> The whole internet is showing the first signs of a digital Resource Curse [1] brought by crypto mining. Crypto mining changed the economics of the digital world in such a drastic way that it is poisoning all kinds of internet interactions. It is not just about disrupting how money used to work, it is disrupting every kind of interaction, even those that had nothing to do with money. Things that were completely economically neutral before, so people did them just for fun, can now be exploited to extract value, so naturally some people do it and the previous innocent/neutral status quo is lost. For example: most free unix shell providers, a fun tradition from nerds from the 90s, had to shut down because now there is such a big economic incentive to abuse such free service.

The whole internet is showing the first signs of a digital resource curse brought on by advertising. Advertising changed the economics of the digital world in such a drastic way that it is poisoning all kinds of internet interactions. It is disrupting every kind of interaction, even those that had nothing to do with advertising. Things that were completely economically neutral before, so people did them just for fun, can now be exploited to extract value, so naturally some people do it and the previous innocent/neutral status quo is lost. For example: most free, non-monetized content providers, a fun tradition from nerds from the 90s, don't exist now because there is such a big economic incentive to abuse such free service.

Ads at least require an audience. Crypto mining abuse requires just the ability to execute anything.

That’s why ads are like acne for the Internet, but crypto is a cancer.

I'd argue it's the opposite.

Crypto is fairly easy to avoid as an individual - the only thing I can think of that crypto has "contaminated" is GPU prices. Otherwise, don't get involved and just watch and laugh at the dumpster fire from a safe distance. You don't have to get involved in crypto to participate in society.

Advertising on the other hand is very hard to avoid, and even blocking the ads themselves doesn't isolate you from its nasty effects such as the constant tracking and that a lot of products nowadays pivoted to be ad delivery mechanisms (try to buy a consumer-grade TV that doesn't show ads or spy on you). A lot of products & services you need to use to participate in society are involved with advertising and may sell out your data (and providing fake data might be impossible/illegal). Even some government departments (DMV, etc) do it.

Crypto is easy to avoid "for now".

The endgame for crypto is tokenizing everything in some peoples eyes.

Video game skins become NFTs that you now "own" instead of just being in-game. So you can transfer them around, sell them on composable markets etc.

Assuming things actually get worked out you could see a merging of the digital and physical worlds assets.

If this a good thing, or will even happen who knows.

> Video game skins become NFTs that you now "own" instead of just being in-game.

This use case actually doesn't make sense if you think about it. Items only make sense in the context of a game, and you trust the game makers to honor it. At that point, there's no incentive for them to actually allow you to port in/port out items.

Think about it this way: what good is the BFG from Unreal Tournament in Cooking Mama?

Even in related games, guns from Battlefield 2042 in say COD Vanguard?

Sounds pretty shit.

A more interesting example would be From software issuing a “moonlight sword” nft (maybe for an achievement like 100% elden ring) and various indie devs creating souls-like games choosing to honor it within their game.

I would like to be polite to you here, but it's going to be hard, because this take is wrong at every single level, and it feels like you haven't tried any sort of critical thinking whatsoever:

1) NFTs are the most expensive, least efficient way to implement the least interesting part of this technology. Even if you accept the dubious premise that they do even that job well.

2) You have explicitly described a system in which every single agreement between devs would require special testing. Is the moonlight sword balanced in the other game? Don't I still have to describe literally every aspecet of the moonlight sword other than who owns it in the second game?

3) Skins and other microtransactions are per game, by an absolute law of their design. That is the point. A game developer has no interest in honoring a microtransaction that I can prove that I paid some other game developer for. I would want my cut.

4) The condition upon which you have proposed that people can acquire the moonlight sword is... for beating Elden Ring? So it's a sign of status. Except that it's a sign of status that I can sell, so it's actually just a signal of wealth or status, maybe? Maybe I can't sell it. But wait, why did I make it an NFT then. So I must be able to sell it, but then it is presumed to have a dollar value, so why wouldn't Fromsoft sell it in the first place. Sounds a lot like a regular microtransaction.

Which brings me to my final point.

5) The market for microtransactions is already very optimized. Videogames are already very good at extracting every penny that people are willing to pay for bullshit cosmetics and play to win garbage. You can't even make money hucking this shit.

Also one final point, if 10 mutually independent devs share an NFT blockchain so the moonlight sword can be transferred between games... what stops me from minting my own moonlight sword? Or super moonlight sword? Or unauthorized micky mouse hats?

