Which means, the technical solutions to the questions raised in the original article this responds to, will probably not have time to be implemented before the rush is over.
Also, one of the main points of the first article, if not the main one (and certainly the first one) is that centralization is a feature, not a bug. People want a central authority and not bother themselves with running their own server/infrastructure.
So the only way for OpenSea to "die" is if it's replaced by a different, but similar, central authority.
Especially since those solutions would reduce the influence and revenue of the biggest players. It's like trying to replace Facebook with Diaspora. It's technically possible, and going nowhere.
The article lists success stories for NFTs: "Axie Infinity and how it’s bringing entire nations out of poverty"[1] Axie Infinity is a play-to-earn game. It's like Pokemon, with breeding and training and fighting, for real money. Players need about US$1500 to play, and earn Smooth Love Potion Tokens. This really caught on in the Philippines, and people were quitting their day job to play.
The article was from June 2021, when Axie was on the way up and Smooth Love Token was peaking around $0.35. Axie is now a Ponzi on the way down. This morning, Smooth Love Potion Token is down to $0.01897 and dropping.[2] Since all revenue came from new players, this was inevitable.
The NFT market is Axie Infinity, OpenSea, CryptoPunks, and the little guys. As with most things online, the top 3 have most of the market share.[3] Axie is crashing. OpenSea is stalling. Profitable NFT resales aren't happening much, and there's a glut of new issuers.
By the time the problems Moxie points out are fixed, this is going to be over. Especially since for US players there's a 28% capital gains tax rate on collectables resold within 12 months.
[1] https://www.notboring.co/p/infinity-revenue-infinity-possibi...
[2] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't centralization in blockchain-related applications a critical problem which defeats the whole purpose of said tech?
I mean, if a Blockchain is controlled by a single entity, doesn't that entity have all it needs to rewrite it however they wish?
And also, is there any difference between storing a record in a centrally-managed Blockchain or a record in plain old relational database managed by a third party?
If there is only one node acting as gateway to the blockchain then it could use PostgreSQL and there would be no differences in trust.
This is not what the original article says. Here's the first conclusion:
> We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure.
In other words, centralized trust is a bug, but that's a different thing than centralized servers.
The problem with existing NFTs is that they not only don't have decentralized servers, they also don't have decentralized trust. They're just not what they claim to be at all.
I would also point out that "centralized" isn't a binary thing. Having literally everyone run their servers is not really what anybody wants, but neither is having one company run a single server for everyone in the world, which isn't really what happens. Even with a "centralized service" like Facebook, they have multiple servers distributed all over the world.
And if the servers didn't have to be trusted, they also wouldn't all have to be run by a single company. Having a billion servers for a billion users is not what anybody wants, but we already have a thousand servers for a billion users. And if the servers are not to be trusted anyway, why do we need them all to be run by the same entity?
Full atomization rarely works. Federation works.
The authentic dev communities building blockchain tech are throwing their weight behind the idea that they will in time transition towards technical solutions, having already set a course for the social solution. So from their end, this criticism is always technical in nature. The initial source of trust is going to be in mathematical realities guaranteeing certain outcomes: if not cryptography, then tokenomics. Of course there are a huge number of "P.T. Barnums" who have jumped ahead to create solutions today, and these solutions tend to platformize. That's the discontinuity making it a circus.
This. And take away the techno-libertarian glamour, it becomes just another technology that might have useful applications, or might be a huge waste of time, resources, and increases complexity and decreases transparency.
For efficiency what we do is we centralize and wherever possible we add safeguards and controls to the central authority, as auditors call them, mitigations.
From the looks of it, if the price drops at best we're in it for that sweet sweet URL pointing to Google Drive/imgur.
Is this not just how financial assets in general works? Anyone buying Amazon's share are not buying it because they want that share. They buy it because they hope some time down the line (weeks, months, years) they can flip it for more money than they spent.
A share without votes and without dividends would be worth $0.
(Also, many NFT shills and/or shovel salesmen fervently insist that they're selfless patrons of the arts, rather than simply trying to make ponzi cash)
Someone posted a link yesterday to an NFT they "own". I saved it to my computer, changed the file name, and uploaded it to a server. They had and have zero agency to stop me from doing so. Their NFT "purchase" didn't transfer any copyrights to them recognized by any entity with means to enforce copyrights. I can do whatever I want with those bytes I downloaded and the owner can't do a damned thing to me.
