Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by MrAwesome 1485 days ago
I am not aware of any non-commercialized crypto anything (from my understanding, this is sorta by definition, but maybe I'm missing something). Do you have any examples?
3 comments

The Worm is a really fun one. The idea is that you transfer the worm NFT from wallet to wallet (it's "trying to visit every wallet on the Ethereum blockchain"), and it leaves a non-transferrable token wherever it's been. To my knowledge, it's been transferred about 750 times without anyone selling it. https://theworm.wtf/

Another cool one is minting amulets. You write a poem, and if the hash of that poem has an amulet in it (four or more consecutive 8s), then you can mint it as a token for your collection. But you can't mint the same hashed poem twice https://text.bargains/collection/

I also met someone once who gave me (and everyone he meets) an NFT from an RFID chip implanted in his hand. That was pretty whacky.

(RE: The Worm) First thing I thought was, what if it gets stuck? Turns out, that's already happened; the 272nd recipient had clipboard hijacking malware that changed the address they'd copied for sending it to, so the original NFT is stuck at the malware's destination address.[0] The organizers had anticipated this and used a feature in the smart contract to remove the worm from the on-blockchain image of the original NFT, as a symbolic way of invalidating it.[1] (Is this an example of "overpowered owner"?) I couldn't find anything else about the implementation, except that it's called "yoink" and that the ambition.wtf site mentions "yoink-chain Smart Contract mechanics".

[0] https://medium.com/ambition-wtf/technical-post-how-we-breach...

[1] https://medium.com/ambition-wtf/the-worm-meets-its-first-cha...

Strangely, the original NFT,[2] linked from another Medium post, now contains the worm again. But the rest of the image also differs from the screenshots in the post, so perhaps they added the worm back after starting the next iteration[3] as an acknowledgement that the original is stuck for good.

Also, I get that it's an art thing, but what is it with the...weird (IMO)...tone? I feel like I also see it elsewhere in NFT-related writing. Reminds me of lesswrong for some reason.

[2] https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xacd3cf818efe8ddce84c585...

[3] https://medium.com/ambition-wtf/the-worm-f-a-q-8f91ea386028#...

Pardon my ignorance here, but do you need to pay gas fees or buy tokens to transfer/mint?
You do. Although, the guy with the chip in his hand paid the gas for that transaction.
> I also met someone once who gave me (and everyone he meets) an NFT from an RFID chip implanted in his hand. That was pretty whacky.

What is the function of this?

Art
> I am not aware of any non-commercialized crypto anything

Say I am an amateur content creator and I set up a donations page for my fans. I have the choice between:

- Setting up PayPal/Stripe/etc. who take a percentage cut, sell my data, can freeze my funds at any time or delete my account if they don't like my content

- Putting up the address of a crypto wallet

Which one should I choose?

The crypto ethos is antithetical to that of non-commercial content creators - putting a crypto wallet address on a website is like putting a big banner saying "I'm helping legitimise an environment destroying pyramid scheme to enrich myself, and I'm probably into lots of other shady stuff too", which might be fine for venture capitalists and their like, but not non-commercial content creators. Putting a donation link to something like ko-fi.com on the other hand is a better look for that sort of site.
> The crypto ethos is antithetical to that of non-commercial content creators - putting a crypto wallet address on a website is like [...]

Yeah, so no true non-commercial content creator would use evil crypto. By the snark, I can tell you are as invested in hating crypto as some of us are invested in building it. What is your motivation?

This is a great use of crypto that (IMO) ties in directly with these movements. It's sad that 'you can join the simple web revival as long as you hate this thing we all decided to hate' seems to be a message that's pushed.
The amount of fans with a credit card and/or a paypal account will dwarf the amount of fans with a crypto wallet. This means that unless you target a very specific audience where you could expect that many of them have a crypto wallet, you will likely get a larger amount of donations if you go the paypal/stripe way than if you go the crypto way.

It's not like cryptocurrencies don't take a cut (in the larger coins, transaction fees are often higher than the amount of money most fans would like to donate) or sell your data (usually not the coin devs themselves, but there are definitely companies/exchanges out there correlating transactions and selling data about them). Stripe and Paypal might not be great, but just because crypto is "not Paypal" does not make crypto automatically trustworthy.

Monero isn't commercialized. It's just a currency that people actually use for transactions, not a product.
A currency is generally intended mainly for commercial purposes, isn't it? I think the word commercialized isn't quite right for what I mean then.

So more specifically, I mean: "not for the purpose of creating or transferring monetary value, and not requiring the expenditure of money to create/send the amount of data necessary to host a simple plaintext/html page"

I was assuming you meant things like NFTs or smart contracts, i.e. commercial products that live on a blockchain