iskander

It's comically complicated once you get into the details of moving an existing chain over from PoW; the Ethereum developers have really been working on it for years and only now have it in a shape that works for multiple Ethereum clients on a shared test network.

If PoW weren't a climate disaster it would have very obvious appeal due to its orders of magnitude simpler implementation.

Edit: You can learn more here -- https://consensys.net/blog/news/the-state-of-the-merge-an-up...

> How does this enable new people to play? The rich can still gamble the most and come in early to earn the biggest rewards.

So far this stuff has circumvented the accredited investor regulations.

That number seems off by a few orders of magnitude.

I tried searching for familiar collections and couldn't find any of them:

- Corruption(*s) - Bored Ape Yacht Club - Lonely Aliens Space Club - NFT Worlds

You also have neither entries for the major Art Blocks series (Curated/Playground/Factory) nor any of the hundreds of individual artist collections contained in them.

So, I think your crawl might be off.

Additionally, individual artists tend to not use OpenSea but instead use Rarible, Foundation, and SuperRare (or skip ethereum altogether and use something on Tezos like fxhash).

>I kind of liked the idea of NFTs as part of an asset portability system for virtual worlds. Goldman Sachs even endorsed that. I was thinking of this for items in the US$1 - US$100 range, like game items. The transaction costs would be too high if it took a blockchain transaction to walk through a portal, even for the cheap blockchains.

This is theoretically possible on Zero Knowledge rollup L2s (two strongest contenders are zkSync and StarkNet) if they achieve sufficient scale but definitely wouldn't work on monolithic chains (not even relatively cheap ones).

And Dropbox was trivially just rsync...

Yet, crypto wallets remain the only cryptographic signature UI that normal people interact with.

...which has effectively neither adoption not momentum to achieve adoption: https://sec.okta.com/articles/2020/04/webauthn-great-and-it-...

For better or worse, there are a large (and ever growing) number of Metamask users these days...

A lot of these "this is not very different from X, you could do Y" replies remind me of the original Dropbox news.yc thread.

What everyone seems to be missing is that the web3 apps and UI conventions already have broad adoption among millions of only mildly techy users. They don't know what SSH is but they do know how to sign things with their in-browser wallet app. Of course, they also seem to not always know that giving away your private keys is quite bad...

But any "solution" that requires e.g. using the terminal is not really competing in the same space.

For all of its flaws, I find the web3 space fun...but I'm also hoping that some of the non-financialized use cases move to other kinds of distributed algorithms, like Hypercore (https://hypercore-protocol.org/).

Even if the technological ideal comes to fruition in a few years (sharded modular proof-of-stake consensus blockchains with zero-knowledge rollups and dedicated data availability layers), it will still eternally remain enmeshed with speculation and scamming. I think there's a narrow time and place for the speculative assets but wouldn't want that interwoven throughout the fabric of everything online.

There is usually a Discord associated with each project (including the one in this post)

Public NFT trading telegrams are a very noisy/scam-y scene, I think that many people gravitate towards smaller private ones with a circle of <50 friends.

Yeah, that's right. Though crypto now seems to experience interlocked cycles of "rotations", so interest sometimes comes back after a few months

Participation in discords and NFT trading telegrams. You can see what people buy and that often the hot potato ladder involves multiple verifiably distinct persons.

This NFT was created partly as a satirical critique of the valuelessness of NFTs. I think people in the NFT scene find it funny to drive up the value of that critique and make it a financially valuable asset. There's no justification of actual real world utility, just a continuation of the joke by a small online community.

The creators can also set a royalty percentage for themselves which would give them a share of each transaction. Unclear if that's what they did in this case.

People looking from the outside of NFTs seem to believe this kind of wash trading is a dominant source of volume. In my experience, it's pretty rare and there's a lot of organic demand around each new "hot" NFT. A better way to think of these is each successful NFT series is a mini-bubble, people inside the scene develop an instinct for features might make an NFT desirable but no one can accurately guess the top. So they play hot potato with each other, where buying earlier increases chances of a successful exit.

That seems irrelevant in this case, where the NFT project is clearly by the photographer who owns the rights to the photos.

You said: "No debt here and my credit score is great. You don’t have to be in debt to have a good credit score."

Technically that's true but it leaves out the very major caveat that your credit score is not usable without accompanying credit history. What is credit history? Debt. It seems like you think it's OK for the system to force people to go into debt every month as long as they pay it off. What happens when one month they can't? They are then blamed for moral failing when probably they would have preferred to never use debt for regular payment in the first place.

