I think that’s the definition of belief: it’s not derived from facts so it can’t be shaken by evidence.
>At first sight we might imagine that knowledge could be defined as 'true belief'. When what we believe is true, it might be supposed that we had achieved a knowledge of what we believe. But this would not accord with the way in which the word is commonly used. To take a very trivial instance: If a man believes that the late Prime Minister's last name began with a B, he believes what is true, since the late Prime Minister was Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman. But if he believes that Mr. Balfour was the late Prime Minister, he will still believe that the late Prime Minister's last name began with a B, yet this belief, though true, would not be thought to constitute knowledge.
[1] THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5827/5827-h/5827-h.htm#link2...
Collectors like to collect, no matter the medium. I have a large collection of both physical and digital-only games. Many of those digital games aren't anything more than an entry in a database table that says my steam id is allowed to download and play the files associated with a particular game id, at least until I actually play them. And yet I've probably spent $12k+ on Steam games over the past decade.
Hell, probably $5k at least were spent on games I never even got around to actually playing, effectively just giving free money to Valve.
Collecting definitely doesn't have to be based on scarcity. Board games aren't scarce (some are long out of print and rare, yes, but most aren't) yet I know people with vast collections (I myself have about 500 board games, and only maybe 3 or 4 are rare enough to be worth any significant money beyond its retail price). If 500 games is not a collection, then what would you call it?
500 board games isn't even necessarily a lot for a collector (it is for me, as I don't have the space to store them anymore and need to sell like 200 of them, but yet I keep compulsively buying new games anyway, I bought 2 more just this past week). I know another guy in my area that has over 2000 board games in his basement.
And I (and many other board game collectors) don't play the games anywhere near as much as we buy them. We may justify the purchase with 'oh this would be good for this group someday' but mainly it's just an excuse to get it onto our shelves.
Before I started playing board games solo, I'd say about 80% of the games I bought I hadn't played since I bought them, sitting on the shelf (for years) for the possible right board game night in the future for them to be played. Or I played the game since, but someone else's copy, since between my friends we often have 2-5 copies amongst us.
Now I mostly buy games I can play solo, and I've played a good chunk of my new purchases the past two years at least once.
Buying yet never playing is so common in board games, in fact, that there's a term for those unplayed games: 'The Shelf of Shame'[2]
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2014/04/17/nearly-37-o...
[2]: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2199795/lets-stop-calling-i...
It’s more rare for someone to explicitly buy something with the firm intention never to play it (and usually that is a second copy they want to keep pristine).
Most of my unplayed steam games are that - oh, $5? I’ve heard of that and want to play it someday, I’ll grab it now.
1. NFTs as ownership standards are not there yet. Even on ETH, there are significant compatibility issues between NFT minters and discussion about downsides of the diverse storage architectures and ownership systems.
2. Classical business is still in flailing hands mode when it comes to adoption of decentralized tech, be it collectibles or more serious stuff.
I am happy we are having a winter now and I hope this one will last a while so that the true builders in this space will get the time they need to actually sort stuff out, build much needed infrastructure and for traditional businesses to read up a bit.
That's a lot of belief riding on there being "true builders".
At best those "true builders" can't understand reality around them (like all the "builders" building tickets or property rights with NFTs). At anything below best it's a sea of scammers and grifters.
The crypo space has become very big in the past two cycles but every techie should be easily able to pick a decentralized chain, look at its community and identify those who build from those who grift.
And those are?
> look at its community and identify those who build from those who grift.
Ah. "Just look at the discords" argument again. I'm having this conversation in the sibling thread.
Let me summarise:
This is equivalent to "just sift through millions tons of shit before maybe finding something worth looking at (which invariably isn't worth looking at)".
Also, I really could not be bothered to go out of my way to compile examples just to feed a troll like you. DYOR and please stop perpetuating closed discussions.
Sure we can blame grifters for this too somehow
The builders and grifters are in pretty separate camps.
If you're only observing this community on Twitter, yes, you will see relentless, low-quality scams almost as a rule.
Are you in the right place?
You seem to be repeating a trope directly in contradiction to my earlier point about your view being social media biased...and also heaped on a little snark, as well.
Please consider politely considering different perspectives here, without necessarily agreeing with them.
Another random link, indistinguishable from "just follow the discords"
> and also heaped on a little snark, as well.
Of course there's snark. That line of "oh you just don't follow the right communities" has been repeated over and over and over again by the crypto proponents. The outcome was invariably the same: a pronounced lack of "true builders".
> Please consider politely considering different perspectives here, without necessarily agreeing with them.
Please consider that "but there are true builders and true communities" bullshit has been repeated too often for anyone to pay any serious attention to.
Even your link is "Ethereum Magicians is a forum for the crypto community to have a place where anyone can join, create topic and discuss mainly about EIPs and technical difficulties of Ethereum ecosystem." So a lot of ado about nothing. It's a self-reinforcing loop of people patting themselves on the back with new ways to do something on the world's most ineffecient VM. Does not make them "true builders".