But again, not only is that trustful (after all, the "moonlight sword" name, image, etc, are subject to copyright and trademark) if From decides to allow that they can just open an API.

“Is thing in wallet” strikes me as much easier to implement then n^2 api integrations across companies. It’d be easier to do the api method via drm platforms like steam at the cost of lock-in to those platforms; cross pc/console access to any item would be far from guaranteed. Outsourcing all of that logic to a centralized (ex google blockchain) or decentralized blockchain and wallet just seems like a more scalable (num of actors not tps) approach with a low barrier for entry for each individual actor.

Your comment about “trust” has little to do with the technology. It’s a cross between legal gray areas (which would need to be solved/accepted if this becomes the norm) and dogma surrounding web3. I tend to agree that this isn’t likely to happen unless from software essentially abandoned their ip for some reason. But if that happened, it’d be a cool way for the legacy to live in future games in a way that pays homage to the original creators. It’s a use case that makes much more sense then just copying a random gun from one game to another because there are years of history in the item.

> Outsourcing all of that logic to a centralized (ex google blockchain) or decentralized blockchain and wallet just seems like a more scalable (num of actors not tps) approach with a low barrier for entry for each individual actor.

I do think for this to make sense you'd have to have, you know, one blockchain everyone used otherwise you still have the "10 app stores" problem, no?

if the game itself runs via a decentralized computational model then there’s no need to appeal to authority to honor the ownership. The game itself, just like the skin, would exist on the p2p network.

We are of course very far from that happening, or knowing if it can happen, but it’s still a possibility to consider

You have to make a game that supports every item. There's no such thing as a "generic" game. Games have balance - hours are spent tweaking relative attributes of items to ensure the game is, you know, fun. For instance, what's to stop me from making an NFT nuclear launcher item on my own, then porting it in and wiping out everyone else's stuff?

MINE + CRAFT

The fact that people keep trotting out this idea about the future potential of NFT gaming is evidence that people know basically nothing about making video games or the assets that go into them. And neither do the founders of any NFT projects with the rate at which they crash and burn if they aren't outright scams.

Crypto is held back by its own stupidity & inefficiency - the system self-regulates well enough.

The only thing a blockchain is good for is assets that fully live on the blockchain for which the source of truth is the blockchain itself - like cryptocurrencies.

Putting NFTs, video game/metaverse avatars, real-world assets, etc will never work; it's at best a very inconvenient, inefficient database replacement, and at worst a scam.

This is something few have realized. Crypto guarantees can only ever extend to things that are wholly represented on-chain, and that's basically just cryptocurrencies. As soon as the chain reflects the real world it's at the mercy of the correct data being entered, or reality not changing around it.

And this means pure cryptocurrencies, backed stablecoins do not offer any of the crypto guarantees either since they are representations of assets held in trust that can be seized.

For a system to be trustless, decentralized and permissionless it must be entirely trustless, permissionless and decentralized. It's not a gradient, it's a step function. Once anything creeps in, all guarantees are void.

Interesting take on this. Something to think about.

It's certainly better than paying companies for "licenses" we don't actually own or digital goods that amount to nothing but bits in their database. With these digital content NFTs, at least we get a real market.

I'm not sure whether these things will actually get integrated into video games or how well it's gonna work. It will certainly be interesting to watch this develop.

>Crypto is fairly easy to avoid as an individual

It's probably contributing more to inflation than people believe. Both in the demand for resources and in terms of redistribution of wealth. Although probably not as much as the new work-from-home paradigm.

Couldnt be the thousands of dollars handed out, making markets discount the dollar, could it?

Yes, that too. The printing has to catch up with them eventually.

> try to buy a consumer-grade TV that doesn't show ads or spy on you

I haven't bought a consumer TV since... well, actually, I just haven't ever actually bought one except second-hand non-smart TVs a decade ago. Is it literally that bad? i.e. does everything show ads? Can you root these machines and/or install non-ad-based apps instead?

Any consumer-grade "smart" product (whether TV or home automation) now phones home (even though it can run entirely locally on the LAN), requires an account and collects data and the (often mandatory) mobile app will typically include various advertising malware such as the Facebook SDK, analytics, etc that spy on you.

