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I'm not impressed with the crypto crowd. I've read too many "white papers" full of bullshit. In the newer rounds, most of the creativity is applied to escaping fraud charges. If the DAO controlled by the governance token controls the payments to the people behind the scheme, and they give up control of the governance token, then those people are just subcontractors of the DAO. So they're not responsible for fraud losses, right? All you really need to secure a blockchain is a number of parties who are not likely to collude. The original idea was huge numbers of miners using spare CPU time. There's a famous picture of the top 5 Bitcoin mine owners in China, who together had well over 51% of the hash power, all on the same stage, talking about what they, as a group, intended to do. That was not the plan. The "smart contract" system was botched. Smart contracts should have been something like decision tables, which can be checked exhaustively. But no, they had to put in a bytecode interpreter, become Turing complete, and dig themselves into an expensively bug-ridden hole. Incidentally, I suspect that the SEC's hammer is about to come down on the "metaverse" NFT people. Back in 2018, the SEC brought the hammer down on the ICO people, by prosecuting the worst of the worst and sending the rest of them letters saying "please explain to them why this isn't a security offering". Suddenly most of the ICOs disappeared. What we're seeing now are schemes where people are selling NFTs which represent virtual land in virtual worlds not yet built. I've seen three of those in the last week. That's a security offering under the Howey test. If you sell an NFT for something that already exists, that's one thing. If you use NFT sales to fund the creation of something, you're selling shares in a common enterprise run by someone else. That's a security. This metaverse stuff irks me because I'm into virtual world technology, and the make-money-fast crowd is giving metaverses a bad name by not actually building good virtual worlds. (Go visit Decentraland, which, by the way, only has 200-300 concurrent users. It makes Facebook Horizon look good.)
Or, in too many case, building anything at all beyond the money-collection NFT system. |