My wife tried to buy a new car with an extremely high credit score. They wouldn't give her the auto loan because of insufficient credit history, which acts as a second undisclosed factor in loan approval. I had to co-sign with my worse (~700) credit score because I had a history with student loans, credit card consolidation loans, &c

I bought one under the assumption that it's only going to the photographer -- these kinds of NFTs seem like a good way to pay digital artists without forcing to do commissions. If any portion goes to OSS that's even better!

That's a common view on Crypto Twitter, lots of celebration of essentially socially stunted behavior by people with limited avenues for progression in the non-crypto world. Some of them end up building very valuable (at least momentarily) crypto assets and making orders of magnitude more money than they could have otherwise.

NFT collection here: https://opensea.io/collection/faces-of-open-source

It feels very awkward to buy these, though I'm not sure exactly why.

>but it's been more than 10 years since bitcoin emerged with the promise that the blockchain would have world-changing repercussions and _I still don't see even one meaningful application of the technology_ ?

I see this critique often but I don't get it: bitcoin was essentially an early prototype, the story of crypto since gone through lots of twists and turns. Make it programmable (ETH), try to make it scalable in one chain (lots of failures, now things like Solana), figure out how to split consensus/data/computation (current ETH L2 road map).

The technology is still young and evolving.

There are a lot of other things worth critiquing (PoW is wasteful, permission-less systems are socially bad, &c) but saying "this technology has been here for 10 years" misses that it's a big complex roadmap, a lot of which (like zero knowledge rollup L2s) just showed up this year.

I can see that for e.g. DeFi but DAOs are essentially social. People are starting tons of these things for all sorts of purposes, from serious to mostly silly.

Some kind of social infrastructure will inevitably emerge but given that it's being treated as an afterthought, it will probably be pretty dysfunctional and/or recapitulate lots of known lessons from other social/political realms.

I have a hard time reconciling the utopian revolutionary vision of DAOs with the reality of the ones that actually exist. Even in the best case, DAOs are essentially a Discord and treasury (hopefully a multi-signature wallet).

Where is the actual social infrastructure through which people are organized into collective effort? It seems missing from the DAO story. It's like saying a public corporation is its shareholders and hoping some of the step up to actually somehow do some work.

Funny how we interpret these situations differently: Bob is going to destroy wildlife habitat, which we should treat as a public good. Sally is going to provide additional housing in a dense urban area, which we should also treat as a public good.

My ideal would be significantly less interference and oversight for Sally than Bob.

>I'm here and I feel things are turning around. The brain drain has receded and turned into an influx.

I moved to Miami in 2017, couldn't find any kind of interesting work in machine learning or genomics. I started the machine learning meetup, which did end up with an enthusiastic but inexperienced community. My friend also moved to Miami at the same time and the only interesting graphics related jobs in the whole area were in Magic Leap. The startup scene was anemic and superficial. People we met who had deep technical skills all had one foot out the door, bound for Austin, SF, Durham, New York, &c. Eventually we both left and now live in Durham.

I met some of the crypto startups working out of co-working spaces around the city 2017-2019; maybe things have improved dramatically more recently but the startups I encountered were unimpressive.

Breathless admiration of Miami as a "tech city" based on tweets by the disempowered mayor of the City of Miami (population bupkis) are a red flag that the author isn't thinking very seriously or speaking from direct experience, rather just regurgitating memes and shortcut thoughts.

If you have ever lived in Miami (the 3M person metropolis, whose mayor is not Francis Suarez), you know that techies goes there to party, vacation, or retire but the actual startup scene suffers from perennial brain drain with no end in sight.

Hahaha, spoken like someone who hasn't lived in Florida.

Miami-Dade is full of septic tank. I think the state has about ~3M of them total. No one thought about the coastal water table when installing them, and I honestly don't know if they do even now.

See: https://www.gainesville.com/story/sports/columns/dooley/2019...

Situation is similar across the whole Gulf Coast. You really shouldn't assume any of this was rationally planned.

In Florida and much of the Gulf Coast though...

Check out this map of population density: https://vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/metropolita...

All those dense spots in Florida and along the Gulf are also more likely than most US urban areas to use septic tanks. That's a lot of brackish poop, clogged toilets, and environmental contamination coming in the next few decades.

>Water will leach inside homes, she said, through basement cracks. Toilets may become chronically backed up. Raw sewage may seep through manholes. Brackish water will corrode sewer and water pipes and inundate building foundations. And most hazardous of all, water percolating upward may flow through contaminants buried in the soil, spreading them underground and eventually releasing them into people’s homes.

This describes my experience living in Miami. People are already acclimated to saltwater pouring out of drains during "king tides".