The primary objective is "growth and engagement" aka an ad delivery mechanism (or data collection mechanism for more ads down the line). The functionality of the product (if any) is merely a necessary evil (from the manufacturer's point of view) to convince the mark to buy & "engage" with the device. If they could get people to "engage" with it without any functionality they'd definitely do that instead.

Do what I do and simply disable internet access to the TV. Netflix and whatnot gets ran on my PS5, which mainly advertises their PSN store, so it's less intrusive.

The only good panels now are also "smart" tvs with something like a roku or samsung spyware built in in an unavoidable way. You can't simply change inputs to avoid it because the whole OS you're changing inputs within is the smart TV's OS.

looks like there might be an emerging market for 60-inch computer monitors

You can absolutely find these, usually offered as commercial products, e.g. for menus, or billboards in airports, etc.

Buddy of mine used to work in a kabab shop before finishing his IT degree and helped out there off and on. He ordered an installed some 48" monitors (simple HD TVs) and then ordered a few for himself. I think they could 2 inputs max, but that's fine for most purposes.

Sadly, I suspect adtech is already working to target them too. What better way to fight adblockers?

Ads no longer work online, period. The ad industry is just 10 years behind acknowledging it. Most of what people pay for is just paying for the organic traffic you'd normally get with no ads so they don't give it to someone else. It's more of a protection racket than it is a source of genuine new customers.

I have rather different experience. Most people either don't care or don't know how to. Unless you're tech savvy you're watching ads. And if you're on mobile you're watching them anyway in many cases.

People ignore ads either way these days, I mean

Many free CI services have stopped being a thing because people exploited the free compute for crypto mining. That’s directly impacted a lot of developers at least.

> Crypto is fairly easy to avoid as an individual

Web3.0 folks are trying their best to change this.

> may sell you out.

Even HR departments. Got a new job and am completely spammed constantly at my brand new work email address.

> the only thing I can think of that crypto has "contaminated" is GPU prices.

And storage. See Proof of Space and Chia.

> crypto is a cancer.

Proof of Work is a cancer. The two are heavily intertwined, but they are not technically mutual terms. Proof of Work needs to be stopped, irrelevant of what it is used for.

PoW(hatever) is a cancer as long as the "Whatever" doesn't have any value behind it, it doesn't bring value to society because it's guaranteed to take resources without leaving anything useful behind. It incentivizes people to abuse anything at hand to obtain proof of that otherwise worthless "Whatever". Whether it's "work" or "space" or "time" then someone will always look to abuse others to obtain more proof without it creating any value.

Unlike money (generically) PoWhatever cryptocurrencies aren't backed by anything anyone can define as valuable. Proof of Housing_built, Proof of Goods_transported, Proof of Music_created, Proof of Space_flights all create real value. Proof of Work where the work is without doubt useless in itself and an absolute net loss for society can't result in anything practically valuable. At best it results in a very wasteful Ponzi scheme.

Imagine something as innocent as "proof of clapping hands", you may get some reward for holding a record but it's otherwise completely useless. That at least only affects you and your hands, even if a waste of time that doesn't seem to bring anything of value - joy or other practical benefits. What if someone could abuse you and force you to clap at the cost of lost productivity at work, health issues, etc. and the result of that work is... nothing?

The supposed usefulness of the work sacrificed in proof-of-work is to prevent Sybil attacks on the network.

An attacker can spawn millions of virtual nodes, yet they will never hijack consensus because of the objectively-measurable resource sacrifice.

While there may be too much reward for this sacrifice currently, the idea is a sound one.

> The supposed usefulness of the work sacrificed in proof-of-work is to prevent Sybil attacks

The usefulness of PoW is to reinforce a system that produces something. Presumably the higher the value of that something, the more you're willing to waste enabling it. If you're burning through an estimated 110TWh of electricity per year (as of last year, one Netherland's worth) enabling that system, you should be able to show one Netherland's worth of value being created.

> While there may be too much reward for this sacrifice currently

You probably meant it the other way around, too much sacrifice for the reward. Wouldn't the concept of creating value imply that net value was created?

> the idea is a sound one.

In theory many ideas are but the implementation matters. So in practice you'd be hard pressed to show the net value. And I'm not talking about showing me 1 BTC is worth $50.000 more than you can say a defunct company is worth billions because some was doing a pump and dump.

> You probably meant it the other way around, too much sacrifice for the reward. Wouldn't the concept of creating value imply that net value was created?

Without the reward, there would be no sacrifice. The reward drives the sacrifice, and it is strictly higher than the sacrifice, otherwise people would not sacrifice in order to lose money and waste resources.

