To really act meaningfully in the world outside crypto, DAOs needed to be wedded to LLCs so they can participate in the legal system.
But...the DAO governance structure allows very low friction, high transparency coordination between pseudononymous strangers on the internet.
The DAO is the "real" manifestation of the collective will of a bunch of people, the corporate shell is just going to perform whatever actions the DAO votes on.
Social interpretation of the contract that the token is attached to.
e.g. if your Art Blocks NFT is on the Art Blocks contract, it's authentic. If it's the same image on a different contract, it's inauthentic.
Just saw your edit: now that it's known that the art is stolen from a different artist, I would expect the original NFTs to lose most if not all of their value. The convention of authenticity is a social one. If an artist misrepresents art as their own then it seems authentically theirs until shown otherwise. Same as e.g. selling prints of someone else's work.
I thought so too but now met enough people who believe in that interpretation and seen the virality of it; feel like it might have cultural legs. We'll see if it survives the crypto bubble popping and the monetary value of all the expensive NFTs disappearing.
It depends on your interests, I just joined a decentralized biotech discord where people are exploring alternative funding mechanisms for both non-profit science and biotech startups. There are quite a few art discords/communities that are focused on the actual art (and not on resale prices).
Nah, I kinda like it. It's a very idealistic and optimistic space with a vision for creating a commons that's not owned by any one commercial entity. The scams will drop away when the current bubble bursts but the web3 culture + tech are probably here to stay.
A provenance certificate which is socially interpreted as ownership. Not going to argue whether that's a good or durable interpretation of ownership, just attesting that some people really do feel it.
It's essentially a state of intention: people buying art to appreciate having it rather than with an intention of selling. Most people in the NFT space are flippers riding bubbles, but a few actual collectors really do exist.
Some people really feel it, I know a few long-term collectors. Some people are into the VR galleries they assemble, others buy non-standard sized displays fit for specific NFTs to display in their homes. It's definitely an odd little community of rich people collecting digital art. And more broadly people feel attachment to their Twitter PFPs and feel like they can't truly use it unless they own it. It's a new social convention that's very unevenly distributed.
> then that infrastructure manages to survive and continue to provide value even after the cryptocurrency house of cards collapses.
That's my optimistic forecast for what happens after the current speculative bubble pops. We'll be left with e.g. universal sign-on via crypto wallet that's not owned by any corporation and can be used for cryptographic signature / voting / &c. We'll also have increasingly robust decentralized infrastructure like zero-knowledge rollup L2s on top of Ethereum to make increasing complex decentralized applications. The money making stuff is about as vacuous as everyone seems to think but the substance it's attached to is a movement away from walled gardens and towards increasingly empowered individuals.
I think you have to participate a bit in the non-speculative side to get a feel for the culture and social movement that's brewing there. New entrants aren't the ones to watch since they're probably jumping in to make money, look to the increasing interest in DAOs as social coordination mechanisms, they will keep evolving to empower groups of individuals to have outsized impacts.
It's legit very hard to sift through the scamminess of the space, I've been thinking of it as the cost of revolutionary potential: exponentially more people rush in to profit off "being early".
I think it's easy to miss the content at the core of the movement given how thoroughly it's wrapped in gold rush and scamming. But the more time I spend around the space the more it seems that there is a legitimately transformative force which attracts the gold rush in the first place. And the ethos of people working on e.g. research DAOs, decentralized publishing, crypto art, &c feels right compared to the web2 world.
I think what Stephen misses in his campaign against crypto is that the old ideals have already been coopted and smothered with the corporatization of the web and splintering of what was a decentralized ecosystem into a megacorp walled gardens. I know there's a tiny community of non-crypto decentralized web advocates and I hope they win. But, the main force for a return to decentralization is in crypto and the only realistic alternative to a web3 future is one where everything is a property of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, &c
That's kinda the point. The "collector" can feel like they own it -- using an idiosyncratic new definition of ownership that you don't really have to agree with but other collectors/speculators/crypto peoplke also feel is real. The artist gets paid (kinda rare for art, much less digital art), everyone else can enjoy their artistic output. System working as designed.
I remember getting hit by reordering when I was in college, getting by on a coffee shop job. The bank ordered a group of concurrently unresolved deposit/withdrawals to maximize the overdraft fees (I think I got hit with ~3x $35). It seems silly now but when you're making $5.25/hr, going more than $100 in the red really stings.
>If they outbid everyone who actually wanted to live there, who were they planning to sell to? :P
The same set of people who would move their price points up after a few months and get larger mortgages. This worked for all of 2020 and most of 2021 and only the past quarter did it fail as a strategy.
>Buying things you think are underpriced and reselling them is not frontrunning. (Ever since GME, a lot of people learned the word frontrunning and started using it in every possible situation.)
You're missing that this is Zillow, not a neutral market actor. They have unique information about demand for houses and even get to influence prices upward through Zestimates.
It's more complicated than that since they also have a huge influence on prices through Zestimates. They undoubtably kept housing prices rising for the past few years, which was very profitable to them as large scale flippers.
For newer cryptocurrencies you often buy them and then either (1) stake them (earn rewards for contributing to network security) or (2) deposit them in a crypto-bank like Aave and earn yield from having your money loaned out. Increasingly people don't look to cash out to USD but rather stay within the crypto ecosystem.
I do think that BTC and its clones engender a certain dragon-cache hoarding mentality that aligns with either plans to eventually cash out at a higher price or some kind of apocalyptic vision where eventually USD is no longer used at all.
Most crypto chains suck for small-to-medium payments. The fees on some layer 2 solutions for Ethereum look promisingly low (between $0.06 and $0.30 depending on the specific L2), but these are just starting to get adopted and integrated into existing tools. Hopefully the tangle of ponzis will eventually emit a usable payment solution.
That's my worry about the integration of crypto into tradfi (via BTC ETFs, stablecoin savings accounts, &c). It's OK if crypto is a hellstorm of speculation because it rides on top of rapid experimentation. However, it's really not tolerable to have that much chaos actually affecting e.g. people's retirement funds. If crypto messes up main street then the regulatory hammer will be unfortunately well earned.
I think this why there is an increasing trend towards valuing NFTs which assign rights to the NFT owners or simply license the whole project as CC0. That removes the dichotomy between on-chain ownership and legal ownership and leaves only a socially constructed notion of digital property and value.
There's an interesting social consensus that seems to emerge around provenance and originality of NFT contracts.
Some NFTs are extremely valuable (e.g. Crypto Punks) and attract many clones. The clones may be on the same blockchain and have very similar or even identical art. Or, the clones may reuse the same art but issue tokens on a different blockchain. In all these cases, the social consensus on the value of these clones is approximately $0. It's a weird psychology.