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From millions of dollars to under a grand: The dramatic fall of the NFT (english.elpais.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 15 points 7 months ago (42 children)

I’d wager even the 1% is the stereotypical “solution in search of a problem”. Seems to be a reoccurring theme as of late in the tech industry.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (17 children)

    Having a currency not backed by a government or different currency is actually something the world could benefit from. Iranian currency was backed by USD, the US caused a shortage of USD there, and their currency value dropped to under 3% of it's former value. 90 Million people.

    That said, I think most of us have only ever used crypto to buy drugs off the internet.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (15 children)

    Yeah, but a currency practically needs a military and an economy to back it.

    Who is going to stop me from fucking with the bitcoin supply if I own the US economy?

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (13 children)

    That's the point of crypto - unless you can alter 51% of the blockchain, you can't.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (12 children)

    You misunderstand, if I own the GDP of a world power, what's preventing me from buying a ton of Bitcoin and fucking with the supply that way?

    Crypto nowadays looks like a pump and dump free for all.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (11 children)

    How is buying the asset fucking with the supply?

    If you mean hoarding it, that's pretty much all Bitcoin is good for.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (10 children)

    The supply of an asset is the volume of that asset available for purchase.

    If I buy all of that, supply becomes zero.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (9 children)

    The price goes up as you buy it.

    You could attempt to corner the market, but in doing so, you're also going to be massively enriching the current holders.

    What point would taking the entire supply do - especially since you can easily just start another blockchain?

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (6 children)

    You buy enough to raise the price, announce that you're buying it, schmucks try to get in on the wave, you dump while tweeting diamond hands.

    Repeat.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (5 children)

    Again, why?

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (4 children)

    To make money

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (3 children)

    The government you're talking about can print money at will.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (2 children)

    But that increases the money supply. This way they can take money from other people. For example Russia can get USD without printing and inflating RUB.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    That's just FOREX with extra steps?

    If Russia controls the entire supply of Bitcoin (which is what you're saying) then why would anyone with USD want to buy it? At that point, being owned by Russia entirely, it's just a Russian currency.

    The whole supposed attraction of Bitcoin is that it's not a government currency, and the supply isn't controlled by a central bank. Ethereum has additional uses to that, but that's still one of the prime factors as well.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    Not the entire supply, just enough to affect prices. Basically the stock market but without even the appearance of it not being manipulated to hell.

    And it's not Russia, or not just them, anyone with enough money to play can fuck people with sub-8 figure net worths over.

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  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    @mattyroses @HK65 starting another blcokchain is not as easy as copy the blockchain unless you convince the majority of people that your fork is better than the previous one

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    Sure, there's a large network advantage.

    But here you're talking about a hypothetical where, for some reason, a major government has bought up all blockchain tokens and won't release them. So nobody's on the original one anyways.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    Yeah, it also needs to derive its value from somewhere. Any stable nation's fiat derives its value from the fact that the government is believed trustworthy in matters of printing money and that in order to deal with that government you have to use that currency. An Australian could do all their financial life in etherium assuming everyone takes and offers it, right up until tax time where they have to convert a lot of ETH values into AUD, then trade some ETH for AUD in order to pay taxes. And if they receive any money from their government you bet your ass they aren't being given ETH. If they trust the Australian government even a little they're probably not jumping through those hoops.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    To preface: I'm not a gold nut and I believe that it's generally wiser for stable developed nations to use fiat currency to enable them to operate in a generally Keynesian approach with controlled inflation.

    That said while I agree it's unwise for nations unable to do that themselves to back their currency with a stable fiat currency from a different country, I don't think crypto is the solution. Coinage is. And I'm talking old school coinage where the government isn't backing it with metals, they're making it out of them. Probably something like silver.

    A backed currency is because a government can't be trusted not to overinflate. If you want to bypass trust, the answer isn't another currency in which all value is theoretical, it's currency in which the value is in your hand and verifiable, with the government acting as the one setting units, assuring proper valuation, punishing devaluation, and publishing means for institutions and people to confirm valuation, such as physical properties, alloy percentages, and the easiest tests.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.

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  • [–] -1 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    In case anybody sees this and doesn't know the context, this is the note that was published in the Genesis block of the Bitcoin blockchain, Satoshi wanted to engrave forever the fact that at this time the chancellor was on the brink of second bailout for banks. It was a call-out against the fiat system, and it's one of the best call-outs in history. and will be there forever more.

    If you happen to have an original copy of this newspaper, it is a genuine artifact, and you can make absolute tons of money on it. No bullshit.

    Based on this headline and the fact that Satoshi mentioned digital cash in the white paper as much as he did, you can clearly tell that he was frustrated with the fiat system and all the excesses that came with it and wanted to create a whole different system that was out of the hands of governments and corporations. He came close to succeeding but didn't quite finish the job because he couldn't figure out a way to add privacy into his ledger, which makes the entire thing completely transparent to law enforcement and government crooks.

    However, on April 13th, 2014, the final puzzle piece was added with the launch of Monero, which has a fully private blockchain that does not have sender, receiver, or amounts being shown.