So what "ownership" do they have? They don't control redistribution. They don't physically possess a thing. They can't assert some sort of exclusionary control over who gets to see a thing.
Some record in a slow expensive database just says a wallet to which they have the private key transferred Geoffrey dollars to another wallet for the contents pointed to by an IPFS identifier. That's one of the more complicated ways I've seen to throw money away but it's not ownership.
You're wrong. I hold many NFTs that I want just for the sake of the art. Sorry to disprove your theory. One of my favorites is the Bonsai collection by ZenFT: https://www.zenft.xyz/
Some people use NFTs as simple mementos (free to claim, and collect): https://poap.gallery/
People enjoy collecting and displaying NFTs: https://oncyber.io/nawkzst People enjoy using their NFTs as avatars in Web3 games: https://www.webb.game/ People use NFTs to access exclusive areas on Decentraland (https://decentraland.org/) and Sandbox (https://medium.com/sandbox-game/cyberkongz-vx-partner-with-t...
People use NFTs for token-based access to websites or online services. People use them for real world events. People spend countless hours hanging out on Discord in various communities and servers and they build together.
> People want a central authority and not bother themselves with running their own server/infrastructure.
People don't want a central authority. Most people don't really understand the implications of the technology they use. Awareness is higher than it's ever been, however, in the age of censorship and deplatforming. It's not sustainable or desirable for all of humanity's communication and value exchange to be routed through a handful of trillion dollar tech monopolies.
It's not desirable that so much of the web be dominated by these entities. It's not good for democracy, it's not good for humanity.
> So the only way for OpenSea to "die" is if it's replaced by a different, but similar, central authority.
Only those who lack imagination or skill would assert such a thing.
This is an old debate and not really the subject at hand, but I'll still bite (against my better judgement).
You don't need to own an NFT to enjoy the art. That's the fundamental difference between art in the real world and digital art (NFT or not). When you own a piece of art you get to look at the original; this is a unique experience in the case of a painting, and sometimes a rare experience in the case of limited editions of photos.
But the digital art is the same whether you "own it" or not. From an esthetic experience (not a financial one, obviously), it's pointless to "own" digital art.
The only thing that would influence the esthetic experience of digital art is the medium. Buy a better screen. Better speakers. Etc.
> People spend countless hours hanging out on Discord
Sure. That I don't doubt.
It's always "early" for some definition of the word "it". Any decade now we'll have PoS, or an actual use case for smart contracts, or NFTs etc.
But no, every year just seems to bring a new "invention" that is "still early" while implying that this, unlike every single other use of distributed blockchain, somehow is the first of all of them to not be pointless (outside of a way to find the bigger fool).
Blockchains are just scam generators.
Well, they are of great utility to ransomware, so i guess they have found one use case in over a decade.
Edit: and of course this rebuttal found like one possible mistake in statistics and calls it a "lie". That should tell you all you need to know about the author's intellectual honesty.
The doomsday cult and spiritual guru model of community-building fits right into the Silicon Valley culture of techno-optimism alongside the "if you believe it, you can achieve it" New Age mantras and "fake it till you make it, it's not fraud if you believe it" naivete.
The only thing more upsetting that watching it happen is knowing how it will likely unravel, with everyone pointing fingers and rushing to find a conspiracy theory to explain why "the powers that be" targeted them for destruction because they were so threatened and were afraid of the power they were losing to the Bored Ape movement, or whatever it is.
I mean the easy reply is no: Fusion is not a solution in search of a problem. It has a precise defined desired output, and the engineering is being worked on to achieve that output.
(E.g.) NFT don't. Smart contracts don't. Even cryptocurrencies don't. If you precisely define what you want from a cryptocurrency, then you'll either end up with something that's better solved centralized (to a larger or lesser degree, but at least control), or you'll end up with something that nobody actually wants.
And if you launch today with something nobody actually wants, then you get rich. So who cares if eventually it solves a problem? And there's no incentive to make that happen.
The main difference is that blockchains are being launched before any thought has been put into what problems they solve. Because the money is made on the speculation. Solving the problem is incidental.