Unfortunately, right now the value created is less than the sacrifice (and I agree with you), which is in turn less than the reward (see the next point).

> So in practice you'd be hard pressed to show the net value.

The Bitcoin transaction fees are higher than $300k/day [1]. So, at least that much value is provided to those transacting, otherwise they would not transact.

Unfortunately, the current implementation still adds a hefty (100x larger) inflationary reward on top - so miners make upwards of $30M/day. [2]

While such a ratio may have been useful in the early days, now that virtually everyone interested knows about Bitcoin, I argue (and agree with you) that this inflationary reward is excessive.

In addition, I argue that the resource sacrifice is excessive because this inflationary reward is excessive. Had the creator(s) of Bitcoin predicted the meteoric rise of the price, they would have diminished this reward more quickly than the current schedule. [3]

Maybe someone could fork a "Bitcoin Green" or whatnot, with the difference that the reward schedule is sped up, and hopefully it would gather a meaningful amount of hash power to prevent 51% attacks [4].

[1] - https://www.blockchain.com/charts/transaction-fees-usd

[2] - https://www.blockchain.com/charts/miners-revenue

[3] - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply

[4] - https://www.crypto51.app/

But at the end of the day, you can only imagine proof of clapping hands because yes that example is useless.

But proof of work is not useless, hence we don't have to imagine it. Distributed consensus is useful to many people at this point.

> you can only imagine proof of clapping hands because yes that example is useless.

People do it all the time, it must have something. But no practical value. But let's not argue for the sake of arguing. It's like saying Ponzi schemes are good otherwise so many people wouldn't be into them. Or any example of things so many people do that have no value and we'd really rather they stopped.

Proof of Whatever is just about gobbling up some resource (sometimes with incredibly high cost for society in general) for some artificially driven value but of no practical positive consequences to almost anyone in the world. Except for the few that are incentivized to make it look more valuable because they've invested and its actual value never changed. It's still a solution waiting for a problem.

And before you argue more, the computer and internet you're using to post your opinions were created with far less waste and provide far more value. If they go away tomorrow the world will suffer a lot, society will literally regress decades. If proof of waste goes away the "investors" in the pyramid will suffer for being tricked and the rest of the world wouldn't bat an eye.

How many people? How useful? What is the distribution of that useful amongst those people? At what cost does this useful stop being useful?

There is one non-profit token based on BOINC that uses scientific computation as PoW. Their self-awareness with regards to their influence is impressive.

Gridcoin (the cryptocurrency you're referring to) doesn't actually use the scientific computation as proof-of-work. It's built on proof-of-stake. It just also happens to have minting set up so new coins go to people doing scientific computation, in a process that superficially resembles proof-of-work mining. The paying-people-to-do-scientific-computation part is purely something extra and isn't strictly necessary in its design to make it work as a cryptocurrency.

(It's kind of splitting hairs, but I see gridcoin brought up a lot by people arguing stuff like "Proof of stake isn't the answer. Proof of work is still good, we just need more useful proof of work" which is a big misunderstanding of it. Useful scientific computation generally doesn't work as proof-of-work and is not an example of it even in the context of Gridcoin. Only specific kinds of computation can work for proof-of-work, and the computation being useful in other contexts actually harms its usefulness for proof-of-work because it can allow the computation for 51% attacks to be subsidized by the other uses of the computation.)

Point taken. Duplication of effort could be argued is proof of work but perhaps that is splitting hairs.

We had the promise that this would change many years ago, I doubt it will change for many years to come.

As of right now the Ethereum foundation are still projecting ~Q2 2022 for full Proof of Stake.

When working with hard/physical assets, one needs no proof of anything. The existence of the asset is the proof.

To me, there needs to be an effective counterbalance to the need for "proof" in the first place, otherwise we are simply prolonging the petrodollar's capability to exist in a world that is clearly quite ready to abandon it.

> When working with hard/physical assets, one needs no proof of anything. The existence of the asset is the proof.

Counterpoint: Real Property

No, rampant transactionalization/financialization is the cancer. Rent-seeking leeches trying to extract money out of previously neutral activity, growing unchecked. The very definition of cancer.

This is exactly wrong. Crypto is fairly easy to make worthless. Ads are impossible to make worthless.

This comment chain made me envision a potentially terrible future direction.