    If you ever happen to read this comment, Satoshi, thank you for your great work. We will be forever in debt to you.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    The fact that there is corruption in the financial system doesn't automatically mean that every other system is honest.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    Oh, for sure. I saw another video somewhere yesterday that said you needed like seven pillars for a decentralized society. Decentralized communication, food, contracts, law, physical manufacturing, energy, and money. While I agree with that list, I think that an eighth one should be added, and that would be education. You might be able to fit education under communication, but I feel as though it doesn't properly fit there.

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  • [–] -5 points 7 months ago (16 children)

    Ethereum has the potential to carry real world assets on its chain. Why does an share of stock have to go through a clearing house when it could be an L2 on ethereum? A company having a total of 1 million shares is no different from a L2 coin having a total number of 1 million coins. They can even be fractional too.

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  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago (13 children)

    Literally every cryptocurrency supports this. But if the real world assets can be seized with a court order, then what's the point of a blockchain and not just a legally compliant database?

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  • [–] -1 points 7 months ago* (1 child)

    Bitcoin doesn't support this. It's what is being mirrored, yes. But, Ethereum is kinda like the distributed operating system/network that could/would allow 24 hour trading without having a clearing-house middleman.

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  • [–] -3 points 7 months ago* (7 children)

    The true libertarians and anarchists in the room would call out the fact that they are attempting to build a world where governments don't run courts because governments don't exist and that all courts would be arbitration courts and decentralized and run by the community. If I have a problem with you, I tell my arbitrator about it, and my arbitrator tells you that I have a problem with you. If you don't like my arbitrator, then you choose your own arbitrator, and if I don't like the arbitrator you choose, then the arbitrators choose a third party arbitrator that they both agree on, and we agree to be bound by what that arbitrator says.

    Edit: If you are willing to watch a 22 minute video, this might be of interest to you.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ0Qkhnt6bQ

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    If your organization is decentralized, then its assets can't be seized by a court order. For example, darknet market admins (arbitrators) and their drug dealers don't even know who each other are. They've had a polycentric legal system for years.

    But corporate stock remains centralized. They have a known headquarters with a known board of trustees. Their assets aren't carried on-chain; only some guy's promise to those assets.

    My point is that an anarchist economy needs to be built from the ground up, circumventing the state's legal system. Slapping a blockchain on top of an already centralized system won't make it decentralized and thus provides no benefit.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Oh, absolutely. But that's because the way we've always done the stock market is through centralized systems. If a company were to be formed today and only ever issue their stock tokens on a decentralized system such as Ethereum, then the Ethereum system would be the final arbiter of who does and does not have shares in that company.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Let's say I open a factory and issue shares on Ethereum. Then for whatever reason a judge orders the company to give up some shares. The shareholders, safely in cypherspace, ignore that court order. And then the state seizes the whole factory. In practice the original shares no longer mean anything.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    Yeah, blockchain adds nothing to an existing economy. It could be useful as a means of distributed public records between anarchist communities, but it is documentation, not ownership. Ownership is an extension of political power and grows from the same barrel of a gun

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    What's the point of an arbirator when there's no means to enforce compliance with their decision? And what could that system actually be? Functionally, it'd be identical to a government.

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  • [–] 0 points 7 months ago

    I'm assuming you didn't watch the video, because it did discuss that.

    Alice, who is a subscriber of Dawn Defense, was murdered by Bill, who is a subscriber of Tanner Justice. Dawn Defense is pro-death penalty for murderers and Tanner Justice is not. Therefore, each company does a calculation to figure out how many users and how much revenue they will lose if their side is not upheld and the side that is likely to lose more pays the other side to stand down. In the case of the video, the assumption is that if Dawn Defense loses, they will lose one million currency units worth of customers, where if Tanner Justice loses, they will lose 500,000 currency units. So, Dawn Defense pays Tanner Justice 800,000 currency units to stand down, which is more than the 500,000 they would have lost, and less than the 1 million that Dawn would lose if they weren't able to enforce the death penalty on Bill.

    These stand-down arrangements would be known beforehand, and therefore, when Bill subscribes to Tanner Justice, he would be informed that if he murders a client of dawn defense, that he will not be protected from the death penalty.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago* (1 child)

    There is no provable way to show that any claim of ownership on Ethereum is legitimate, unless that person has some real-world proof of ownership, in which case the Ethereum link adds no value. It's just another step with another middleman.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    In today's world, we are moving from analog systems to digital systems, and therefore, physical proof of ownership supersedes electronic proof of ownership.

    If a company is digital native and issues their shares on a blockchain without ever issuing any kind of analog shares, then the electronic proof would supersede the physical proof, no matter what happened.

    Say Alice has a hair salon that's called Alice's hair salon, and she issues one million tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, and each token represents one one millionth of the company, Alice's hair salon. Well, since she never issued any stock on the analog systems, the Ethereum system would be the final arbiter of who does and does not own any of those Alice's hair salon tokens.

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