Sure, you could be super cynical and say that fusion, or indeed every single company in the world, is only there to make money, primarily. But they do that by solving (or trying to solve) actual problems.
Again on cryptocurrencies: Why do you think I'll have a hard time walking into a bank with duffle bags full of cash? Really think about that question. Really think about the hundreds of years of thought that has gone into it.
Do you think the main problem these generations of people were trying to solve was "intransigent bankers"? Do you think the bank doesn't "like" you as a customer if you walk in with duffle bags full of cash without explanation, and that's why it has rules and takes time, and you have to explain yourself?
Now cryptocurrencies just treat that as "that's stupid, let's remove all that".
Let's say a thief stole your TV. They catch the thief, and a court orders them to repay you. They have the money. They say no. Obviously you want a court order to be able to take their money.
A friend of mine was sexually attacked by a guy. The guy was convicted and ordered to pay a fine. He refused. The court ordered his safe deposit box opened, and they took the money.
And that's a good thing.
> when you don’t actually follow the technology
The technology doesn't matter, if problems are misidentified.
2. Bud, if we go tell every cryptocurrency enthusiast that they'll be allowed to invest in it now and get a return on investment in 80+ years[1], crypto will be dead within 24 hours.
[1] The first experimental fusion reactor was tested in 1958 and at the rate they're going, 2038 seems like a reasonable date for the first commercial fusion reactor.
Granted, early timelines from Vitalik and others were way off base initially. The planning fallacy is a thing, and we shouldn't expect a 21 year old to accurately predict the timing of a very complex network migration. Hanlon's razor suggests that bad estimates are usually just bad estimates, not some kind of scam.
Both the original article and the response are reasonable, which is rare in this discussion. There's actual substance, rather than lazy binary conclusions.
At no point did I say "this is a lie".
You can disagree with my factual rebuttal of the response, but you are also factually incorrect that I was doing some sort of shitposting.
My god, I hadn't even considered that, but they're right, there's currently n established blockchain the requires permission to send anything. That's fine with money, but with NFTs that actually represent something that could be a serious risk.
There are also countries where you don't want to let the police know you own crypto because of laws against alternative currencies.
Real world comparisons don't really work well with public blockchains.
Does our legal structure support immediately transferring it to a null wallet as a disclaimer of ownership? Bob doesn't want to be the one to make that case law. Nor does he want to hand over his private key, or clean his wallet out of everything but the evil image and then hand over his private key.
Basically there are no good options, although burning the offending data by sending it to /dev/null should emerge as a valid defense. Will it?
With post mail I'd imagine that scenario is somewhat timing-critical, whereas I'm not sure how feasible it is to delete things if they are in the blockchain (consensus for deletion? How does that work?) and the police seize all the computers in your house.
A ransomware operator could send the loot from an operation, channelled through a well publicized address, to someone they don't like which makes their account undistinguishable from that of a fence as seen by blockchain analytics firms maintaining the blacklists of addresses legit players do not task to. Or they could blackmail someone by threatening to burn their account by sending tainted funds.
Politicians could be sent unwanted donations to dirty their reputation by making it looked they're supported by the wrong people.
...
It's not that this isn't a problem with cryptocurrencies, it's just that it's a problem that already exists in the real world.
This is also why using public blockchains for storing personal information is such a stupid idea, illegal even if the GDPR is involved in any way. Blockchains are designed so no information can be altered or redacted, and that's often an overlooked problem.
Someone malicious could definitely send a collection of child porn through the mail and report you the second it arrives. If they can time it right, you could definitely be in trouble and the police would likely take all of your digital storage and search for more. It's a lot harder to do such things anonymously in the real world, where security cameras and physical mail boxes are a thing, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone would actually pull off something awful like this.
Of course, the police probably won't arrest you if you immediately report the illegal contents and hand over the evidence (or destroy the evidence without involving the police), but that's not as easy with the blockchain. Transferring the NFT out of your account would likely involve paying some kind of transfer fee (ethereum gas is quite expensive) and the police aren't going to pay that for you. You won't be finding or suing the sender of the child porn either, because this stuff isn't hard to do anonymously. Even if you do manage to transfer the illegal content out of your wallet, the blockchain will forever keep a public record of the content you once owned, so even if you do everything right the accusation of paedophilia will forever be easy to make.
