[kristofferR]

The discussion here used to be way more thoughtful, it's only been bad the last year or so.

I think the degradation of crypto discourse here was mostly a knee-jerk reaction to NFTs. "NFTs are stupid, so all crypto is stupid, because NFTs are crypto" - that was likely the thought process behind all the toxicity seen here.

[rawtxapp]

I would disagree, in my experience HN has been pretty anti-crypto for a long time, starting with Bitcoin's announcement thread [1].

Personally, I think people are just tired, as a proponent I'm tired of arguing the same stuff over and over again, I can imagine the other side of that too. At this point, time will decide who's right and wrong, I think that what anyone of us thinks doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852

[simias]

Yeah I'm an opponent and I feel the same. The talking points have been exhausted half a decade ago. On top of that as cryptocurrencies get more and more mainstream we have to deal with less sophisticated people who make it very hard to have a decent discussion in the first place, because you basically have to start by taking 20 minutes to explain to them what the basics even are.

NFTs are really pushing this situation to the extreme. Between the NFT enthusiast who seem to think the technology is literal magic who can do anything you want it to and "haters" who will say stuff like "NFTs are just URLs of JPEG" which is absurd oversimplification and completely misses the point.

That being said I would argue that the fact that the discussion is not advancing and that we're left with "monkey jpegs" is to be blamed entirely on the cryptopeople who clearly fail entirely to deliver anything new. The killer "crypto app" has been a couple of years away since 2015 at least. The tech keeps getting more complicated as an attempt to address the fundamentals shortcomings of the blockchain, but it still fails entirely at being anything more than a vehicle for wild speculation.

The fundamental reality is that basically nobody would be using any of this if they didn't think it was going to make them rich. That was true five years ago, it's true now and I think it's going to remain true for the foreseeable future.

[iskander]

I'll try to engage without pulling us into familiar debates.

I have found, in a year of intensive use and research around the Ethereum ecosystem, here are a few things I like that wouldn't really work without an underlying immutable distributed ledger:

1) Creating limited editions of generative art.

2) "Forever" art like on-chain pixel and ASCII art.

3) Frankenstein-like adaptations of traditional fintech constructs into a decentralized implementation, such as AMMs.

Also, the more I learn about the zk-rollup space (STARKs and SNARKs) the more curious I get about the possibilities there. You can, for example, have digital treasure hunts where whoever finds the treasure can generate a proof without revealing the location. So far this is just cool without having an obvious killer app, but more than anything else in the crypto space I think there will be killer apps emerging from this technology.

By volume, I agree with critics that it's mostly bubble-chasing, gambling, and scams. It might be healthier for everyone if the tech & art experimentation were walled off from investments. At the very least, we probably shouldn't have crypto exchanges advertising -- really nothing interesting comes from luring Main Street to buy and store Doge on a centralized exchange.

[8note]

I don't know what the third one entails, or whether a distributed ledger actually enables it without also having a centralized legal entity, but the other two seem like they already exist without a distributed ledger.

The limited edition art is really just tracking receipts - you can do that over email if you want and it really doesn't have to be public. Non digital art does fine with private receipt tracking. You can also have a dedicated database that charges art owners a maintenance fee, and tracks who the current owner of each art piece. Basically free tier AWS.

For 2) forever art already existed without any ledger. People store copies of pictures they like because they feel like it. Not being on a ledger doesn't mean Nyan cat will disappear. The ledger might attempt to guarantee that unpopular works stay available, but I don't think you can guarantee that any particular ledger will continue to be active "forever".

They could do a hard fork that prunes out the unpopular art to save on space, and migrate everyone to that one, leaving the old one unhosted. Long term, you're not going to force people to keep spending resources to maintain stuff that nobody cares about

[iskander]

>The limited edition art is really just tracking receipts - you can do that over email if you want and it really doesn't have to be public. Non digital art does fine with private receipt tracking. You can also have a dedicated database that charges art owners a maintenance fee, and tracks who the current owner of each art piece. Basically free tier AWS.

I think this is a misunderstanding of what happens when a collection is created through a platform like Art Blocks. The generative code is frozen on chain, every minted image has a verifiably random initial seed, and each image is generated from the composition of these two elements. The number of random seeds which can occupy an "official" slot is preconfigured and cannot be later increased.