Imagine a future where websites force people to consent to allowing them use your device to mine cryptocurrency while you use its services or browse its content instead of ads.

Interesting tidbit: a few years back I encountered a Minecraft server with a dynamic map on a website. After checking it out for about 5 minutes I noticed some weird CPU usage so I asked the server admins.

They apparently to came to an agreement with the players where, to support the server, a browser miner would be ran on the dynamic map website.

I would like to get chunks off of a community grid like Nunet... There is a mod that adds LODs these days, CPU-intensive, so with a nice view the real estate does become a little valuable doesn't it? :)

I'd prefer that to ads.

With crypto mining I can buy my way out of it by having powerful hardware, or - in a hypothetical future where this practice is mainstream - offloading the mining to a separate machine as to not affect my mobile device's CPU. Crypto miners have a defined price: give me an average CPU's hashrate while you stay on the page and that's it - so if you pay that you are good.

With ads, buying your way out is impossible - by attempting to do so you just become an even bigger target. There is no define price for it that you can pay to "opt out".

>With ads, buying your way out is impossible

I disagree. It's just not in its final form yet. But take a peek:

Hulu: 6.99 with ads, 12.99 without

Youtube: Free with ads, 11.99 without (or bundled with another google paid service, like Fi)

HBO: 9.99 with ads, 14.99 without

---

It's coming - if you have money to throw at the problem, you can already buy your way out of a lot of advertising.

If you have time and a bit of technical savvy - setting up a pihole or ublock origin incurs costs on time, but also remove ads.

At least with ads the cost is fairly clear, and it's definite. With mining... it's mostly malicious and will consume as much CPU as it can. That actually taxes me more for having a nice CPU.

You can buy your way out of ads in some places, but you can never buy your way out of the invasive tracking.

Welcome to the future. The year is 2018.

https://cyware.com/news/pirate-bay-found-running-browser-bas...

"Imagine a future where websites force people to consent "

I imagine a future, where people just do not vist sites, where they do not agree to the conditions.

But like others pointed out, those sites exist already since quite a while.

How do you even know what the terms and conditions are without visiting the site? This whole "by using the site you agree" thing is completely stupid.

Isn't that the Brave browser?

No Brave doesn't do that, its default behavior doesnt use crypto, its optional behavior theoretically lets you earn bat but not by processing cycles

Brave has its Basic Attention Token that they give users in exchange for sending notifications with ads in them. They literally pay users for their attention. Doesn't consume any CPU.

I think all advertising is inherently bad but this is the least bad form of advertising I've ever seen. Not only are users compensated, they can actually turn off the ads in the settings and simply use the browser normally, and it has a built-in adblocker even on mobile.

This was a reality a few years ago (in particular, there was a very easy to use Monero cryptominer that ran in the browser) and then every major ad blocker and many major browser distributions blocked crypto mining and it's basically become impractical for the most part. PirateBay did it for a while but I believe they have stopped, you really don't see it anymore.

Frankly I would pick that over ads any day.

Can you mine crypto in the browser? I know there are some native hooks, presumably JavaScript is never going to give a good hash rate, but it would be interesting if sites starting dropping JS tags that silently mined crypto in the background.

WASM Monero miners were a big problem years ago.

Certainly.

https://github.com/jtgrassie/xmr-wasm

Individually hash rate will be quite poor but if you make a mining pool out of all your users everything changes. Monero mining pools even have rules prohibiting that.

https://minexmr.com/miningguide

> Botnet / Web Mining Policy

> Sadly it happens that Botnets often run cryptominers on infected PCs.

> minexmr does not support botnets, web miners or any other illegal activities.

> Any account suspected of botnet mining or web mining will be banned.

Oh certainly. Back in 2018 I found my favorite site to read online comics was turning my phone into a hot plate before I blocked JS.

> because there is such a big economic incentive to abuse such free service.

On my free personal blog, I have nothing for sale, and nobody discovers it in spite of the ones that do read it enjoying it.

Another problem of advertising oligopolies monetizing everything is, if you don't pay them, you are invisible.

You should read their second paragraph.

Unless you were going for some kind of meta-joke/correction, in which case bravo.

It was definitely a serious-toned joke. Bravo from me as well. I don't know how people navigate the web without an ad blocker anymore. Do people actually do that? it's unbearable. Slows pages down, clutters the actual content, wastes more battery on phones and laptops, generally rewards companies for spying on you... it's awful.