No way I can take someone seriously if they think Axie Infinity is saving the Philippines/Vietnam from poverty.
Edit:
Crypto maximalists don’t understand history, economics, or globalism. All while claiming that crypto will solve for globalised economies and save people from poverty.
Do they know why these countries are poor? Do they understand colonialism and modern slave labor? Or that colonising countries dictate the global economy and devalue developing world currencies? And that these countries are poor by design, and their weakened economic status is a result of colonial history?
How does a “Play 2 Earn” game that is provably negative sum by making money from fees - where the poor ”scholars” have to rent tokens from the rich “lords” and share 30% of their income with, help the poor come out of poverty?
This is crypto colonialism for crying out loud!
But I also don't agree with your characterization of developing nation economies. You have your own blinders on. The degrees of freedom a developing country has are constrained ... but not mainly by outside market forces ... more their own internal institutional structures.
India was isolated from all Western banking for the main part for a long time. Also insulated from competition from Western companies. That was not a good time for India. Turns out your own institutions can fuck up pretty well on their own. Openness and liberalization of an economy also come with complications but these are not "slave labor" and "colonization". I feel you have been exposed to some ideologies but have not actually tried to manufacture something in a developing country and seen the friction that prevents local economies from leveling up ... its not the EU or America stopping Indian manufacturing from leveling up ... its India's own internal complexities.
If it was possible to do what you suggest, Taiwan, South Korea, and now Chinese advanced manufacturing would not exist. Countries just need to get their act together.
There is an inherent arbitrage performed by developed economies through outsourcing, and Axie Infinity demonstrates that wonderfully. Obviously the story would never be “GameFi solves poverty in the USA” because it pays well below minimum wage in developed economies.
Aside: There is no basis in humanity that foreign currencies are significantly lower in value than western currencies. It’s purely a result of historical economical forces resulting from colonisation.
Many of the 'internal' problems in developing nations root in historical colonialism.
Yup, that's quite a zinger there.
Seriously, what is with these people? Do they have any idea at all what they're actually saying?
The US was a colony to the UK. Singapore was some shanty island town that even Malaysia did NOT want to take in because how bad it was.
Just like you cannot have a fit body without exercising, you cannot become a prosperous nation without hard work and a predictable rule-of-law. There is no way around it and to blame "colonialism" is nothing but empty words that will help no one.
Yes, and by that view, the USA is /still/ colonised by Europeans. The colonised Natives are not represented in any meaningful way.
> Singapore was some shanty island town that even Malaysia did NOT want to take in because how bad it was.
You can feel this way, but that does not justify the colonisation of Singapore by Europe. In fact, it begs the question as to why they would colonise such a “shanty town” if it wasn’t worth something to them.
> cannot become a prosperous nation without hard work
I’m not sure which fantasy you ascribe to that ignores how much hard manual labor the developing world’s people perform for the global economy. In fact, that is literally the basis of colonialism - to find able-bodied workers to enslave and resource-abundant regions to extract value from.
> and a predictable rule-of-law
I don’t know why you have such a negative impression of developing lands, to blame them for all their faults and claim they lack “rule of law” entirely. As if this is perfect in developed democracies, and the sole reason for their status.
> to blame "colonialism" is nothing but empty words that will help no one.
It is important to acknowledge history and not completely ignore it like you have. Regardless, you are right in that “blaming colonialism” helps no one - but that’s because colonisers don’t want to take the blame and fix things, but instead control the global playing field. This affects the poor classes of developing countries too, if you haven’t noticed.
Anyways, I get the feeling none of this will educate you, so probably not worth my time.
The reason for OpenSea et al. providing centralized services isn't accidental--it's not that it's "early days"--but that whenever there's an opportunity to innovate, those innovations will first appear for centralized services.
If we hope for distributed solutions to be on par with centralized, we are in effect hoping for an inefficient market, or one without innovation (giving distributed services time to catch up).
This criticism, in a way, has little to do with "Web3" at all. Instead, it's justification for the alternative solution Moxie has been working toward: one where crypto(graphy, not currency) allows the cost and feature advantages of centralization while preserving (or in fact exceeding) the user privacy of distributed solutions.
(I have some criticisms of Moxie's vision, but the author seems not to engage with the argument's real substance.)