I promise you that this has significant impact on the feeling of working on generative art and what you think of as the final outcome of an art project. It cannot be replicated through some kind of ad-hoc receipt system that lacks algorithmic guarantees and is subject to modification or increase at any later point.

[simias]

>1) Creating limited editions of generative art.

I personally think that it's not really an interesting feature. Creating scarcity out of something that ought not to be scarce is just a way to infiltrate capitalism in every aspect of our lives. Hacker culture historically went completely against that (phreaking, breaking DRM etc...) but I concede that it's more of a philosophical/political argument than a technical one. I still find it utterly depressing.

I would also argue that there's usually a significant difference between ownership of a token on the blockchain and what the local IP laws says. IP law is messy and sometimes subjective, putting things on a blockchain can make things messier rather than simpler.

>2) "Forever" art like on-chain pixel and ASCII art.

So that one is interesting, but I would argue that it's only true if you consider that the blockchain is "forever". In order for that to be true it means that you have to believe that your blockchain of choice will be considered significant enough by a number of people across... well eternity really. This could be true for the "big" ones like Bitcoin and Ethereum, although I'd say the scene is way too young to be sure of that. It's as good a bet as any I suppose.

But here's the thing. We already have "forever" digital "art": the source code of the Linux kernel. There are countless copies of it across the globe, and it'll remain archived for the foreseeable future.

My point here is that if something is significant enough it won't be difficult to convince a bunch of people across time and space to archive it. People do that for old videogames, music albums, usenet posts etc... And unlike the blockchain you can actually curate it, you don't have to archive the neighbor's sandwich picture collection. I'd argue that this curation power is a feature, and the fact that the blockchain just stores everything forever is a bug. It actually means that the bigger the blockchain grows, the less likely it is that people will want to store personal backups of it.

So I don't think the blockchain does anything novel here, and I don't think it does it better. Forcing arbitrary people to store arbitrary data forever regardless of value or interest is just wasteful.

>3) Frankenstein-like adaptations of traditional fintech constructs into a decentralized implementation, such as AMMs.

I think the oracle problem is really going to make "DeFi" a tough sell. There is, in fact, a lot of trust in our financial system, and being able to use a central authority (the justice system) to settle issues makes things a whole lot simpler and efficient.

In general I firmly believe that trust is usually a good thing that makes systems more efficient and this obstination of cryptopeople to get rid of it is more based on political ideology than pragmatism. Trust, but verify. But trust.

[scyclow]

With respect to point 1, I'm sympathetic to your response, but I don't see things quite as bleakly for a few reasons:

- NFTs create a scarcity of ownership, but they don't create a scarcity of enjoyment or experience. In fact, the entire NFT generative art community is based around the idea of viewing and enjoying pieces that you don't personally own.

- I don't think scarcity of ownership is necessarily a bad thing. Having put some skin in the game for that specific piece, the owner sort of becomes that piece's biggest advocate. And this allows many collectors to form a much stronger relationship to the piece than they would have if they saved a copy of an image they found on instagram.

- A generative algorithm can theoretically produce an infinite number of outputs, and I think there are valid artistic reasons to want to limit the set to a specific size. For example, maybe the algorithm no longer produces unique results after 500 or so iterations, and the artist wants to cap the collection at that size to allow people to become familiar with that amount of outputs. Managing this with NFTs allows the artist to create a canonical collection limited to the desired size along with the proof that they all derive from the same algorithm.

- Blockchains are still fairly new as an artistic medium, and I think many artists will find ways to create interesting projects without leaning as much on scarcity. Some projects do open editions, which we may see more of in the future. Scarcity is simply a tool at the artist's disposal.

(Disclaimer: I'm an artist who makes a lot of generative NFTs, so I'm heavily biased)

[8note]

if youre not extracting a profit from people enjoying the art, why are you advocating for it? what is your skin in the game? if youre only advocating it to get rid of it by selling it, i dont think thats a genuine advocacy for the piece.

im unclear that this scarcity is different from making a wordpress site with n posts, each one being a picture generated with the different parameters.

i think the website version is better, even, since you as the artist can pick out the best individual items when producing the single art work that is "n pieces generated by this algorithm"

i dont think it really unlocks anything new. Whats different is having tooling that makes it easy to do

[iskander]

Re: #3, there isn't really a meaningful oracle problem now that there are reliable oracles.

