[SirensOfTitan]

We built this really cool iOS app a couple years ago called Editional that was centered around NFTs. Anyone could create one, and they would mint so many editions, the first being the most valuable (since it’s the “original”). I still contend that we were far ahead of anyone even today: we had the ability to facilitate multi-atomic swap trades even.

…we ended up closing shop. We were paying for minting transactions behind the scenes and the market was too expensive in 2018-2019. We made a crucial error there, but we didn’t think people would be willing to pay so much for transactions.

..boy, were we wrong. I just sold a couple remnants of my old Editional wallet for a good chunk of money. I had a…hard time doing it though: transaction fees cost from a minimum of $40 and and a maximum of $160 for those smart contract transactions. Add in the fact that every provider takes a large cut: from Coinbase, to NFT marketplaces, to the 10+ dollar fees to actually complete a successful transaction.

To be honest, I was intimately involved in this space for a while, and I don’t get it anymore. We had this hypothesis that the ecosystem would scale and mature as we went, but we didn’t see much of that at all. It’s all gambling. It’s not even cool gambling: the decentralized prediction markets I was particularly excited to see never really took off.

I got interested in the space because I thought: decentralized consensus is really interesting, how important that’ll be in a world trending lower on trust; but this crypto world is so dishonest that I’ve realized that trust is integral to most effective systems.

[rchaud]

it would be really helpful to see this in a flowchart or diagram. Crypto seems unapproachable because of all the prerequisites involved. Add on to that the sheer volume of counterparties all taking a cut.

[58x14]

I wouldn't write off NFTs yet.

The many malicious actors in cryptocurrency are not representative of the many organizations and individual contributors in blockchain technology.

I think the common applications of NFTs now are entirely primitive, and I find understanding the concept of blockchain oracle networks to be hugely influential in framing my perspective of the 5-10 year landscape of IP and digital media. Lex Fridman's interview with Sergey, Chainlink founder, is exceptional, if lengthy.

A blockchain represents a public and immutable* ledger of "things that happened," and smart contracts represent agreements of "things that will happen if [conditions]." If the storage, execution and outcome of those smart contracts occurs on the same blockchain, that's a seriously powerful mechanism. Its primary limitation is that it cannot GET data from outside the blockchain, because that would compromise system integrity.

Oracle networks are simply another layer of distributed consensus. Weather is a straightforward and common example. Let's say there are a dozen entities that all operate as oracles in a weather network, and they report certain meteorological data at 24hr intervals. Should entity A report inaccurate or fraudulent data, the network would reject that and entity A would be penalized in some way. The number of oracles, or nodes, in the network is relative to the significance of value reliant on their data, so a handful of nodes is fine for early stages, and at larger scale, more nodes are incentivized to participate in data collection and validation to strengthen the system integrity.

There's a rapidly expanding body of research surrounding all of these concepts, but I find oracle networks to be the infrastructure required to begin standardization of the bridges between traditional, legacy agreements, comprised of legally binding contracts and IP / patents / copyright licensing, and smart contracts executed autonomously based on conditions and outcomes that are universally knowable and agreed upon.

With those bridges in place, we unlock a lot of efficiency by dis-intermediating the fulfillment of contractually obligated outcomes that are contingent on enforcement from a legal structure, which may not exist in developing nations. A smart contract for crop insurance that pays a claim if there is no rain in a region for a year will GET weather data from a smart contract provided by an oracle network (which already has its standards for validation published and verifiable) and simply pay out claims if those conditions are met.

A traditional insurance company might simply be bankrupt.

NFTs, conceptually and somewhere in the future, will represent a vast majority of the management of digital assets and probably many real world assets as well, because they are represented on chain. Maybe an oracle network formed of real estate title search companies offer a homeowner verification function and provide it as a zero-knowledge proof to a larger protocol that assesses some future form of creditworthiness. Maybe not in the next few years, but certainly in the next few decades, all titles, deeds, and other legal documents that represent ownership of an asset will have a primary digital representation on some sort of blockchain.

They probably won't even be called NFTs, but who cares, I'm sick of hearing about them anyway.

* there's a lot of discussion around finality but most implementations of blockchains have a strong degree of immutability

p.s. I sent Editorial an email