In the Firefox OS days here at Mozilla, I was a huge believer and advocate for our desire to push web protocols & standards into mobile. But as it turns out, proprietary walled-garden mobile platforms move faster than web standards - who knew?!
But, I like the phrase you used - "hoping for an inefficient market". At this point in my tech career and looking around at what the tech market is doing in the world, I think slowing down and getting less efficient might be good for us?
Distributed crypto offerings do not lag much behind in terms of features, but they are costly and inefficient, which drives most users to centralized solutions.
This creates positive network effects for OpenSea (nft), Binance, Coinbase (crypto trading).
L2 / zk-rollups / validiums have potential to change this balance of power by introducing low-cost, fast transactions.
Which can be achieved by making transaction execution/verification faster through ZK proofs and offloading execution off-chain (without sacrificing security). There is intense competition in the space (zkSync, Polygon Hermez, Starkware, Loopring and others).
Some large players like banks or BaaS companies may create or license their own private rollups.
So far most wallets do not support L2 rollups, I've only heard of Argent supporting zkSync.
This is of course a hybrid solution, not for purists.
Blockchain critics will have fun criticizing it for the next 5 years while it scales. :)
I’m not at all an expert, but I’ve been wondering if a world where we all regularly use Bitcoin, but only via large, centralized L2 networks, would be one which feels exactly like the world of today, except (say) Visa or Stripe use Bitcoin instead of…fedwire? I dunno?…for clearance. And as a user, would that actually benefit me?
This isn't really true, though. Even in the example he gave, NFT royalties, they appeared first in individual NFT contracts before they were on OpenSea.
I'm curious about this point; if the only thing stored on the chain is a URL (including Drive/Imgur) then there's no possible way to actually preclude the content from changing right?
It actually does seem very weird that people aren't at least putting a #sha1= in the NFT URL to be able to verifiably know if the underlying content did change.
When you use something like IPFS the url is created from a hash of the file contents, so it is not possible to change the file without creating a new url.
I’ve inspected NFT contracts and saw they were designed wrong with a direct link to a website that could go down
And I still minted or bought them because the community or game was interesting
I’ve also seen extremely clever completely onchain nfts. I like those.
Indeed that would seem to be the point of the entire exercise!
~ every cryptocurrency/blockchain/web3 article ever written
But, a lot of us are pretty jaded by “blockchain is a game changer” with no tangible evidence beyond BTC as a highly unstable store of value and claims of some great future state.
Bitcoin is not a store of value, and never was. A highly volatile asset, specially one whose market price halves overnight without much surprise, does not serve the purpose of a store of value.
I mean, this week alone Bitcoin dropped around 10%, and around 25% during the past month. This is not value being stored. If an asset manager lost 25% of it's wallet in a month they'd be out of a job.
This is not true. An NFT that follows the ERC721 contract standard has a `safeTransferFrom()` function that a token holder can call to initiate a transfer. You do not have to depend on OpenSea: https://etherscan.io/address/0x5754f44bC96F9F0Fe1a568253452a...
You can also use an alternative NFT swapping protocol, such as the ZeroX-backed Trader.xyz: https://trader.xyz/ (fully open source) to initiate a swap.
Decentralized exchanges for fungible assets already exist and work extremely well (and I prefer to centralized exchanges whenever possible), such as Uniswap (https://app.uniswap.org/#/swap), Curve (https://curve.fi/), and Sushi (https://app.sushi.com/en/swap).
Decentralized exchanges for NFTs are being worked on. No one has quite nailed the full end-to-end user experience yet, but it will happen. It's inevitable.
From my understanding of the space and the original article, it seems OpenSea will not die and this is pure wishful thinking.
Might not happen, but as of now it definitely could.
Ok, maybe, but that would mean they would be simply replaced by more of the same. It would not mean a return to a decentralized system.
https://twitter.com/thesmarmybum/status/1478505321433735169?...
Ahahaha. No.
More seriously: if "everyone" pays it means there will be a few who are going to reap all the profits. Glorious future, indeed
No thanks. Don't chain on me.
No they're not.
I co-founded Fabrica.land in 2017, and in mid 2018 we used an NFT to perform a real estate transaction. That's already 3.5 years, and NFTs were already around. The first transaction was a bit "rough", but perfectly valid. Lot of progress since then.