Can we go back to when people weren't so lazy as to do everything in their power to not have to give their cash directly to someone? Sure, you don't have to hand your money to a content maker on YouTube anymore, for example, but I wonder how much the lifespan of your device is decreased by the added processing that comes from advertising, and how much that adds up in the end. You may as well just have paid them money directly in the first place.

Apply that thought to any "free-but-only-because-it's-ad-ridden" software/service.

interesting point of comparison. the much bigger cost of ads is probably the attention loss. we don't have much attention capacity. ads increasingly syphon it. I guestimate that attention loss for an average person is worth order of magnitude more than the extra cpu tearing + bandwidth costs required to run ads. but like for your comparison, most users aren't even realising they are paying a significant mental cost by accepting those ads.

It's not just a mental cost - someone has to pay for those ads and all the machinery & various middlemen that make it possible. That someone is all of us; the prices we pay for most goods include the overhead of polluting society with ads. You end up paying a double tax - a monetary one and an attention one.

agreed. it's multiple costs. and we all pay for that waste and the long term consequences of it.

But the example is untrue. The nerds are still hosting free content.

It's incredible how much people can talk about capitalism without mentioning it. It's all about the trends in capital, but never about the general mode of capital. Which i do get to some extent. It does make sense to talk about trends, like advertising swallowing up all aspects of media, but critique can never be made on trends alone. Trends don't dictate processes, trends are the result of processes. If you look to explain this from the bottom up you'll hit a wall of individual decision making. But from the top down you see the influence behind those decisions, it's an economic choice that is necessitated to continue the process of capitalist accumulation in a corporation, country or even market.

It's not only crypto or advertising it's the process of capital using technologies to radically transform its production process in search of more profits. Be it by established corporations or groups of crypto miners. This mode of production will do this to any technology that can advanced the generation of capital. This is the core of capitalism, the revolutionizing of production, not for humanities sake, but for profits sake.

To settle on a single manifestation of this mode as its cause is to wear something like horse blinders and all conversations on the topic will be as narrow as the topic you want to hate on the most. And capital will keep chugging and keep using technology for its own sake at everyone's expense.

Agreed, most of the world's ills could be mitigated with an extreme tax on digital advertising.

As Dan "FoldableHuman" Olson put it [1]:

> The end goal of the crypto machine is the financialization of everything. Any benefits of digital uniqueness are a quirk, a necessary precondition of turning everything into stocks.

[1] https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman/status/1465835083542061059

Both of your examples (cryptocurrency and paid linking) are indeed plagues on quality content, but I disagree that they’ve replaced quality content.

They’re mostly examples of new business models that people have tried to use to generate new types of content and monetization in a crowded space. Sites like HN and commenters here aren’t trading links for money, we’re just sharing interesting content. The obvious paid advertisements (going from 0 votes to +20 votes in minutes despite obvious content marketing) get flagged away quickly for the most part.

Crypto and “web3” especially has become a catch-all for people who want to catch a gold rush or have otherwise run out of ideas for traditional business success. The problem they’re discovering is that the average consumer has almost no interest in crypto unless it’s as a speculative investment to flip to someone else, which means the entire space is basically crypto people flipping things to each other and trying to convince new people to join in so they have more downstream people to flip their tokens too.

But despite the constant efforts to flood our news feeds with crypto stories, most of us navigate the internet without cryptocurrencies or NFTs because they’re entirely unnecessary and you have to go out of your way to do anything with them. Since they bring no actual benefit, we just ignore it. And it’s fine.

It's what happens when you throw a pyramid scheme into something - just like with pyramid/mlm schemes in real life, suddenly everything is about optimizing for the scheme. Every conversation becomes a sales pitch.

That's a good way to summarize the problems that traditional game-devs foresee with NFT games. Game purchases are viewed as speculative investments rather than entertainment.

Devils advocate here, but crypto does disrupt a free sharing economy that's on the internet and part of the magic of it.

Yet maybe there are benefits in terms of making previously economically inviable things viable. People making passion projects are great, but at the end of the day they are creating value for people that's almost never reciprocated in other ways and tokenizing things lets them capture that value or add new value to what their selling.

e.g. with NFTs right now you have three parties, the buyer -> who gets provenance ("ownership") the digital artist -> who makes more money off their art than was possible before because rarity is built into the price now. (Non-fungible, unlike selling prints tshirts etc.) everyone else -> who can still copy and share the work for free, as before.