You can make synthetic assets which track prices of e.g. stocks. There are a few different protocols in this space, such as https://synthetix.io/. The biggest hurdle, I think, is regulatory -- is it legal to make and trade derivatives of $synthIBM and trade it like derivatives of $IBM?

[iskander]

Re: limited editions, I'm not talking about monetization. As someone currently working on a big generative art collaboration, I think knowing that the output will have a finite set that is considered canonical is an essential artistic constraint.

[fleddr]

I would consider myself an informed skeptic that is selectively pro-crypto.

I would first clear the air by saying this: yes, making money is an important use case of the current crypto industry, if not THE use case. I find it puzzling how people frown upon that. Making money (or at least getting paid) is the number one activity the average person spends a lifetime doing. Many in bullshit jobs that add no value.

You can have all kinds of opinions on how this money is made (speculative), but the crypto community doesn't care. It's their money, not yours. I would personally not touch 95% of crypto with my money, but take no issue with people that go all-in. Live and let live.

As for NFTs, it's funny how you say some discussion participants simplify it too much (just right-click) and then come to sweeping simplistic conclusions yourself: bored apes and crypto people failing to deliver anything new.

This suggests you're keeping track. If so, can you tell me about recent trading volume? The top 10 projects? Which celebrities, artists, musicians and sport teams released popular ones? On which platform? Which are hot upcoming releases? Out of the many issues with NFTs (no infinite storage, copyright acknowledgement, mint duping, etc), which teams are working to address these issues, and what are the solutions? Do you know which non-JPEG NFTs got traction, like unique physical access and lifelong memberships? Which gaming companies are experimenting with NFTs, and I'm talking AAA titles?

I could make that list a whole lot longer. I suspect you don't know the answers, but that's not a personal attack. The point is that the space is vast and extremely fast. This idea that nothing has happened in crypto in 10 years is because you're not looking.

The discussion is not advancing because people don't spent a second learning about crypto or keeping track.

[8note]

All an NFT is at heart a JSON blob like

{ Id: some unique namespaced string (aka, the part that is a non fungible token) Owner: reference to who currently owns it Payload: data that defines the content of the NFT }

You can put this in a database if you want, or use a block chain as your data storage. I expect many of those teams you mentioned are solving their NFT issues by moving their NFTs from block chains onto postgres tables, or putting them in databases from the start. The listed problems have somewhat straightforward solutions by doing so, and many companies have offered NFT marketplaces based on databases for years and years like the Steam marketplace for gaming. They work fine at scale, too. I expect that most popular digital ownership systems do not use a block chain as their back end, though I do not know what the top 10 are {apple, amazon, google, the us government?}. The most advanced team solving the listed problems is without doubt YouTube though.

What block chain NFTs have over database NFTs is hype. There's a lot of wealthy people with money tied up in crypto investments that want to be able to.

The other feature is that the audit history of changes to the Owner field is guaranteed to be public instead of optionally public, and that guarantee is what of questionable value when "crypto people don't deliver anything new" is mentioned.

----

If somebody's managed to make solve identity using a block chain that's quite interesting re: "unique physical access".

I'd expect the block chain to be uniquely incapable of guaranteeing unique access to anything, since access is based on knowing a password, and it's easy to make copies of a password. At best id expect a blockchain to guarantee limited access to people who know one at least one of a set of possible passwords, and a bouncer controls unique access by doing a separate identity checks.

Is this some facial scan? Dna +epigenetics check? Is it trivial to link all your accounts together? What kinds of attacks has it been tested against? Can your twin get in if he knows the right password and borrows your id? Can your spouse get in if you're in the hospital? Next of kin when you die?

[iskander]

Is there a non-blockchain equivalent of gated access to resources based on ownership of a token? People do this a lot in the NFT space (access to certain chat channels based on owning an NFT), is anything like that happening (rather than theoretically possible) outside of crypto?

[mmerlin]

How about anything with a membership fee?

The token is the mag-key-card that opens the doors to your local gymnasium.