From [0]: The ERC-20 (Ethereum Request for Comments 20), proposed by Fabian Vogelsteller in November 2015, is a Token Standard that implements an API for tokens within Smart Contracts.
Note: yes, ERC-20 has a few flaws [1], and subsequent ERC have improved on it.
[0]: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/standards/tokens/erc...
But yes, it's true that NFTs are older than 3 years old. I thought that was an odd statement.
Useful recent discussion here [0].
[0]: https://levelup.gitconnected.com/which-one-to-choose-erc-20-...
Moxie spoke about how web3 currently works. Not about the hundreds of proposed solutions. And no, proposals don’t “solve” anything, until they’re actually implemented and tested.
To their credit, the author of the rebuttal acknowledges that the Opensea type approaches are problematic, but misses the greater argument around why they're popular and why trying to replace them with something "better" will be difficult.
Nope - do your research better before you use the word "lie". BAYC did it until very very recently for instance. Definitely as of 27th September they were using cloud functions as you can clearly see in my gist here: https://gist.github.com/JofArnold/bf2c4a094fcdd4aee2f52983c7... I know there is/was plenty of others too because I looked deeply into this around the time.
[1] https://etherscan.io/address/0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061c2e118...
I don't think the fact they are now using IPFS makes it any more credible either; IPFS is not a new thing and the valuations were huge already by September. They should have done it from the start. Furthermore that they can mess around with the base URL is not cool.
* Although thanks for posting that as without that fact I admit my story was incomplete.
Half of Moxie's post were using the evil YC company OpenSea as an argument against decentralization, which seemed strange. It's like arguing against decentralized email because so many use Gmail.
The arguments against Infura etc. especially fell flat, as they are just proxies to the decentalized blockchain, the only value they provide is providing exactly the same decentralized blockchain data as your own node would. It's not as decentralized as running your own node would be, but to call it centralization is still wrong.
If 90% of wallets utilize the OpenSea API what the blockchain says doesn't really matter anymore. OpenSea is effectively the new source of truth.
Which Moxie does often do, including in the web3 article.
I respect Moxie's opinion on (de)centralization, but I just have different priorities to him. I am personally more concerned about one company (Facebook or Signal, although I do use the latter) owning and controlling access to a platform than I am about perfect end-to-end encryption and forward secrecy.
Hands up if you see the flaw here.
It doesn't seem that hard to state relatively quickly and simply:
Current ways of handling data online generally result in large centralized databases under the control of relatively or extremely large corporations, which gives these corporations too much control over (a) what data is accessible (b) what can be done with the data (c) the lifetime of the data.
Sensible folks generally acknowledge that this either is a problem, or is likely to become one.
So the central issue is: how do we have data available online without it under the control of corporations that run centralized databases?
----
In response to this, cryptocurrency advocates point to blockchain technology and say, in essence, "look! there's an example of a technology that does exactly that"
However, for this to be the best solution to the problem requires a few things to be true that are either untrue or not known (yet) to be true.
* was blockchain designed to handle arbitrary data blobs, or was it designed to handle transaction records?
* does pretending that any arbitrary data blob can be treated as a transaction record help or hinder solutions?
* are there other ways to distribute data storage and access that don't depend on the fundamental technologies/concepts inherent in blockchains?
Why anyone feels they can be certain that the answers all indicate that blockchain is the obviously correct technology to use for distributed trusted data storage and access totally escapes me.
But I'll take it a step further than 'Blockchain is not the answer' and indicate that Web3 itself probably isn't an answer to that much in the first place.
"this either is a problem, or is likely to become one."
Web 1/2 approaches have tremendous advantages.
As the original article stated - people don't want to run servers.
People don't want to manage confusing things.
We want everything mostly SaaS.
Some of those push a bit too far, like Apple locking you out of your Mac - but this is probably best dealt with with legislation.
The privacy and control benefits of self hosting are limited to mostly niche use cases, and of course, blockchains have problems, as you mention.
Web 2 is just a few bits of legislation, a few rational consumer choices, and a few fewer crappy companies away from being fairly ideal.
Don't use iCloud, avoid Google for anything other than search, don't 'depend' on Facebook or Twitter and already you're doing well.
Dialogue and experiments are great, but NFT/Crypto so far is just a lot of MLM noise.