I feel like this should be a growth engine for digital artists, that has minimal impact on the general public, and everyone walks away happy with the transaction. (Putting aside scams b/c the market is unregulated, environmental concerns, etc. just talking economics.)

Putting away the scams, environmental concerns, and lack of regulation is a big caveat though. They are an inherent cost to the crypto space that currently lack an immediate resolution (to my knowledge).

How much "previously economically inviable things" are captured by NFTs and crypto anyways? I have not seen any potential usescases that outweigh even the inherent environmental cost of cryptocurrency.

The resource curse is that natural resources go together with oppressive government: the former can promote the latter in that an oppressor needs some form of wealth to pay their minions/allies, and international sales of extracted resources are a source of wealth that makes fewer demands on widespread cooperation from the locals than does local development.

How does this map to crypto? Who's the oppressive government we're getting more of?

It's correct that crypto changes the economics, and I'd say that's a good thing. We've tried leaving economics out of our core means of cooperation online for a few decades, and we don't seem very happy with the feudal internet that that led to. Let's try expanding the range of ways of coordinate and to fund work, with e.g. https://gitcoin.co/

I'm sure many people would agree with your diagnosis. What's the treatment, though?

Time.

Crypto is a speculative digital commodity bubble. We haven't seen a real bear market yet. Gold took 7 years from 1973 when you could own gold again to the 1980 peak. All the increase in gold mining lead to a 20 year bear market.

The crypto narrative is fundamentally unsustainable. It doesn't just have to beat the S&P 500 returns, people need to believe they are going to get rich. That November 2021 peak is going to be tough to take out. That is looking like the peak of the everything bubble from COVID. The get rich narrative can only hold for so long until the reality that crypto is a set of volatile currency no one really uses and has been massively over mined for years now sets in.

2017 wasn't a real bear market? It dropped like 95% and stayed at 50% to 80% below peak for a couple of years..

How do you define bear market for crypto? -90% is just another year (or even month) in crypto space.

I mean, I'd define it, much like any other bear market, as a sustained downward trend in the market.

Ban crypto mining. Outlaw exchanging cryptocurrencies (directly) to USD (and other fiat currencies, but USD is the big one for now).

It seems like it’s happening indirectly. I keep hearing stories about places like Coinbase not converting dirty Bitcoin that’s been associated with illegal activity.

Eventually, it seems like this will apply to all of it.

How much would it cost to purposefully contaminate a significant portion of Bitcoin? Just, you know, for reasons.

I don't think banning fiat conversion would stop this.

There are bonds and stable currency issued peg to the defi or crypto world.

It would reduce the value but it's unstoppable.

See fei: https://fei.money/

Proof of work or hardware intensive proofs are only used in a few crypto currency so this is a very blunt response in regards to banning exchange.

Have you seen what happened in the finance world with respect to Russia recently? Feels to me like it is perfectly possible with the right Zeitgeist. Pretty much all the on/off ramps for Russian money are gone at the moment.

Which I acknowledge above. You can ban exchange to fiat but it will only reduce value, not completely eliminate it as there are protocols which derive value from defi ecosystem itself.

I.e people will start directly using these currency for payments (which they already do) without exchanging to fiat. The stability is maintained by the defi collateral and shared acceptance.

So you would have to ban everyone to accept crypto currency and so on as payment but that is very catastrophic decision with large implications.

It also doesn't help crypto completely eliminates centralized authorities when moving across borders.

> people will start directly using these currency for payments (which they already do) without exchanging to fiat

Without fiat exchange, People can only accept crypto in an economically feasible manner as payments up to the rate that they have expenses/outflows that can be paid in crypto. The price will only be able to stabilize at a price that is orders of magnitude lower than today. How much lower exactly depends on the health of the black market for exchanging with fiat.

So let's assume crypto is banned? Why is FIAT much better? What about another 2008? What about Quantitative Easing?

It's not solving much.

Because it's not speculative garbage like literally all crypto is.

Russia is a bit more complicated..half their economy is oil. The chance of import bans and Russia nationalizing oil companies is partly priced in.

Time.

Crypto is a speculative digital commodity bubble. We haven't seen a real bear market yet. Gold took 7 years from 1973 when you could own gold again to the 1980 peak. All the increase in gold mining lead to a 20 year bear market.