Or a database entry that gets checked when you show your personal ID to get into the flight club lounge you bought lifetime access to via Amex club

Or any kind of website or info-product you bought a membership for, where the token is your email address + password

etc.

[lhl]

Over the past few years, my personal experience/perception is there's been less and less people with a technical grounding in crypto/blockchain who bother to engage on HN (on CT, it's often dismissively referenced as "the orange site") because not only is there such a strong anti-crypto attitude, but usually it's based on pretty shallow or often wrong comprehension of the tech/mechanisms.

I agree that it's pretty pointless to argue though. Even when blatant misinformation gets cleared up, or clear examples of how the tech is actually being used are outlined, most of the conversations then end up at "well, I don't see the value of it so it still must be useless." ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[BoorishBears]

Hasn't time already proven the skeptics right?

The biggest sources of skeptism were around logistics and value as a currency:

Is there a cryptocoin that has successfully solved logistics without disastrously failing as a currency?

Even if you ignore the environmental aspect... has any coin that has achieved scale not experienced deflation that would make the Great Depression look like a hiccup?

To me the skepticism has always been "you can't have a functional decentralized currency". Some people take that at face value and proudly proclaim "people will accept your BTC/ETH/etc."

But most people mean it in the sense we think of currencies belonging to non-failed states: aka being a somewhat stable store of value. More widely used for payment of productive economic output than fraud and speculation...

-

I see crypto as I see Tesla, maybe there way a point but it's long buried under the mania.

Disclaimer: Due to that mania I keep some as hedge, but again, imagine saying I keep dollars under my pillow as a hedge that next year they might have 10x'd in value...

[rawtxapp]

Has it?

Bitcoin is bigger than ever before. It's far more valuable, it has far more users, processes hundreds of thousands of transactions moving billions of dollars worth of value every day on-chain alone, has very healthy L2 layer growth (1ml.com), has hundreds of exchanges worldwide, it ticks every 10 minutes and will keep ticking for the foreseeable future. We have a small country that adopted it as a legal tender with more countries coming on the Bitcoin standard potentially this year.

People only see the fiat currencies and forget that we've run on gold standard for thousands of years and fiat currencies are barely 50 years old and riddled with financial crises left and right. Bitcoin is digital gold, strictly better than gold. But anyways, we'll see what happens in the future.

[8note]

Strictly better than gold is not true.

Gold can be traded without leaving an audit trail, and without a per transaction cost.

[mhmmmmmm]

You still have transaction costs in the form of transport costs to get the gold to your personal location.

[rawtxapp]

Yep, and obviously any kind of transportation like that will be tracked and easily traced, with exact weights and sizes.

By hopping on the lightning network, you're essentially anonymizing your payments as well as making them practically free.

[BoorishBears]

Does that answer anything I brought up?

You know, the whole "relatively stable store of value paying for productive output rather than speculation and fraud?"

We moved off the gold standard for a reason (and it's not all geopolitics...)

[miracle2k]

Bitcoin's volatility is not because of the fixed supply. If nothing else, new Bitcoins are still being issued. It is of course true that inflation encourages spending etc., but the difference between -2% and 2% does not cause 50% daily price movements.

Bitcoin cannot be stable relative to other currencies as long as 90% of its forex volume is speculation. If there are businesses having long-term obligations and trade denominated in Bitcoin, providing for a large base of regular demand and supply that outweighs the speculation, it will stabilise.

This is obviously really really though to achieve, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the "tech" (which is essentially a spreadsheet). This makes the debate around the volatility and whether its qualifies as a "currency" rather boring. It will happen, or it won't, and we can try to predict the future, but it is not really about Bitcoin at all, just marketplace behavior.

[BoorishBears]

Where did I say Bitcoin's volatility is because of fixed supply.

Or even remotely imply it.

-

Once again the reply doesn't actually answer the basic question, because the answer is inconvenient.

I'd love one honest reply to the point grounded in any crypto, not even Bitcoin, being a "relatively stable store of value paying for productive output rather than speculation and fraud?"

Relatively stable being defined extremely generously in this context might I add! I won't hit you with a "gotcha!" because your coin of choice is widely used to pay for goods rather than fraud and speculation but it happened to fluctuate 10% or something, USD does that too...