For the verses of the song I would suggest lines such as:
“The proposed solutions solve this”
“But this is not always true, you can”
“We are actively building alternatives!”
https://hicetnunc.art is an active alternative to opensea, and the gas fees on tezos are far smaller (pennies)
Whats the downside?
https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/01/06/polygon-under-accid...
They don't seem to really be solving the scalability issues, but rather just kicking them down the road, at which point yet another blockchain will pop up to "solve" the issue.
As for dipping your toes, I'd say it's maybe the hardest area of coding to do that in. Generally I find the documentation is lacking, everything is moving really quickly, there's a huge amount of jargon, and there's a huge number of protocols and standards to read about, with very little authority on what is worth spending time on.
I have a collection of comments in my side projects where I've discovered various surprising things about how blockchain stuff works. Others I know have similar pages of notes on how particular things in the space are arranged.
Moxie captures why this is so: there's a gold rush, and appearances seem to matter more than substance.
Seems like the author has never build an app before. There nothing easy even with the current tech. It's much harder with the tech they mentioned.
Even with that, there's a centralized system anywhere. Liek Arweave's DNS system etc.
This is such a he said she said. Can we get some stats on this? Are NFTs primarily stored on the chain or linked to a URL? I'd like to see the breakdown by platform, Opensea, etc.
Why can’t I have a like universal wallet? I don’t want my NFTs divided among 4-5 wallets, especially as new chains are created as time goes on. Kinda a sucky user experience.
That’s my nit
Images are not stored in a wallet. NFTs and ERC20s do not actually live in a Ethereum wallet. They live in a smart contract. And that smart contract has a ledger of account for who has the right to transfer that particular asset.
The images themselves, unless they are SVGs, are typically stored on Filecoin or Arweave or a centralized server and marked by an IPFS hash.
Content moderation is handled by the data storers in those networks: https://www.arweave.org/technology#content-moderation
Spam NFTs are just like spam email. The receipt of something illicit or illegal does not mean automatic imprisonment anywhere that I'm aware of. If you live in such a jurisdiction, I suggest you flee immediately.
NFTs don't all have to be maximally decentralized. It should be perfectly okay that some NFTs are not on-chain, purely immutable artwork. Besides the extreme constraints that places on the art (given that data storage on a blockchain not purpose-built for storage is expensive), there are some advantages to having mutable NFTs.
You can create evolving NFTs by making them mutable. Users can upgrade their skins (such as adding a Santa hat during Christmas). The NFTs could respond to real-world events (maybe the weather or the outcome of a sporting event influences the artwork). You can use them as game characters that level up in response to playtime, presumably the artwork for the character would change as the character levels up, etc.
It's very difficult to do the above in an immutable, pure fashion, without thinking of all the possibilities beforehand. It's okay that just the mere ownership transfer mechanic is decentralized. Yes, a project could theoretically rug its users and change the art to a poop emoji, but in practice projects develop a reputation over time and those that foster goodwill stand to gain more from community loyalty than they'd gain from pulling B.S.
Even in the case that a project were to rug its community, however, it's entirely possible for the community to create a new smart contract that "wraps" the NFT as a new NFT (you deposit an NFT from a particular collection, and get back a new NFT and the old NFT is burned). And if enough members of a community rallied around the wrapped version, then it could be treated as a consensus fork.
Escape hatches are one of the features that distinguish Web3 from Web2.
Sadly it's all about money re/distribution, even if all try to dress it in all kind of masks on top..
With a wallet substituting my Identity (or trust, or whatever else that is not money).. it's no different to any other substitution - email, belonging to a club (FAANG+oauth), whatever. Except more involving..
I suppose for some, enhanced control and privacy of full decentralization has value, but it's a very niche scenario.
Web 1 brought us the internet. It's already decentralized, and it changed everything.
Web 3 enabled us to interact a lot more with user-generated content. FB, YouTube. Nice, but it has some downsides.
Web 3 ... so far mostly Crypto and NFTs have some possibly interesting characteristics but are mostly giant pyramid/MLM style scams.
Web 3, so far, is a lot of hot air and a mostly hollow effort, it's like Tech Buzfeed. We should be doing better than this.
And the solution to this is using unstable internet money which are being accepted by a handful of stores? Sounds about right.