The crypto narrative is fundamentally unsustainable. It doesn't just have to beat the S&P 500 returns, people need to believe they are going to get rich. That November 2021 peak is going to be tough to take out. That is looking like the peak of the everything bubble from COVID. The get rich narrative can only hold for so long until the reality that crypto is a set of volatile currency no one really uses and has been massively over mined for years now sets in.

Time will make crypto boring like every other currency/commodity. No one gets all excited about corn futures.

I think the most straightforward thing would be to regulate mining operations as money transmitters and smart contracts as derivatives. Several jurisdictions have made noises about doing this; it seems to be more a matter of political will than any fundamental difficulty.

Although I agree that post crypto incentives have changed. It's a bit much to say that it's "completely changed the digital universe" this group is targeting the primary developer of GPU mining.

In terms of the ask, I think they are being much cleverer than dumb money as unlocking the GPU mining further could create new areas of economic power, i.e ebay old gpus or push NVIDIA to design a specific crypto gpu?

Either way capitalism is what's driving the team.

artificial limits, on bandwidth and energy could be one way to both foster innovation and decrease resource usage

We just saw that those artificial limits (Lite Hash Rate) fostered the "innovation" of hackers attacking Nvidia, eh?

The curse is crypto tokens and NFTs, not Bitcoin or proof-of-work. As we have seen, most of these tokens are just speculative schemes without connection to the underlying property.

On the contrary, Bitcoin, as a seamless Internet-native currency, can actually help making the Internet better, by allowing easier and better ways to monetize content instead of relying on advertising. In the coming years, we'll see more Bitcoin-based services popping up.

I have a dream of solving this with extreme-infungibility of a currency system.

I’m sure every ancient civilization noticed this problem when the ease of trade that came with common currency resulted in the incentive to be conquered and taxed from a foreign land.

Those who had gold but no army, soon had neither. ISTM gold and other substances of "concentrated value" are inherently more dangerous than other things that ancient people could have stored, like lumber or grain.

Can we please just jump to the end and make it illegal to transfer Crypto to Fiat?

I agree with you overall - this does appear to be another resource curse - but I want to point out that the culprits in this matter are the companies that bottleneck the overly-abundant resources for profit (so Nvidia and Google), not the users who attempt to bleed constrained value through that bottleneck. Nvidia used their near-monopolistic power over the graphics card market in an attempt to globally limit the hash rate of mining. I doubt their intent was as altruistic as they spun it either - it seems very obviously a move to force miners to use more GPUs in parallel, to circumvent the limits in each single GPU. I find that to be more concerning than some hackers demanding that they stop.

> it seems very obviously a move to force miners to use more GPUs in parallel

This is very obviously wrong. The economics of crypto mining are almost entirely dominated by power cost. Nvidia's decision here simply means they will use other hardware, not more of the LHR hardware.

Nvidia already can't make enough GPUs to satisfy demand. Why would they try to increase undesirable demand (which is going away soon anyway, at least for ETH).

I'm not sure nvidia actually sees mining as 'undesirable demand' .. sells cards, makes them money. They wouldn't give a shit if people were buying them to use as firewood.

If that's the case, then I stand corrected, but it does not change my point that a single company being able to bottleneck a resource is problematic.

The resources are bottlenecked due to the chip shortage, which happened because the entire automotive industry mis-forecast demand for the pandemic. All the GPU manufacturers have the same problem: they don't want to build GPU production lines for a market that is going away. The problem isn't Nvidia, it's proof of work, which will bottleneck as many resources as it can by design.

This is what happens when you try and build a planetary messaging system with inefficiency as a design goal.

You're likely not going to like this, but you agreeing with their reasoning for bottle-necking a resource does not make it any less problematic that they have the power to do so.

You imagine that you had a vendor selling bread, and you have people who need to eat, and a customer comes and asks for a year's supply of bread so they can have a bread bonfire as a sacrifice to their god so their god can take over the world, you're going to do everything in your power to avoid selling bread to those people. Because they are going to have their bonfire, their god will not appear, and meanwhile everyone will starve.

Nvidia doesn't unilaterally have this power - they are making the same rational choice as all the other GPU vendors, they are just doing it somewhat more forcefully.

I’m not sure Google can be blamed for the bottleneck since user behavior says that people will only look through so many search results before moving on. That’s not abundance since no matter how many results Google shows the people problem will remain.

Advertisers and marketers fighting for top positions are where the real curse comes from IMO.