¹(whether Ethereum or something else)
> should only have a secondary-at-best interest in efficiency of a VM
Yup. Useful, global, and "efficiency is secondary-at-best". True builders, indeed.
But my point wasn't strictly about efficiency of the VM. And, as it always is with crypto-proponents, that point is completely lost, because I don't follow the right discords, sorry, magicians.
MY point in addressing your efficiency comment is:
1) at least know what you're talking about, regardless of where the heck read it, before writing tech off wholesale, and
2) stop taking weak, adjacent-to-point cultural potshots, because it distracts from your point, which I actually think has some merit.
I hate discord, and actively have avoided projects that use it, as well. There, I said it.
You want to argue that EVM is in any way shape or form efficient? There's a reason why storage or large contracts are prohibitevly expensive in it.
> stop taking weak, adjacent-to-point cultural potshots
No idea what you're talking about.
> I hate discord, and actively have avoided projects that use it, as well. There, I said it.
It doesn't matter whther you hated it or not. This statement, "It doesn't take belief if you spend any time observing these communities." is indistinguishable from "just follow the discords" which was (and probably still is) the standard response from crypto-proponents.
This is equivalent to "just sift through millions tons of shit before maybe finding something worth looking at (which invariably isn't worth looking at)".
Your link to show "a community of builders" is not much diferent: they invented a playground and are busy inventing ways to play in the playground (replete with a new jargon)". You still have to sift through millions tons of shit like people wanting to rename gas to mana or "standard to enable reacting to NFTs with emojis". Or people discovering reality and painfully re-inventing existing mechanisms like liens and or contracts forbidding re-selling of something.
There's probably something to look at, maybe, but the usefulness of that something will be questionable at best because it still runs in the same self-reinforcing loop of "we have this thing that we say is useful so anything we do in this thing is useful by extension" (both are statements that haven't been proven).
This is not "true builders". This is children playing with playdough and coming up with cute names for their playdough creations. And literally everything they do is only applicable to their playdough (because even their main plaything, NFTs, cannot be even store objects it references in the playdough, and needs to store it somewhere else, and has literally zero relationship to, say, real physical world).
Can also easily be said in a new conversation every year about new types of databases, frontend/other frameworks.
Just isn't a compelling or concise enough argument for me to forget about how helpful offline ZK-proofs will probably be for near-future real-world transactions, for example.
I a) should be said, b) is often said, and c) more often than not is
> Just isn't a compelling or concise enough argument for me
That is not the entirety of the argument. But in true crypto-proponent fashion you skip from context from context, from tangent to tangent hoping to forget and ignore the gist of what the conversation started with.
Even if I helpfully brought it back to original context: This is equivalent to "just sift through millions tons of shit before maybe finding something worth looking at (which invariably isn't worth looking at)".
> how helpful offline ZK-proofs will probably be for near-future real-world transactions, for example.
Yup. Exactly what I said. Of course the entire usefulness will lie squarely within the playdough, sorry, the blockchain, will have extremely limited applicability, will not be applicable to anything in real world (without significanly reducing real world problems to trivial applications), but will be marketed as the best thing since sliced bread.
You can bookmark this link and come back when this "near future" happens
I wish you hadn't spent so much time fighting a straw man in my place, we might have been able to talk any sort of tech.
"if", "sooner or later". Any ource of evidence for your wishful thinking?
> I wish you hadn't spent so much time fighting a straw man in my place
That's the problem with any crypto proponents: they have only demagoguery and wishful thinking instead of arguments. I literally started with skepticism that there are any people doing anything useful in crypto space.
Instead of "taking technology" you provided zilch (as I explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35505598).
Instead of "talking technology" you're saying "oh, there's absolute lack of any evidence, but I believe that FedNow will use ZK proofs" because if you believe strongly enough this will surely happen.
And so on. But sure, it's me who's fighting strawmen, and not crypto space profucing tons of bullshit.
I do not. Didn't say anything that be interpreted that way — only that you're missing some things.
They may have a boring but practical use as UUIDs in decentralised systems. Without wading through a sea of scams it's difficult to find anyone doing anything in that space.
NFTs are just the latest iteration on finding a problem to fit the solution of blockchains.
AI is going to give us a crisis of authenticity, and here we have a tool that might address it.
I think that the real Web3 will be mature and developed enough that there will be no need to create a bunch of apps boasting they're on the Web3 nor libraries abstracting Web3 APIs called "web3.js" before the term is even tangible
I wonder if saying "I am the next big thing" has any impact on the probability of being relevant in 15 years.
What happened to web4?
That probably has more to do with selling the digital equivalent of funko pops on reddit, than any technological merit.
Valuable to who? This sounds like a quasi-religious schism between ETH blockchain and the Polygon chain. Don't they both accomplish the same thing, i.e. a permanent record of ownership?
As someone who's working on a decentralized product, I speak with nft creators and collectors every day. They see this as a confirmation that Meta wasn't really in. There was also a perception that Polygon NFTs aren't as valuable.
Interestingly, Reddit has managed to sell Polygon based profile pictures fine, and there is a healthy market for their avatars.