It turned out that the only value proposition they had was that they "used blockchain" but literally only in the sense that at some point a blockchain would have some data on it.
They were true believers too, but simultaneously didn't care that it was fakery. I have lingering PTSD from that gig.
The crazy thing (for me) is that I remain enamored with the special qualities of blockchains and would like to put them to use in a non-financial manner.
Can you think of any practical uses of a blockchain? I also think they're a fascinating concept, but I cannot think of a killer application for them.
I remember one of the original ideas was a trustless logistics system for things like shipping, but even then all the blockchain proves is that someone said they'd shipped you a box, you could still open it and find it full of rocks. And the smart contract stuff is very clever, but seems to be essentially techno-escrow except that you just have to trust your smart contract broker and the authors of the blockchain rather than your escrow agent, and also if everything goes sideways there's no legal system to interpret the contract "sensibly".
Identity / authenticity. As we head into a world of digital (deep) fakes, being able to authenticate the source of information/media will be very important. Block chain seems well positioned for this?
I think NFTs will settle down eventually and they'll be useful (after these short term stupids).
I'm not a fan of blockchain currencies mostly due to the preponderance of bad actors. Maybe some day, but it's a bit of a shit show atm, and not nearly as practical as originally hoped for.
What would stop an actor with enough resources (Russia, China, USA) to put deepfakes onto the chain?
What would stop them from blackmailing service providers who act as gatekeepers / market platforms to put deepfakes into the chain?
Why would they even accept any single "Blockchain X" as the source of truth? Why wouldn't they just say "Oh that's the evil state Y, of course they're pretending that their fakes on their state-governed propaganda blockchain are authentical, whereas OUR blockchain tells the TRUTH!"
How would you correct honest mistakes on the chain? By a correction update? Then what would stop an evil actor (Taliban) who overturns the government, or takes over a giant corporation, from "correcting" an unpleasant truth, and rewriting history?
Once again, a social problem is attempted to be solved with technology. This never works.
> I think NFTs will settle down eventually and they'll be useful
What would be different, given some time, from now? What needs to change for NFTs to become useful?
I think being able to identify and authenticate original works is a good idea that has practical uses. Practical in the same way as identifying originals in meatspace. I believe there's a ton of hype and bad actors (as usual in a new market), but suspect that'll eventually settle down. I don't see any issue with the idea of purchasing the Nyan cat original if we (society?) all agree that it as an original, same as a material painting.
Maybe NFTs are a misstep on the way to that, I don't know, and I don't care to be honest (I'm not invested in anything crypto related). There's at least a useful idea there.
I agree. I don't agree that blockchain, or NFTs, can ever deliver on their promises to contribute to that matter, because of their nature. How do you think would the blockchain, or NFTs, help to identify and authenticate original works?
> I believe there's a ton of hype and bad actors (as usual in a new market)
Can you name an example of another market where this was the case - i.e. bad actors were the majority of actors, and then something (what?) happened that made the market unviable for scams?
> the idea of purchasing the Nyan cat original
What does the "original" .gif of the Nyan Cat do for you that my copy of it doesn't?
> same as a material painting
I see 2 purposes of the "original" in a material world: 1. speculation, 2. paying the original artist. Since 2. isn't possible for e.g. the Mona Lisa, what remains is that it's a pure speculation object. You could argue that experts could distinguish the orginal Mona Lisa from any copy, but that wouldn't work in the digital world, where my copy of the Nyan Cap .gif would gif just as your original would.
What is the problem statement here, and how would NFTs, or blockchain, contribute to a solution here?
I think that the way would be to use a permission-based, id-linked, reputation-maintaining mechanism. No PoW or PoS -- proof of self. It would have to be designed from the start to account for hostile manipulation. Easier said than done, of course.
Even distributed trust doesn't need a blockchain; web of trust is an example of that.
This is all fairly irrelevant anyway as people do not do not check things before sharing them anyway, and/or trust authenticated information from untrustworthy sources (if Fox News put their reporting on a blockchain, it doesn't suddenly become truth).
There's two problems / truths here; 1) the source (E.g. Fox), which is what I think we'll need to verify, and 2) the truth of the content, which is an age old problem with no technical solution I'm aware of (or would even believe if presented with one).
I've got some fuzzy notions on identity management and other non monetary things but it still needs thinking through.
Which special qualities are you enamored with? And to what use would you like to put them?
