thing of cryptocurrency is that at the end of the day, all you have is a file of a few hundred gigabytes that somehow represents hundreds of billions of dollars of market value. That value means that an absolutely huge number of eyeballs are scrutinizing it, looking for a way to protect their investment. They can't "turn off" the system and make sweeping changes. The hypotheses of anything-goes "assassination markets" have not panned out - crypto has become a sector with a civic outlook.
> One way or another all of that chip supply would be sold, and then it is a case of benchmarking the social value, load and efficiency of the different uses to some utilitarian optimum.
I disagree. Cryptomining created a new market that increased the demand. There's no reason to assume the same numbers of GPUs with the same utilisation rate would be in use if we didn't have crypto. Thus, it does have direct environmental consequences.
Not all of that electricity use is a total waste: a friend of mine uses part of his mining heat to warm up the apartment in the winter. It's an expensive heater though.
What hasn't he delivered on? Does he have any track record of delivering what's been promised? If I recall correctly, proof of stake already started to roll out this year.
That’s a bit disingenuous. Ethereum isn’t as static as bitcoin; they’ve been making steady progress. Proof of stake also has started rolling out already
The question as I interpreted it is "what has he not yet delivered on" - not "what has he promised to deliver on and appears to be making progress on, and has started rolling out, but is not yet broadly available" :)
Yes, let's rely on word play to make it seem that ethereum isn't being actively upgraded as we speak ;)
Kidding aside, I would think that most people understand "what has he not yet delivered on" as "he's completely broken his promise and he's no longer working on it". I didn't have a "yet" in that sentence.
I agree with you. I also think this is great for during the week too. Sometimes a little break and fun distraction is all I need to get past a hard problem.
We're launching LivMote (www.livmote.com), a touchless screening solution to help business reopen. Founded by YC and NASA alumni and backed by leading VCs and strategic partners.
Hiring across all departments:
- Full Stack Engineering
- Business Operations
- Customer Success
- Marketing
Seems reasonable when your core business has been massively impacted. Being a public company can't make it easier.
Also as a startup, good sub-answer to the "Isn't Uber / Twitter / Dropbox etc working on this?". Yes, but in a market downturn, your investors want you to dig in harder while their investors want them to survive and focus on core.
I honestly wonder what the strategy is. Obviously they are heavily impacted in the short term, but also this is a company that has been losing money from the get go. If the intent is to build and build and build and search for profit eventually, then I'd think they'd weather this storm more than they are. They invested heavily in building up a world-class engineering team and just cut a huge chunk loose. It makes me think they aren't just cutting costs, they are refocussing the business and probably won't reenter some markets.
Hey I'm the friend; let me know if any questions. It's been a lot of fun and a pain in the ass to create! Though our pre-sale customers have been really happy which is awesome!: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cqVeMVOTMjuy8zhWji_pY1Lc... -sent from my SPUD
The few reviews of the actual product (vs gushes about the Kickstarter 4 years ago) I can find seem pretty "meh" on it though. 1280x720, bad contrast, ...
Hi Detaro, I'm Alex one of the creators. Resolution and contrast are definitely areas to attack/improve. The resolution is good enough for a lot of work. I’m using my SPUD now to type this from my self-quarantined Shenzhen apartment...Here are some pictures taken with my Oneplus 7t of my current setup with my SPUD. This SPUD was a reject from our assembly factory for failing brightness spec by 20%, e.g. the ones we shipped to customers were at least 20% brighter and usually much more (CEO gets the rejects...), with and without the overhead lights on: https://photos.app.goo.gl/7j5jx8th6kDDgMtZA
The contrast is good for indoor use/shaded cafe (unless your shining light directly at it, like photography lights, when filming a video, for example...).
Directly regarding the Linus video:
I do not think it was fair for a number of reasons (this is just copy/pasted response to a Kickstarter backer who asked about it):
(1) He filmed it with studio light shining directly on the screen. This caused the image to appear much more washed out than how your eye would see it under normal (e.g. indirect) room light. Other videos and our social (https://www.instagram.com/realarovia/?hl=en) more accurately show how SPUD will appear. Even when SPUD was on the Today Show, when we had a white glossy screen (e.g. before we developed the grey matte screen that further improves contrast), the contrast appeared significantly better. That was under normal lighting (all they did is turn off the very bright studio lights directly over SPUD): https://youtu.be/9aFmoA6xFC0
I am not sure if he read the manual or any of other FAQs because, we clearly say to avoid direct light on SPUD for best performance.
