[morgante]

Cryptocurrency has basically completely inverted the trust issue it's meant to solve (at least for many developers).

In theory, a decentralized ledger of project contributions / owners is a good idea for distributing sponsorship dollars without a middleman controlling things.

In practice, the brand of crypto has gotten so bad that developers are far more likely to trust centralized mechanisms like GitHub's funding.yaml and associated partners.

[aChattuio]

And it doesn't even solve the trust problem for anything off chain.

And even if it would than the question of which chain is the right one comes up.

Did you know there are fake nfts and you hardly can see which ones are real?

You literally need an initial trust anchor like a project website with https to learn about it. What a wonderful irony.

[justonenote]

Of course you need a trust anchor. How would would it work otherwise?!

If you can come up with a system where we could just all imagine up the same blockchain code, parameters, and have the code magically appear on our machines to run, that would be cool, but seems not really possible to me?

OTOH, what you can do with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, is download the code, review it, see if you agree to the rules laid out in the code, and if so, run it, and participate.

If you don't have the technical knowledge to do this, like 99.99% of people, you can delegate that trust of verifying and explaining it, to someone of your choosing.

No-one is expecting on-chain ledgers to solve off-chain trust. What they can do is make the process more transperant, more decentralized, and give people a much wider choice. You might look at this as competition. Alternatively you might sit on hn and hope to get a job in ad-tech.

[pavel_lishin]

What differentiates a "fake" NFT from a "real" one?

[aChattuio]

The real nft is on the right ledger and can be resold or if it has something attached to it, it can be redeemed.

[pavel_lishin]

What differentiates the "right" ledger from the "wrong" one?

[charcircuit]

Counterfeits exist in real life too, bit crypto has the benefit that you can actually prove who created something where in real life a good counterfeit could remain undetected.

[acdha]

It allows you to show what key signed a record. It doesn’t tell you what person used that key, whether they were acting in good faith, or whether they had the right information. If you want to know any of those things you have to pay real auditors to check real world status, and at that point you’re going to ask why you need to pay so much more to use a slow database which requires always-on internet connectivity when you’d get the same value from a Yubikey or iPhone’s builtin cryptographic primitives.

[rchaud]

In real life, counterfeiting is dealt with at multiple levels: legal, communal, technological. Laws are written to deter the act with punitive measures. Communities share information about how to spot counterfeits. Technology is used to make the act of copying harder.

The folly of NFTs, energy footprint aside, is thinking that a well-written smart contract is all that's needed to stop counterfeits.

[atoav]

Yeah but the crypto is outside of the object of desire. I too can give you a signed paper that tells you that you now own the Mona Lisa. You can even formally verify that the signature is real and by me! Notice anything?

The important questions for you remain unanswered:

- Do I actually have the rights to sell you the thing I try to sell you?

- What do I actually sell you?

- Am I who I claim I am?

- etc.

NFTs are not answering any of these questions, they are the equivalent of an elaborate signature on the contract of the guy trying to sell you a bridge.

[charcircuit]

None of those are true when someone is selling physical products either. Cryptography at least gives us a chance to verify someone's claims.

[atoav]

Indeed they are not true, but physical selling typically doesn't pretend it is.

> Cryptography at least gives us a chance to verify someone's claims.

Has it a better track record at doing so that e.g. a notary?

[acdha]

It gives you a distraction from the real work they described. You still need to do all of that work, so at best the blockchain is redundant.

[pavel_lishin]

> crypto has the benefit that you can actually prove who created something

No. Crypto lets you prove who wrote a small amount of data to the blockchain.

[techdragon]

Yep… I can totally prove this random pseudonym/anonnym is definitely the same one that has… never been used before because due to social incentives you want zero links between identities and thus the web of trust is just a sea of filaments floating loose in an ocean

An ocean filled with fish poop…

It’s so great I can definitively verify that this ID is something… but that’s absolutely fucking pointless if I have no way to judge if the entity or entities controlling it, connected to it, supporting it, or even associated with it (to consider potential future actions)… the goal was noble but the implementation completely failed because to succeed would have required the participants to build anchors in the real world of verifiable identities… and for all the value people get from day to day use of cryptocurrencies… the biggest value of crypto was in staying as far away from the real world as possible allowing such things as drug purchases and international money laundering and illegal gambling at a level low enough to evade legal enforcement services coming after the players (since obviously if they could come after the casino/house they would since that’s where all the money is)

[chx]

This is bullshit.

Let's repeat the basic fact: every crypto which uses a transaction fee is inherently a scam because it's a negative sum game. Everything else is bait to get you involved in the scam. There's nothing else.