The shared ownership of state -- theoretically "serverless" in that there's not a specific server that rules them all.
> And to what use would you like to put them?
Something wiki-like, as well as service discovery.
Lot of hype back in the day that this technology e.g. torrent was going to revolutionise the internet and society would never be the same.
And whilst it is still widely used today and has practical use cases e.g. data distribution it wasn't transformative.
This comment reminds me of the scene in The Social Network where Eduardo Saverin taunts Sean Parker about Napster losing to the record companies, and Parker says "you wanna buy a Tower Records, Eduardo?"
By which I mean: just because peer-to-peer didn't win as a technology, does not mean it wasn't transformative. We live in a world where the iPod could launch and we have access to $10/mo unlimited (centralized) streaming. This world exists because the mere existence of p2p technology places limits on the way that the content industry can operate.
There's really something worth it, perhaps?
Eventhough I consider myself above average, I'm sure there are smarter and more creative people that can come up with more use cases by time.
Just like the Internet evolved to what it is over decades, crypto space also will. We're in the "animated gifs, visitor counts, and unskippable huge flash intros" era of the crypto space.
Regarding your use cases.
> uncensorable payments
would your corrupt country not eventually catch up by regulating the ability to convert your BTC into fiat to buy things, or do you anticipate doing all your payments on the blockchain and never converting to fiat?
> also super quick payments (donated to Ukrania during war ar Sunday night < 30 secs)
a global payment system does seem very useful, assuming the currency is stable; not justified to the current hype though
> moving the ownership of items to a decentralized system (e.g. NFTs as trading cards)
I have failed to understand this one. If you own NFT 1 on Blockchain X, how do you enforce your ownership rights in the real world if someone else chooses not to acknowledge the authority of this decentralized system? If it's a real world asset, and I steal it from you, who do you appeal to? If it's a digital asset, and I copy and use it, who do you appeal to? Or is the utility here people who all buy into and respect the authority of this chain's ownership ledger being able to trade these things within that ecosystem?
> smart contracts (lock your tokens and you're guaranteed, by code, that something happens like being paid an interest at some time/logic trigger)
I haven't found this one that compelling, but maybe I'm missing something. Code isn't immutable, so what's to stop my "smart contract" from changing? I may be unaware of some guarantees that the blockchain provides that the code itself is also immutable.
While it's true that you can't really censor the blockchain transfer, how much that allows someone to 'take' a payment depends a great deal on the legal circumstances where they live. I don't mean that the core transfer mechanism isn't cool - but there's a pretty big gap between a digital currency and acquiring physical goods where authorities can step in.
> super quick payments
Blockchain technology is, on average, pretty much the slowest possible way to make a payment. The slowness of other techniques are not because of any underlying technical reason - they're based on laws and policies. It's true that it can be faster than other methods in certain circumstances - but that has more to do with gaps in regulation than the technology.
I fully agree that distributed ownership is cool, but I wanted to note something about this:
> I can have my trading cards on a privately owned server too, for sure, then I'm bound to them not banning me, not crashing and losing my data, not going bankrupt, not changing the rules of the game etc
You are still bound by them not crashing, losing your data, going bankrupt or changing the rules. Many blockchains have gone down, lost history, shut down entirely, or changed the rules. There are ways that these problems are more easily addressed in a blockchain ecosystem, but it's not straightforwardly "better." If your usecase suffers from a bug, and a majority of the nodes benefit from that bug, you will likely never be able to get that bug fixed on the main chain.
I also think that copyright is the elephant in the room. Imagine two versions of...a world of warcraft sword. One is the texture & model that are included with the game - the other is, additionally, an NFT. The material reality of adding that sword to another game are identical in both cases: you can just put the sword in another game if you have the assets. That has never been a technical challenge. The challenge is legal and NFTs do not help with the legal problems.
If I sign a contract with you saying you can use the sword in another game the contract is the thing that matters. It does not matter if the contract is in an NFT or references an NFT. If anything, creating a system to manage & mint NFTs is an additional technical lift in creating multi-game assets.
I'm hard pressed think of how NFTs would be better than a centralized server that publishes daily signed database dumps of all owned assets. The cryptographic guarantees are the same and in either case the service continuing to sell assets depends on their willingness to assign copyright.
Being smart isn't an indicator of correctness.
Just because whom you believe may be credible people might back something up doesn’t give it value. It’s value does.