That said, if you ever tried to take a picture of a movie screen or a projected slide in a lecture, you know it is not trivial to take a good picture of a projected image!
(2) He folded it in a way to maximize size. The manual and our online tutorials can help a lot in knowing how to fold SPUD to the smallest size: https://bit.ly/357PjkA
(3) He didn’t follow the steps on how to optimize image quality. The manual and our online tutorials can help a lot with optimizing image quality: https://bit.ly/2MMXMTR
I am not sure if he read or tried any of other online resources. He definitely did not contact me directly to try to get any assistance…He did contact me to ask how SPUD compares to USB monitors and I sent him an accurate, detailed answer and he did not include any of the points in his video: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1XC-XvNITvGqkj32zrAfSp91jlb... It was very frustrating because all of our backers, if they have a problem, message us and we solve (worst case by RMA). He did not even make the effort to ask us before posting a video that some people may take as gospel. That said, this is part of the deal of doing something that people find interesting. I also understand that he has a huge incentive to be negative to drive clicks and there is no consequence for him doing it with a small, 3-person startup. All said, I am still grateful for him backing our project and am very grateful for all of our backers help in bringing the first collapsible display to life! Please let me know if there are any questions I can answer! -Thanks, Alex -sent from my SPUD
I did but this would be a very complex setup as each projector would need their own support, and would need three blank screens and I would also need to have space behind the desk.
This is an oversimplification of why aeroponics or any form of hydroponics is great. A few of the most notable benefits:
1) Growing density - you use a lot less square footage by growing up!
2) Can grow anywhere - you control a ton of the variables due to setup indoors away from weather conditions, indoor lights, control of water and nutrients, etc.
3) The ability to very carefully fine tune the end product due to a large number of controllable inputs into the growing process (rather than spreading nutrients and water over large acres of land)
> 1) Growing density - you use a lot less square footage by growing up!
Yes, but all of that square footage is inside the building, which cost money to construct and operate, in addition to capital costs of constructing the multi-tiered farm and wiring it with LEDs
> 2) Can grow anywhere
Yes...anywhere...inside a heated building. Even if the LEDs used provide some degree of heating, some sort of HVAC to regulate temperatures must still be employed. I'd imagine you wouldn't use an unheated warehouse in Canada during winter.
> 3) The ability to very carefully fine tune the end product due to a large number of controllable inputs into the growing process
Probably the only real advantage. It also makes ramping up to demand somewhat easier, since the growth time is shorter.
However, make no mistake - so far these are low calorie greens at a luxury price.
> Yes, but all of that square footage is inside the building, which cost money to construct and operate, in addition to capital costs of constructing the multi-tiered farm and wiring it with LEDs
Operating a modern western farm requires all of that too. Do you think farmland has no capital costs? What about all the farm machinery?
> Yes...anywhere...inside a heated building. Even if the LEDs used provide some degree of heating, some sort of HVAC to regulate temperatures must still be employed. I'd imagine you wouldn't use an unheated warehouse in Canada during winter.
This seems like a rather strange argument. You can grow crops indoors in antartica if it comes to that. Beind able to grow crops anywhere you like rather than having to hunt for ideal land is an incredible benfit. Considering that a lot of the fertile topsoil in the midwest is being lost, this seems like a great way to ensure that food supplies are not jeapordized.
> However, make no mistake - so far these are low calorie greens at a luxury price.
For now, because farms and farm produce is heavily subsidized. If we were to apply similar subisidies to indoor farms + continue to increase the efficiency, we could possily produce at similar costs as well.
If you built a house just for growing plants then yes. If I grow a few veggies in a green curtain at home in the kitchen window where I am not even there 90% of the daylight time, then no. Also, I am growing radish and salad in the attic right now where there is no extra heating or light so point 2 is also not necessarily true. The only thing I would agree on is that you will not cover more than 5% of your diet that way but it enough for covering the winter with some fresh stuff.
> If I grow a few veggies in a green curtain at home in the kitchen window where I am not even there 90% of the daylight time, then no.
Smaller scales make the math worse, not better.
> Also, I am growing radish and salad in the attic right now where there is no extra heating or light so point 2 is also not necessarily true.
I'm assuming the attic is attached to a heated building of some sort? Not sure why you're trying so hard to come up with arguments for this hydroponic stuff.
People are well aware of the advantages and it's mostly going to be used to grow high-value cash crops like spices (saffron?) and cannabis.
