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by muglug 1612 days ago
> But what it misses is a vibrant ecosystem of experimentation that is happening with NFTs below the easily visible surface

You could argue there was a vibrant ecosystem in the dotcom space in 2000 as well, but ultimately that vibrant ecosystem was only able to exist because so much money was being pumped into the space. I don't think "some people are doing cool things" is a protection when the most visible people are doing things that seem, to me, at least a little dodgy.
1 comments
andrewxhill 1612 days ago
Why stop at 2000 though? The internet is still full of terrible things today, many of which are the most visible, and most of which are happening because, money.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU

Terrible things on the internet don't make all things built on the internet guilty by association. Just like scammers and grifters finding opportunities in web3 don't make all NFTs bad ideas.

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muglug 1612 days ago
> Terrible things on the internet don't make all things built on the internet guilty by association.

OK, but it's not like TCP requires fantastically large amounts of energy for each request. While I'm sure there are particular companies working on a solution for those problems, I've seen enough of the cryptocurrency world to understand that the big players won't shift their money into theoretical environmentally-sound currencies, because they simply don't care about global warming as long as they can be very rich.

The thing I keep coming back to is that blockchain databases don't allow me to do anything, as a developer, that I couldn't do with traditional databases and with much less power consumption. People have been buying in-game digital good for decades without needing the blockchain. Services like Venmo and Paypal make it easy to send (small amounts of) money across continents in an instant.

Blockchain databases are fundamentally unnecessary to the average person.

Edit: and it occurs to me that this is the main reason these technologies get such short shrift on HN: to most of us they seem like solutions in search of problems, and sometimes even just solutions in search of money.

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